Scarcity can be one of the most powerful reasons for someone to buy. As mad as it sounds, you can often make a sale with the major reason being that someone doesn’t want to miss out.

A wonderful example of this is the Groupon (and similar sites) model. If you are not familiar with Groupon, I will explain briefly how it works.

They have a deal of the day and then after that 24 hour period, the deal is withdrawn and as much as you beg, you are not able to get hold of that deal.

The way that they are using scarcity is based on a limited time model. If you purchase within that period then you are able to get the product for a much reduced price.

Here is where the psychology becomes clever and I will apply it to something that recently happened to myself. I saw that a manicure was reduced from around $50 to around $20. I saw what seemed to be a ridiculously amazing deal. And although I have no need (or so I think) for myself, I though who else I could buy that for and lo and behold my wife now has access to a manicure and pedicure!

Would I normally have bought my wife a manicure and pedicure? Chances are not. But because I did not want to miss out, I found a great reason there and then to buy it. The reason being that I had to make a quick decision and was sure that my wife would be happy with it.

We see examples of scarcity being used not only on the internet but also offline as well. A “SALE” sign can be enough for many shoppers to take action on items which they would not normally buy for example.

What I want to do, is to look at some different ways in which you can implement scarcity into your own marketing:

1. Timebound scarcity. For example, you must order before midnight tonight. The most important thing here, is that it is credible. Explain why the person must order before tonight. This is often combined with another sort of scarcity. eg. price reduction/additional bonus.

2. Limited quantity. People are very scared on missing out on something. By limiting the quantity, you can increase demand. One of the problems that people have here is doing it in a credible way. Limiting a quantity just for scarcities sake doesn’t work very well, especially online. As we all know, with digital products, there is in theory an unlimited supply so why limit quantity? Some reasons which I have used (quite truthfully) are:
- I can only support a limited number of people with my present resources. By using this reason, it shows potential customers that support is important to you.
- That I don’t want a method to be saturated.

3. Additional bonuses. You see it quite often and it works very well. That you will offer an additional bonus to the first 100 people. This gives a positive reason for your prospects to act right now.

One thing that I would like to make very clear, is that when you are using scarcity, that you should use it honestly. What I mean, is that if you say you are only going to sell a certain number, then do. If you say that you are going to remove an offer by a certain time, then do.

If you don’t, then it will come back to bit you…

I’m serious when I say that if you try it then you will see massive increases in profit. If you try and combine more than one, then you will even see a greater effect.

I think that my greatest use of scarcity was when I did a webinar and promised to sell only 100. Once those 100 were gone, I replaced the order button and said that it was sold out. I had around 30 people asking at the helpdesk to be able to purchase the product and I was able to let a few more in due to refunds and credit card problems. By creating that scarcity (which was real), I am pretty sure that it made customers more eager to purchase and that next time, they will know that when I say I am only going to sell a certain quantity, that I will.

Would love to hear any more examples of scarcity either which you have used or been susceptible to. Please do leave a comment below as would love to hear from you.

It was a throwaway comment I saw on a forum which was hidden in amongst a load of other distraction.

Really made me think about my own marketing and how 99% of marketers get it totally wrong when it comes to squeeze pages.

Many a time when we are directed towards a squeezepage.

(A squeezepage if you didn’t know is a page which has an optin form on the page to try and get you to fill in your name and email address.)

However, what makes you fill in your details?

A promise of a report?

An opportunity to watch a further video?

Perhaps to be informed when something happens?

It is my hunch that people don’t fill in their details so much in order to receive access to further information.

Admit it, we are all subject to so much ‘information’ on the internet anyway, that do we need any more info to clog up our brains?

How high would your optin rate be, if your visitors trusted you when said that each person that signed up would receive $100 delivered to them by FedEx?

I have given an extreme, but think how you can change your own marketing so that if someone does sign up for your list then they will receive REAL value and something that they really do want.

If you have an idea of how you can change an optin page that offers a free report that no-one really wants to something better, please comment below.

Keeping it real in an unreal world,

Ben Shaffer

PS. If you don’t currently have a squeeze page on your own website, then why not?

If you have been following me for a while then you will know that I am an avid split-tester. What this means is that whenever I create something that tries to get a prospect to take an action, I put up at least two variants to see which will outperform the other/s.

Conclusions:

I know that conclusions are supposed to go at the end of an article, but I wanted to get a few out of the way first:

1. Testing DOES most definitely work

In many occasions I have managed to double or even triple sales and optins. In a one step sales process this means that I have brought in double or triple the amount of sales. In a two step process, this means that I have been able to quadruple or multiply ‘sales’ by 9. Therefore if you are not already, then you must start testing.

2. It is important WHAT you test

I have tested certain things such as font size or text color. Although this may have increased conversions in certain cases, I have found that there are variables that when changed give a far greater increase. Examples of this are price, headlines, order-buttons, time-delaying an order button and a totally different salesletter or video concept. Therefore, if you are going to test, then it is definitely important WHAT you test.

Some Unmentioned Results

There are certain things that I have found now that I am doing serious testing that I haven’t really heard spoken about before but are incredibly important:

1. Generally, when testing you need a large amount of data to make sense of it. If you are testing 4 variations of a salesletter and receive 50 sales, then depending on the data, in many cases the data will be almost meaningless. For many people, receiving just 50 sales is a lot of sales and therefore it will be very difficult to make any conclusions. For example, if I release a new product to my list then making even 100 sales will not give me an conclusive scientific data. It then comes down to acting on hunches until you get accurate data, which does kind of go against the whole point of testing.

One of the problems of testing is that although you are aiming to increase your sales conversion, while you are doing that, you are also losing sales as you are showing variants to prospects which are not resulting in the optimum level of ‘sales’. Therefore, it is important that you lose the losers and keep the winners as quickly as possible. One way of doing this is skewing the ‘pages’ that you show according to what is winning at that point. Google Optimizer does take care of this automatically for you if you wish.

2. Prospects View Your ‘Page’ Multiple Times

(I have never seen anyone else write about this before, so please do drop me a comment below if you have)

In a typical internet marketing launch, this may not matter so much. However, on salesvideos from other niches, I have found something very interesting happening.

I had one ‘page’ which was performing for a few months at (let’s say) 1% conversion – therefore 1 in every 100 customers was buying. I thought that I may be able to increase that, so created a second video and split-tested the two videos. I found that the 2nd video outperformed the first video so started showing that one twice for every time the first one was shown. After a few months, I found that the conversion on the two videos was almost equal. So, I added a third video and found that that was now doubling the current conversion rates of the first two. The first three videos steadily converted equally, so I added a 4th and the same thing happened.

So, what I was finding was, that each new variant that I added performed really well and then suddenly reduced in conversions to approximately the same as the previous videos. My personal conclusion was that visitors were visiting the site many times and would only watch the video if it didn’t seem familiar to them. Therefore, each time I put a new video on the site, it performed really well and made ‘sales’ but over time, once visitors had seen it and not bought they would not watch it again.

The solution of course would be to add a new video every month or so or to rotate the videos. However, I did wonder if you had noticed this phenomenon and if you had any other solutions.

I found two solutions to this ‘problem’:

1. Create a new variant of the video every month or so which means that it will always appear fresh to visitors.

2. Rotate a number of videos, cookieing each visitor to make sure that they will never see the same (fairly different) video in a row

Would love to hear your comments on this or anything else in the article, particularly if you are testing yourself and any interesting results that you have had. Please DO leave a comment below.
Keeping it real in an unreal world,

Ben Shaffer