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:

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.