Creating urgency is a proven strategy to increase conversions on e-commerce stores. It’s popular and getting more popular but most of the time conversion and marketing people can get the urgency wrong and this can cause losing brand image, lower conversion and losing customer trust.
In this post you’ll learn;
- What is the Urgency
- Benefits of Creating Urgency on Your Ecommerce Stores
- How to Create Urgency Without Being Fake
What is the Urgency?
I use a very simple conversion definition. Conversion is someone saying “I want to buy this product, right now.”
Why do I use this definition of conversion?
E-commerce store conversion optimization process has two part.
- Persuading people to buy your products (this is where I want to buy this product)
- Persuading people to buy right away.
As a human being, we tend to postpone our decisions as much as possible. It’s evolutionary, if it’s not urgent, make it wait. We need to spend our limited energy only things we need urgent.
Now think about yourself. Would you buy air ticket for a travel you’re thinking like 2-3 years later? Nope, you buy the ticket when all the details clear.
Or let’s say there is a power problem in your home. You just search the closest technical to fix it, right? These are urgent issues and you need to take care of them asap.
But what about a very nice bag, shirt? Colors, design looks great. Brand looks great. You like it, you want to buy it. But you can always buy it later.
I have been working on ecommerce conversion since 2015. Data analysis, session recording, surveys, user researches.
There are lot’s of reason why 97 out of 100 people leaving your store without buying. But here is the thing. One most crucial one is they just don’t need it URGENTLY.
Urgency is a pressure when we feel before booking a flight or finding a technical to fix power problem in our house. It speeds up our decision making process.
Benefits of Creating Urgency
There are lot’s of different researches showing the benefits of creating urgency. One of the recent one is from Marcus Taylor on CXL showing 332% increase on sales.
If you don’t have a crucial UX problem, chances are most of the people like your products.
They leave your store just because it’s not urgent for them to buy products on your store.
One of the biggest benefit of creating urgency is increased conversion rates and lower sales cycle.
It helps you to get more ROI from your Google and Meta ads, reach more customers and lower customer acquisition costs.
How to Create Urgency Without Being Fake
This is the most important part.
There are lot’s of examples just showing well known platforms like Amazon or Booking to create urgency.
Stock alerts, number of people looking at the same room, etc.
Creating urgency is a proven strategy but when you don’t do it correctly, it can cause huge problems both for your conversions and brand.
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3447624
Understand Motivations
You’re different from Amazon. Your brand, business model, relationship with your customers are completely different.
Stop trying to copy Amazon poorly.
Most of the time I saw some “X people looking at this product”, “Y stock left” messages and when I just open the same page using different browser it showing completely different numbers.
If you’re not selling next generation of PlayStation or iPhone, limited stock maybe not the best way to create urgency.
This is also apply for “WELCOME10” kind of discounts, too. I can use that discount code anytime I want. It’s that simple.
After analyzing more than 300 Shopify store’s data, I created the perfect way to create urgency on your visitors.
It’s time-limited smart discount offers. Now imagine this;
- AI backed data engine analyzing your visitors behavior,
- Segmenting them based on their buying intention,
- Making them a time-limited discount offer when they are most interested based on their buying intention
- Timer is over, personal discount is over.
- Same visitor can’t see the discount again until they get the similar buying intention.
What is the most important factors are here?
- High intended visitors get lower discounts and lower time like 5% OFF valid for 10 minutes
- Low intended visitors get higher discounts and higher time like 15% OFF valid for 45 minutes
- Each customer get a personal discount code
- Discount codes automatically applied to cart, no need to copy or paste
- Discounts automatically when timer is done!
Growth Suite shows the timer and the offer on every page on your store based on the intent.
Notification bar contains all the information and customer can reach the campaign detail anytime they want.
In product pages, cart page and cart-drawer they can see how much will the product for them if they complete their purchase right away.
Most of the time this is the best way to create urgency for your customers.
If you want to use this tactic on your store, just install Growth Suite from Shopify app store and see how things are going.
Want to discover more? Check out Growth Guide, Marketing Guide and Conversion Optimization Guide.
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