Landing Pages And The Urgency Of Time

Landing Pages and The Urgency of Time?

This sounds like some kind of fucked up marketing ebook slash Harry Potter novel hybrid. But rest assured it’s not. It’s just the first title that came to my head. And seeing how I’ve been writing a “Beginners Guide” ebook for most of the weekend, I thought I’d go all J.K Rowling on the world.

If you’re new to CPA marketing:

1. Why are you reading this blog?
2. Will you buy my ebook?

It’ll be out in early December and it’ll teach you absolutely everything you need to know to start turning a profit in CPA marketing. Well actually, it won’t. But I’m not gonna tell you that when I’m actually selling it. Expect a Warrior Forum sized circle jerk of paid testimonials, artificial coupon price reductions and quite possibly Finch on his hands and knees. PLEASE YOU MOTHERFUCKING RETARD JUST BUY MY GOD DAMN BOOK THERE’S ONLY 47 RETARDS LEFT TO SELL IT TO.

Anyway, I got some positive feedback from the last post. Seems like there’s a demand for more landing page tips, so I’m going to address a technique that will nearly always increase your conversion rates.

It’s all about how to fuck a customer’s mind in to believing that there’s no better time than now for busting out the plastic and adding a swish $35 to your stats.

And I’ve pretty much just given the game away right there. It’s all about creating a sense of urgency in time.

Have you ever read a bunch of offer descriptions claiming that Product X has been “optimized, tried, tested, passed around, fobbed off and maximized” for the best conversion rates? What this basically means is that some dude took a look at their design and added a few calls-to-action that practically scream out to the user to order now or forever hold your peace. If you’ve engaged in some serious split testing in the past, you’ll be aware that one of the ultimate factors between success and failure is a sense of urgency in the consumer’s mind.

If you’ve got your eyes open, you should be seeing examples like this all the time:

offer

How often do you see these rush-to-action techniques slapped on to merchant pages? It happens all the time with rebills. It works because the users are normally too dumb to think twice about challenging the deceitfulness of a JavaScript ticker. I’m not complaining, because that’s the way we like it.

So if we can accept that creating an urgency of time is key to increasing final conversion rates, why do so few marketers implement the same techniques to increase their clickthrough rates? This is a question that has always confused me.

Practically every variety of banner, text ad or Facebook flier I use is underlined by some kind of urgency to act now. Particularly when you step in to the realms of PPV and “interruption marketing”, it becomes even more important to stress the need to click and click now. Click now or you’ll miss out.

One of my favourite marketing techniques (but obviously not so precious to me that I’m going to keep it secret) is the 24 hour window sell. You might wonder what the hell that is, and rightly so, because I made the term up just then. But what I’m referring to is a landing page that was created “today” and will become redundant “tomorrow”.

Through the power of PHP, it’s really quite easy to add some dynamic controls to your page that edit the dates and create a realistic aura of “hot off the press”. I’m sure many affiliates are using this already to alter aspects of their landing pages. I’ve seen examples varying from the dates of comments, to the date of a post being published. But you’re really going to start to see the benefits if the date becomes an integral piece of your actual story.

I’m not going to out my own methods of doing that because it’s quite custom. But it’s all about creating relevance and urgency in one hit. If you can pair this up with a geographical scripting element, you should be golden for some mean looking conversion rates.

While basic PHP hacks are effective, you really need to be looking a little deeper in to your marketing efforts to see how time can be leveraged in other positive ways.

Taking a dieting product as an example, how could we build an urgency of time? How can we make Product X scream in the consumer’s face that it needs to be snapped up now? For dieting, it depends on the season.

Given how it’s nearly fucking Christmas already, you could try something like this:

“The acai berry is the world’s most in-demand superfood. But as we approach the new year, thousands of Americans will be looking to lose weight as part of their new years resolutions. Unfortunately we have to raise our prices during the peak season time. That means, you only have until [PHP SCRIPT INSERT] to start our revolutionary diet for a bargain $X.XX”

“You’ll still be able to buy Product X after that time. But unfortunately we can only sell it at the peak season price of [How cruel are you?]. This is still a fantastic deal for the body you’ve always dreamed of having, right? If you want to take advantage of our limited free supply, you must act now.”

“Save $XX.XX By Ordering Today! ACT NOW”

This is just another example, following on from the last post, of how you can turn a negative (the cost) in to a positive (what the customer is saving).

It’s also completely unverified considering 1) I don’t promote acai, and 2) I write this shit in about 20 minutes. But what I do know for sure is that time has, and continues to be, one of the biggest defining factors in whether I make a sale or not.

It’s worth taking a look at how your pages could be given the dynamic spark that brings them to life. Get creative in how you build an urgency to the consumer. There are so many innovative ways of doing so, and they don’t only have to be restricted to a landing page. Your banners, Facebook ads, sponsored search listings…they’re all fair game for a little mindfuck time-to-act-now makeover.

PS. If you’re new and don’t understand what just happened, buy my ebook in December. It’ll stimulate your mind AND offend you in one cool hit. A bit like a donkey punch, but with marketing attached.

About the author

Finch
Finch

A 29 year old high school dropout (slash academic failure) who sold his soul to make money from the Internet. This blog follows the successes, fuck-ups and ball gags of my career in affiliate marketing.

8 Comments

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  • Will your ebook answer the question, “How is baby formed?”

    If yes, it is a sure buy from me k thx.

    Oh btw, stop stealing my techniques dog. I thought I was the only one using this on the block.

  • your post made me think about “buying triggers”, figured i’d share the rest of them here (from joe sugarmans buying triggers/adweek copywriting handbook/advertising secrets of the written word)

    feeling of ownership/involvement
    honesty
    integrity
    credibility
    value and proof of value
    justify the purchase
    greed
    establish authority
    satisfaction conviction
    nature of the product
    current fads
    timing
    desire to belong
    curiosity
    instant gratification
    exclusivity, rarity, uniqueness
    simplicity
    human relationships
    guilt
    specificity
    familiarity
    hope
    & sell a cure – not prevention

  • As always, great post Finch. I learned about the double-whammy of scarcity (“Only 22 hours left to buy”) and exclusivity (“Only 7 spots left”) when Smaxor of Ads4Dough fame suggested all affiliate marketers read “Cashvertising” by Drew Eric Whitman. It’s a great, quick read. It’s a jam-packed 200 pages of information that will give you selling and ad-writing techniques for years to come.

    We’ve personally experienced the power of scarcity and exclusivity in selling memberships to a site we own. We’ve learned that if a consumer can get the same deal tomorrow as today, they will put off buying until tomorrow. Also, people are possessive and vain, and having something others do not, makes them feel better about themselves. Telling them that only X people are allowed in to a certain program, and they can be one of them, makes them whip out their credit cards much faster than if the same deal is available to everyone.

    Keep up the great work, I look forward to each new post.

  • another good book that talks about scarcity & exclusivity is influence: the power of persuasion. robert cialdini is the man.

  • I haven’t read Cashvertising but I’ve heard it’s a brilliant book. Might have to give Amazon a workout sometime this week.

  • Excellent post and blog! Can you refer me to a site that has good date/time php scripts that work in both i.e and firefox ?

    Would Appreciate it Finch

    Thanks;

    The Guy

  • Nice posts and I’ll def start using more urgency. But do you know if there is any concern about false advertising here. With the FTC cracking down on everything it might be something to think of.

    If you say prices go up in 24 hours and they really don’t, I wonder if they consider that deceptive?

    I guess technically u “could” of been planning on upping them but decided not to. It just so happens u do it every day. I guess that can cover u.

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