Use Scarcity To Sell, Not Scare

Take­away sell­ing, for the unini­ti­ated, is a way to limit the sup­ply of a prod­uct or ser­vice in some way to increase scarcity of an offer. Because it’s a proven fact that scarcity sells.

It’s that age­less law of sup­ply and demand. The less the sup­ply is, the greater the demand will be.

Peo­ple don’t know how much they want some­thing until it’s about to be taken away from them. As Jim Rohn once said, “With­out a sense of urgency, desire loses its value.”

Why? Because pro­cras­ti­na­tion is the biggest killer of sales — par­tic­u­larly online where the chances of a prospect stay­ing on or return­ing to a web­site (in order to think about buy­ing), in today’s click-​​happy world, are just as scarce.

It’s like walk­ing into a depart­ment store and you see a shirt you’re inter­ested in. Since there’s none in your size, you ask the sales clerrk if one is avail­able. The clerk goes into the back­room and emerges a few moments later, say­ing, “I found one in your size…

“… But it’s the only one we have left in stock.”

Now, how much more do you want that shirt?

That’s the power of take­away sell­ing. In fact, I’m about to make a shock­ing state­ment. One that will force you to look at things in a dra­mat­i­cally dif­fer­ent way. It even might shock a few copy­writ­ers and “online con­ver­sion” pundits.

It is sim­ply this: I’ve grown even more con­vinced over time that great copy is not meant to induce action, espe­cially online. Yes, your copy’s job is not to get peo­ple to act.

It’s really meant to pre­vent procrastination.

Why? Because copy should not sell peo­ple and pres­sure them per se. It should help them buy what you sell and pre­vent them from mak­ing a wrong decision.

Pro­cras­ti­na­tion is a deci­sion in itself, albeit a bad one.

Peo­ple go online for one rea­son above all: infor­ma­tion. They are search­ing for spe­cific infor­ma­tion. So they find your site through research, or they are land on it through some affil­i­ate pro­mo­tion, ad, or offer made else­where. They are ini­tially interested.

There­fore, to a large degree and unlike the offline world, they’re pre-​​qualified. Just like a shop­per who’s brows­ing in a retail store, the moment they hit your site they’re “in” your store. They’re brows­ing around. Lit­er­ally. So it’s safe to say they’re in the market.

(Granted, that’s not true all the time. But again, they are qual­i­fied to a great degree — at least to a greater degree online than a bunch of peo­ple on a direct mail list you have no knowl­edge of, other than some basic demo­graphic data.)

Nev­er­the­less, as the say­ing goes, “Peo­ple don’t like to be sold. But peo­ple love to buy.” So scarcity, used prop­erly, helps them buy — and not pres­sure them to act.

Some peo­ple will still buy from bad copy. So poor copy isn’t the great­est killer of sales, pro­cras­ti­na­tion is. Because it’s the nat­ural fall­back posi­tion when­ever we feel con­fused, insuf­fi­ciently informed, or coerced — whether the copy is to blame or not.

Even if the offer is out­stand­ing, the prod­uct is per­fect for them, and it’s exactly what they want, peo­ple will always — always! — pro­cras­ti­nate if given the chance.

(How many times have you bought from some­one who used scarcity but whose copy was less than desir­able? You prob­a­bly did it more times than you care to count.)

Look at it this way: give a chance for your prospects to pro­cras­ti­nate, and they will.

Guar­an­teed.

So use take­away sell­ing in order to stop peo­ple from pro­cras­ti­nat­ing rather than get­ting them to take action now. In other words, shape your offer — and not just your prod­uct or ser­vice — so that it is time-​​sensitive, quantity-​​bound, or event-​​based.

Even pre­ven­ta­tive scarcity works really well, such as one tied to less­en­ing the poten­tial aggra­va­tion of a cur­rent, unde­sir­able con­di­tion, or to elim­i­nate the fear of some immi­nent prob­lem, dan­ger, or ill-​​favored circumstance.

Either way, the impor­tant thing to remem­ber is to always give a rea­son­able, believ­able, and log­i­cal expla­na­tion to jus­tify your sense of urgency, or else your sales tac­tic will be appear disin­gen­u­ous and be instantly discredited.

So how do you apply scarcity? I’ve used one of three ways. You can:

1. Limit the time
2. Limit the quantity
3. Or limit the offer

The first is done by adding a dead­line on the offer.

Add a real dead­line, and not some script that changes the date every­day. How many times have you come across a saleslet­ter where the offer had a dead­line that seemed to “mag­i­cally” bump ahead each time you vis­ited it? Peo­ple are not stupid!

On the other hand, scarcity done very well is when the prod­uct or the price is chang­ing after the dead­line, or sim­ply no longer avail­able or tem­porar­ily inaccessible.

(By the way, there’s an inter­est­ing take on the use of take­away sell­ing. I remem­ber one site that held a rab­bit hostage on its way to a slaugh­ter­house by a cer­tain date — unless you donated money or bought mer­chan­dise. Per­son­ally, I’m not too keen on the approach. It’s crude. But as an exam­ple of take­away sell­ing, it’s quite creative.)

The sec­ond is lim­it­ing the quan­tity of sales you can make.

Whether it’s a finite num­ber of units in stock, or a lim­ited num­ber of open­ings, always back it up with a real­is­tic rea­son. Some­thing log­i­cal. Some­thing real.

Per­haps it’s a “fire sale” (i.e., prod­ucts dis­counted because of min­i­mal cos­metic dam­age, for exam­ple), or per­haps it’s a way to deplete old stock to make way for the new.

