How Create Urgency in Your eCommerce Marketing
You have likely witnessed creative use of urgency with eCommerce marketing when making an online purchase. Have you ever booked a flight across the country only to have a well-timed pop-up appear soon after listing the lowest priced rentals in your newly booked city?
“Hot deal! Only one left at this price!”
As much as many of us dislike parting with our hard-earned money, we dislike spending more than we need to even more. For this reason, creating urgency in your marketing can be beneficial and increase sales. Let’s look at why this phenomenon works and how you can easily include these strategies in your marketing initiatives!
Know Your Audience
Offer buyers what they want. This is easier said than done, but having a solid understanding of the pain points that are common with your customer avatar as well as what they value is vital. Urgency is meaningless if your audience doesn’t want what you are selling, so be sure to keep this in mind when creating your eCommerce marketing materials. This is among the many reasons why email marketing is a hot marketing tool even in 2021. Popular softwares like MailChimp and Constant Contact allow you to segment your lists and speak directly to the pain points of various groups of customers. As an example, if you have a particularly popular product and have had an email waitlist on your website to alert customers when it returns in stock, consider sending the email along with a limited time offer if they make a purchase on the waitlisted item in the next 24 hours. This technique is sure to increase sales because the viewer has previously demonstrated they are a “warm lead” by showing interest in the product, so the great offer combined with urgency before it sells out again will have a powerful effect!
Establish a Deadline
Make it crystal clear that the offer or promotion is limited and list exactly how long the customer has to claim it. Study after study has indicated that not only people take more time to complete a task if there isn’t a deadline, buyers generally, even when being excited about a promotion will tell themselves they will “revisit it later” and simply forget. This is why it is so important to not only capture your buyer with an exciting offer but clearly show that they must act quickly to take advantage of it!
For larger more detailed campaigns, also consider the motivations and perspective of the buyer. As an example, if you were promoting a weeklong summer camp, the timing of advertisements and emails will be the first step to creating urgency. Consider scheduling multiple posts or sending several emails. The first announcement can include general excitement for the offer and details about what is included, and how to claim it as well as the deadline. The second announcement should include a call to action to “buy now” because “space is limited” you could even include a count of how many of the products or spaces in the event are left. Finally, the third announcement should let readers know that it is the very last call so they better click that “Buy Now” button quickly!
“Only 24 hours left for the biggest sale of the season! Take advantage now using coupon code SALE123! But hurry, space and time are limited!”
Perfect Your Copy
Crafting copy for your website, emails and social media is an important step to ensure you’re communicating urgency and scarcity in a way that is seamless and motivating to your buyers.
One example of scarcity that you likely are familiar with is commonly found in email subject lines.
“You aren’t going to miss this, are you?”
“Don’t Be the Last to Know!”
“You Won’t Believe What Customers are Saying!”
These email subject lines work because it not only piques the interest of the reader, but also suggests that there is something to be lost by them not opening the email. Most readers subscribed to an eCommerce store’s email list do so because they feel it is of some value to them. Whether they subscribed for 10% off their next purchase or because of the free articles or advice, getting readers to take the one additional step to open their email and take advantage of free value is difficult to pass up.
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