Irresistible Offer Component #7: Urgency & Scarcity

What does the general public think when they hear the word “marketing”? perhaps…artificial urgency and scarcity “tactics” come to mind.

Only 3 left in stock! 5 Days left until the doors close! Act now or this is gone forever! Many times, its disingenuous, manipulating, or downright insulting.

Let’s back up and define urgency and scarcity – your business needs both to increase sales but you need to do it ethically and different than everyone else, which will increase the value even more because you will stand out.

Urgency is defined in terms of time – Take action by X date.

Scarcity has to do with how limited the supply of an item actually is.

There is good reason why marketers deploy urgency and scarcity. Human beings hate taking action. They would prefer to put off decisions and procrastinate even if taking action would be helpful to them or their business.

But there’s more. The #1 reason why anything is valuable is based on scarcity. So if a marketer can make it seem like there is less of something…then by default it becomes more valuable.

The same goes with urgency – most people need some urgent reason to take action. The more urgent something seems, the more valuable it is.

But how do you do it without giving away your soul? How do you do it authentically? How do you have continual urgency and scarcity without being fake?

Many businesses create artificial urgency and scarcity.

Your company should create structural urgency and scarcity.

Consider 2 questions:

1. What is your normal business cadence for fulfillment? If you are a health coach you might have a 30 day program that starts at the beginning of the month. If you have no cadence, you should start one, you’ll actually sell more than if you let clients in whenever they want. And you will save on stress and gain in organization. This way you can also deploy real urgency. “We have 1 week till this program starts, you in or out? Once I start teaching on the 1st I’m not going to go back and re-teach that day, so you need to get in before the end of the month.”

2. How many clients can you actually handle? If I gave you 100 clients next week…could your business handle that? So find out whatever
number that is – and then just let the market know the legitimate scarcity that exists in your business. If you are just starting out and can only handle 3 clients per month at 3k apiece…that create excellent scarcity. One person has already signed up and it’s the 8th of the month…you can powerfully and legitimately say that you can only take 2 more people or the client must wait till next month.

Ironically, building an irresistible offer and charging premium prices helps with this process of creating structural scarcity.

Because you don’t have to take on as many people to be even more profitable than you were before. So you aren’t desperately trying to sell clients and can create natural cadences so your product appears more valuable.

It’s a virtuous cycle.