With the end of the year approaching and the holiday shopping season in full gear, you’ve likely seen an obscene amount of limited-time offers, sales, and seasonal promotions in your inbox and elsewhere. Some of these offers work fantastically well and pique our interest, while others are immediately deleted.
What gives?
The secret is that there’s an art to urgency. And once you build that sense of immediacy, you must delicately navigate your excited buyers toward the action you want them to take.
Here are some tips on how to create limited-time offers that boost your leads and sales, and infuse your marketing copy with a little excitement to boot.
Create clickable headlines. Lure readers to click on your headlines by immediately creating desire. Research shows that humans are more driven by the desire to avoid pain than the desire to achieve pleasure, so speak to what your prospects want to evade right away. For example, most online buyers prefer to receive free shipping, so a headline that announces this kind of offer is sure to get a second look.
Be timely. Your offer needs to be relevant to what’s happening now. Specials on chocolates should happen around Valentines Day, and the perfect time to offer a whitepaper on social media marketing is right after Twitter unveils new developments in its advertising options. Timeliness in your offers further evokes its fleeting nature and subtly instills in your buyers a sense of immediacy.
Offer what people want. All of your limited-time offers must be what your prospective buyers actually like—or better yet, what they need. Try having a sale on your most popular product or service, and watch your conversion rates climb.
Hurry! Time is short. A limited time offer that extends for eight months is not “limited.” Making your offer’s timeframe shorter (and promoting that) will make people jump at the chance to get it before it’s gone. Victoria’s Secret does a nice job with this—almost all of their Angels Rewards come with a deadline by the week’s end.
Be exclusive. If you want to cause even more of a scramble, limit the number of people who can receive your offer. If the first 100 people to register get in free, people will be quicker to sign up.
Use your calls to action wisely. Remember—time is running out, and you need your prospects to move. Don’t waste the urgency you created with a wimpy call to action. Tell your readers what you want them to do, and make the buyer process as streamlined and simple as possible so they don’t lose the buying momentum your limited-time offer copy instilled.
Which limited-time offers have resonated with you as a buyer in the past? Share it in the comments section below!
Comments on this entry are closed.