One of the most important objectives in your marketing efforts is to get people to respond to your offers with a resounding “YES!” Since the majority of people tend to procrastinate, if you do not give your visitors a sound reason to accept your offer, they will put off the decision or become distracted by another offer, even if they really did want your product or service. In order to be more successful with your lead generation campaigns, create a sense of urgency so your audience is compelled to complete the offer immediately.
Drive Conversions with the Psychology of Urgency
The most successful lead generation campaigns catch and keep visitors’ attention by making them think they will miss out on something important if they do not act immediately. In psychology, urgency is a facet of impulsivity, or making spontaneous decisions based on emotional response. To create this response in your marketing efforts, you rely on scarcity from economics; when supply is down, demand goes up. By creating a shortage of supply or a limited time period for your audience to act, the psychological response is triggered and they are more likely to complete the offer.
Since psychology is a driving factor behind conversions, it’s important that you align your offers with the appropriate stage of the buyer’s journey. For example, if your visitors are still in the awareness stage, a call to action of “Buy now! Only 100 remain!”, is not going to be as effective as it will be in the decision stage and may alienate potential customers. Make sure you are creating scarcity for what your visitors need, when they need it.
Applying the Principle of Creating Urgency to your Lead Generation Campaigns
Now that you understand scarcity is how you create a sense of urgency that triggers the psychological response to act immediately, you need to put it into practice. Keeping in mind the objectives behind your landing pages and the stage of the buyer’s journey for each, you can employ the following:
- Limited time offers: This is the most common method used to create urgency. Since procrastination can be what puts off people from accepting offers, telling them they only have a limited amount of time before the offer expires makes them feel they have to act quickly, lest they miss out on what they wanted.
- Limited quantity offers: There is some evidence in studies that limited quantity offers might be more successful than limiting time. When something is in short supply, there is no telling when it will no longer be available. When you offer a limited amount of time, there is still some wiggle room for procrastination. By limiting the quantity, people do not want to take a chance that waiting will mean they cannot get the offer.
- Limited time and quantity combined: Combining both to create a sense of urgency can be very powerful, especially for eCommerce businesses. If people only have a limited time and a limited supply available, if it is something they wanted they will not risk losing the deal.
Creating a sense of urgency in your audience will help put an end to procrastination and drive more conversions during your lead generation campaigns.
