Digital Scarcity: Does It Still Convert?

Scarcity is an effec­tive tac­tic often used in copy­writ­ing to cre­ate a sense of urgency in an effort to con­vince the unde­cided reader to make a pur­chas­ing decision.

After all, peo­ple pro­cras­ti­nate, and they do for a vari­ety of rea­sons. It’s sim­ply human nature. So the goal of apply­ing scarcity is to pre­vent prospects from pro­cras­ti­nat­ing.

As online con­sumers become wise to these direct-​​response copy­writ­ing tac­tics, one ques­tion often arises:

“What about dig­i­tal prod­uct down­loads, like ebooks and soft­ware? How can you cre­ate a sense of urgency for some­thing that, in itself, is lim­it­less or per­ceived as such?”

Here’s how to use scarcity sell­ing effec­tively with dig­i­tal products:

Limit The Offer

Many peo­ple use this strat­egy inef­fec­tively. They say the offer will only last until mid­night. How­ever when a vis­i­tor returns to the web­site the next day, the offer is still up.

Another exam­ple of scarcity done badly is to fol­low through on the promise and the offer is no longer avail­able on that par­tic­u­lar web­site. How­ever, it is still avail­able on another web­site, through affil­i­ates, or via another Inter­net marketer.

Con­sumers are more sophis­ti­cated than ever before, and nowa­days they tend to eas­ily notice this tac­tic, shun it, and even react hos­tilely to it. It lessens your cred­i­bil­ity as a busi­ness per­son, and makes any other offer you pro­mote suspect.

How­ever, one of the ways to add scarcity to a dig­i­tal down­load is not by actu­ally lim­it­ing the quan­tity or time, which can be seen as irrel­e­vant for a seem­ingly “unlim­ited” prod­uct, but rather by lim­it­ing the offer, its many com­po­nents, or the promise of its availability.

For exam­ple, rather than plac­ing a limit on the quan­tity or putting a dead­line on the offer, you say the pack­age, the price, the pre­mi­ums, the guar­an­tee, or any addi­tional ser­vices (such as sup­port, upgrades, con­sult­ing, etc) is only guar­an­teed through a spe­cific date.

You con­tinue by stat­ing that, if they wait or return after that date, the offer may change and may even be no longer avail­able. So they run the risk of los­ing out if they don’t buy now. Of course, always give a believ­able, log­i­cal rea­son to jus­tify your sense of urgency.

(This is impor­tant, so I’ll come back to this with some examples.)

Now, here’s how this tac­tic is dif­fer­ent and why you don’t lose cred­i­bil­ity. Even if your prod­uct is still avail­able after that date, you’re not con­tra­dict­ing your­self because you only guar­an­teed that it would be avail­able until then.

You didn’t out­right promise that it wouldn’t be avail­able after the limit or dead­line has been reached. You only raised the poten­tial risk of los­ing out on the offer, at least as it cur­rently stands, if they pro­cras­ti­nated and failed to buy now.

For exam­ple, you can tell poten­tial cus­tomers that the price is lim­ited to the first 1,000. After 1,000 copies are sold, you may change the offer by rais­ing the price or remov­ing the pre­mi­ums, or even stop offer­ing it altogether…

… At any time, with­out warn­ing or notice.

Update The Product

Take advan­tage of the fea­tures of dig­i­tal products.

Dig­i­tal prod­ucts have some­thing in com­mon: they are con­stantly being updated. It’s sim­ply the nature of tech­nol­ogy. Soft­ware keeps updat­ing with new ver­sions all the time. Ebooks, there­fore, can oper­ate in exactly the same manner.

So don’t be afraid to put a ver­sion num­ber on your dig­i­tal prod­uct, just like you would on a piece of soft­ware. When a new ver­sion comes out, even if slightly edited, the older one no longer becomes avail­able or becomes obso­lete by default.

The good thing is that updat­ing a book is as easy as edit­ing or adding a few para­graphs, insert­ing an inter­view, attach­ing an updated chap­ter, includ­ing a guest con­tri­bu­tion, inject­ing extra appen­dices, or upgrad­ing the resource list — espe­cially bookmarks.

(We all know how web­sites and links change all the time. Some URLs can change, redi­rect, move, or become unreach­able. So by upgrad­ing the book­marked resource list, among oth­ers, your list stays fresh and your links remain valid.)

Let’s not for­get the ubiq­ui­tous “alpha” and “beta” stages most soft­ware prod­ucts go through. These can be applic­a­ble to ebooks and dig­i­tal infor­ma­tion prod­ucts as well.

Plus, they don’t have to be applied to an entire prod­uct. They can be used with spe­cific chap­ters, add-​​ons, pre­mi­ums, tools, or even mem­ber­ship sites.

Addi­tion­ally, they don’t have to be called “alpha” and “beta.” Use your imag­i­na­tion. For exam­ple, call it a “pre-​​release ver­sion,” “launch edi­tion,” “intro­duc­tory ver­sion,” “2007 for­mat,” “early bird deliv­er­able,” “advanced copy,” “pre-​​market issue,” etc.

If you sell an ebook with “free updates,” then that is the ele­ment that’s scarce. To add more scarcity to the offer, you limit the bonuses or the free updates for a spec­i­fied quan­tity and/​or time, and not the actual prod­uct itself.

Make It Time-Sensitive

The third tac­tic is to add a chap­ter or a bonus that’s time-​​sensitive. I’m not talk­ing about a dead­line. I’m talk­ing about con­tent that’s timely and more valu­able based on its fresh­ness rather than con­tent that is released with a deadline.

