How to Motivate Customers with Limited Time Offers

Get People to Act with Urgent Offers

There’s a big difference between getting your customers to want your product and getting them to actually buy. Getting a customer to buy involves getting them to believe that not only do they want to act, but they want to do it NOW.

To illustrate this point, in the copywriting industry teachers encourage beginning copywriters to think of customers as a lazy, sloth-like creature watching TV who can’t even be bothered to reach for the remote. Your goal is to get them excited enough and instill enough urgency to get this sloth-like creature off the couch, get their wallet and pay.

Urgency is the key. In order to create urgency, you need to come up with urgent offers. Here are a few different types of urgent offers, along with a few tips on how to use them.

==> Limited Time Offers

One of the most common types of offers is the limited time offer. As the name suggests, with this offer the user only has a limited amount of time to take advantage of a specific price or package.

Let’s say you’re doing a teleseminar. You might give the participants of the teleseminar just 12 hours after getting off the call to take advantage of a special deal.

==> Limited Quantity Offer

Another common technique is the limited quantity offer. This works by limiting the amount of product you’re going to sell, then letting your customers know.

For example, you might only print 200 copies of a high priced product. Take a photo of these 200 copies, then let your customers know that once 200 are gone, nobody else is going to get any.

==> Limited Bonus Offers

These are similar to the above two offers, except what happens is that users can only take advantage of the bonus offer for a limited period of time. In order for this to work, the bonus has to be very appealing.

For example, you give a free consultation call (valued at $150) to the first 25 buyers. If they act quickly, they can get your personal guidance to help them achieve what they want to achieve.

==> Making It Real (or Not)

There are two ways you can structure these urgent offers. You can either make them real, or make it a part of your sales message but carry little real weight.

Making it real is much harder, but much more effective. If you make it real, that means you actually have to cut off selling your product once the time is up or once the quantities are out.

Once customers know you’re serious, your urgent offers will convert like mad as the threat of not getting your product will be very real.

On the other hand, many marketers simply use these techniques to add urgency to their offers without actually following through on their threat. While this is still better than nothing, it’s not nearly as effective.

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Author: jm

Joan Mullally has been doing business online for more than 20 years and is a pioneer in the fields of online publishing, marketing, and ecommerce. She is the author of more than 200 guides and courses designed to help beginner and intermediate marketers make the most of the opportunities the Internet offers for running a successful business. A student and later teacher trainee of Frank McCourt’s, she has always appreciated the power of the word, and has used her knowledge for successful SEO and PPC campaigns, and powerful marketing copy. One computer science class at NYU was enough to spark her fascination with all things digital. In her spare time, she works with adult literacy, animal fostering and rescue, and teaching computer skills to women.