This can be done prac­ti­cally with every infor­ma­tion prod­uct out there.

For exam­ple, if you’re sell­ing a prin­ci­pled, ever­green, or theory-​​based ebook that, in itself, can’t go out of style or become out­dated, then add a few extra pages, like a list of resources or spe­cific tac­tics, that are rel­e­vant at the time of writ­ing the product.

How­ever, the best way to do this is to include infor­ma­tion that, directly or by impli­ca­tion, makes it scarce. It can be some­thing tied to a spe­cific event, activ­ity, trend, or news item. If not, and if you wish to keep your prod­uct ever­green, then spec­ify it in the copy.

Say you sell a book on how to grow big­ger, red­der toma­toes. Your book can have a chap­ter or a bonus report that talks about how to enter and win a cer­tain annual, well-​​recognized, and pop­u­lar “tomato-​​growing con­test,” which has a set date each year.

This infor­ma­tion there­fore becomes time-​​sensitive, because, if they buy after the con­test, then the book holds less value — at least in the way it’s posi­tioned in the copy.

Another way is if it relates to a sea­son or period of the year, such as a book on how to coach youth bas­ket­ball. The book will have a time-​​sensitive ele­ment a few months before bas­ket­ball sea­son starts, and lit­tle or no value once the sea­son is over.

Ulti­mately, think of how you can add scarcity to the prod­uct itself by adding either con­tent or add-​​ons (like pre­mi­ums or bonuses), or by how you posi­tion it in the copy, to make it time-​​sensitive some­how — with­out hav­ing to limit the offer directly.

For instance, can the value or per­ceived value of the prod­uct depre­ci­ate over time or after a cer­tain num­ber of down­loads? If not, how can you incor­po­rate this ele­ment (whether it’s through extra con­tent, pre­mi­ums, or add-​​ons)?

Use your cre­ativ­ity, here.

In my expe­ri­ence, prac­ti­cally every dig­i­tal prod­uct, no mat­ter how time­less or ever­green it may seem at first, can be made scarce or urgent in some way, or made to appear so, that’s inde­pen­dent of any lim­its you oth­er­wise impose.

Technological or Resource Limits

Done prop­erly, this is a very com­pelling and clever use of scarcity, because you are essen­tially using tech­nol­ogy or time against itself. Here’s how it works…

An exam­ple that’s also the eas­i­est is where you tell prospects that the item is lim­ited because you need to con­serve or limit the band­width. Many hosts limit accounts by file­sizes or allo­cate a cer­tain num­ber of bytes trans­ferred per week, month, or year.

As a result, you may need to revise the offer or raise the price to cover your grow­ing costs at a cer­tain point in the future, as greater resources are con­sumed. Not only that, but main­te­nance and sup­port costs pro­por­tion­ately grow, too.

“Of course,” you might say, “every­one knows that.” Yes, but they don’t nec­es­sar­ily real­ize this may directly affect the offer, price, or avail­abil­ity of the prod­uct altogether.

So the idea is to spec­ify it in your copy. Tell your read­ers that, as more and more peo­ple buy and down­load your prod­uct, the cost­lier it becomes to maintain.

Price increases are inevitable, and there­fore they must act now to take advan­tage of such a “low price.” If they wait they might lose out on a great deal or on the prod­uct alto­gether as it may be taken off the mar­ket to con­serve resources and con­trol costs.

The trick is, you can spec­ify a cer­tain date or quan­tity sold by which you will revise your offer to ensure it appro­pri­ately reflects and cov­ers your costs at that time.

That’s why the scarcity, in this case, is not so much a promise that an increase in price is immi­nent, but the promise you will main­tain the cur­rent offer as it stands for a pre­de­ter­mined period of time only. After that, any­thing can happen.

Now, while that might seem log­i­cal for soft­ware, some­times this tac­tic might not be as con­vinc­ing in the case of dig­i­tal prod­ucts. (Espe­cially in the case of a very short ebook, among oth­ers.) In this case, try to make your dig­i­tal book dynamic.

Again, this doesn’t have to apply to an entire prod­uct or to the prod­uct itself. Cer­tain parts, chap­ters, or bonus add-​​ons only can be made dynamic.

For exam­ple, some PDFs now have forms and quizzes. Some ebooks con­tain stream­ing audio and video. Oth­ers are com­piled as stand­alone exe­cuta­bles but pull con­tent from the web. And let’s not for­get mem­ber­ship or password-​​protected websites.

Dynamic con­tent obvi­ously uses more resources than sim­ple one-​​time down­loads. And it may be com­mon knowl­edge. But the goal is to com­mu­ni­cate this to your prospects.

Nev­er­the­less, aside from prod­ucts them­selves, there’s the most scarcest resource of all.

And that, of course, is time.

There are only so many hours in the day or so many clients you can serve at any given time, right? There­fore, if your prod­uct comes with, say, free con­sult­ing or coach­ing, such as cri­tiques, reviews, email con­sul­ta­tions, etc, you could then say:

Due to the grow­ing demand on my time, I can only accept a cer­tain num­ber of indi­vid­u­als. So I guar­an­tee that the next 10 clients only who buy this prod­uct will get [add-​​on service].

Bot­tom line, and par­don the pun, but don’t just limit your­self to the prod­uct proper. Look at the fea­tures or parts of your prod­uct, the deliv­ery method, any add-​​ons or bonuses, the offer, the resources required, or the service-​​based components.

Dig­i­tal scarcity works quite well, even when the prod­uct may seem to be lim­it­less. Because the pos­si­bil­i­ties are only as finite as your creativity.

About the Author

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