Another way to apply scarcity is to raise the bar­rier of entry, such as through an appli­ca­tion and selec­tion process, longer wait­ing times, or higher prices and price increases. A great exam­ple of this is Aus­tralian den­tist Paddi Lund.

What­ever the rea­son, as long as it’s cred­i­ble and log­i­cal, and of course as long as it’s real, scarcity can become a pow­er­ful tool to dras­ti­cally boost sales.

Peo­ple buy on emo­tion first, then jus­tify it with logic. In fact, give them log­i­cal expla­na­tions in your copy fur­ther down, and many will actu­ally use your sug­ges­tions — be it con­sciously or uncon­sciously — as a way to back up their buy­ing decisions.

You make the excuses for them, in other words. And when you do, they will “own” your rea­sons for buy­ing now. (Even though those rea­sons came from you first.)

If you sell ser­vices, you can apply scarcity by lim­it­ing the num­ber of peo­ple you can take on as clients — either because there are only so many hours in the day (the most log­i­cal rea­son), or because overex­tend­ing your client base will dilute the value of the service.

(Again, you don’t have to stop tak­ing on new clients. You can sim­ply increase the bar­rier of entry, because if you have to work harder to serve more clients, then you cer­tainly deserve to get paid more. After all, if you’re busy, you’re in demand!)

Also, mak­ing the offer some­thing that’s secre­tive, exclu­sive, or oth­er­wise unavail­able to the gen­eral pub­lic, can arouse stronger motives in the psy­che of your readers.

Peo­ple are intrin­si­cally curi­ous. And peo­ple always love to get some kind of “insider’s edge” over the rest of the world. (If you want to learn more about this prin­ci­ple, I rec­om­mend Dr. Robert Cialdini’s book, “Influ­ence: The Psy­chol­ogy of Persuasion.”)

For exam­ple, there’s one pri­vate mem­ber­ship site, which cur­rently has an exten­sive wait­ing list. Once in a while, they “open their doors” to allow only a spe­cific num­ber of new mem­bers to join. Once they reach capac­ity, the sales page goes down.

The third is lim­it­ing the offer as it stands.

The way to do this is to limit other ele­ments that are part of the offer, such as:

• The guar­an­tee – in other words, you offer a longer or more favor­able guar­an­tee, but only to a cer­tain num­ber of units or peo­ple or by a cer­tain date,
• The bonuses or pre­mi­ums – this one is my favorite, espe­cially when the pre­mi­ums come from a third party, and I’ll come back to this in a moment,
• The price – aside from typ­i­cal dis­counts, per­haps it’s an immi­nent price increase, per­haps to cover the extra costs in deal­ing with more customers,
• The pack­ag­ing – per­haps since the prod­uct is bun­dled with other prod­ucts or com­po­nents that won’t be avail­able after “X” amount sold,
• The extras – as in free sup­port, free instal­la­tion, or free ship­ping, etc),
• And so on.

Nev­er­the­less, I like all three tac­tics, espe­cially when the prod­uct is truly limited.

But for con­ve­nience, flex­i­bil­ity, and cred­i­bil­ity, I pre­fer lim­it­ing the offer with bonuses and extras — espe­cially when they come from third par­ties. Because often, bonuses can be lim­ited and changed, with­out lim­it­ing the sales of the core prod­uct or service.

If they come from another source, they can be lim­ited at that third party’s dis­cre­tion. This projects more believ­abil­ity, because it reduces the per­cep­tion of the owner’s con­trol over the lim­i­ta­tion, which may appear as self-​​serving or manipulative.

Plus, and more impor­tantly, it reduces skep­ti­cism as the bonus may actu­ally be sold else­where, and there­fore it is scarce by being added as a bonus in the first place — let alone the fact that the third party may put a limit on the quan­tity to give away.

For exam­ple, I did this with Stephen Pierce’s copy I wrote, where Stephen was giv­ing away a soft­ware pro­gram that com­ple­mented his info­prod­uct he was sell­ing — one that was truly being sold by some­one else on another web­site at a real price.

Stephen man­aged to secure per­mis­sion to dis­trib­ute only a cer­tain num­ber of copies as a free bonus to his info­prod­uct, mak­ing the offer truly scarce and valuable.

In nego­ti­a­tion skills train­ing, they call this approach the “higher author­ity” or “third party” gam­bit, where the lim­i­ta­tion appears to be out­side of the owner’s con­trol — mak­ing the take­away truly a take­away, and not some con­spic­u­ous, manip­u­la­tive ploy.

This is cru­cial, because too many peo­ple use take­away these days as an unfounded tac­tic to induce action, and not as a real rea­son to pre­vent procrastination.

So add a dead­line — a real, honest-​​to-​​goodness end-​​date — to your offer, limit the num­ber of prod­ucts you sell (or the num­ber of new mem­bers you allow to join), or shape your entire offer so that one or more ele­ments are limited.

To make sure that peo­ple believe your need to limit the offer, give a real, rea­son­able, and log­i­cal rea­son why, or else your tac­tic will work against you. Always back up every claim you make. (Because, like it or not, apply­ing scarcity is mak­ing a claim.)

Here are some examples.

If you add a dead­line, limit the num­ber of sales you can make, or limit the num­ber of clients you can accept, then you must explain why you’re doing so. You can also be vague, sure. But a real, hard, tan­gi­ble dead­line is always best.

Here’s an exam­ple of what I put on some sales let­ters I’ve writ­ten — they sell mem­ber­ships to pri­vate sites and offer per­sonal con­sult­ing to their members:

Exam­ple #1:

“Let me be can­did with you. I don’t know how long I’m going to keep the doors open to new mem­bers since this infor­ma­tion is extremely sen­si­tive. I don’t want to dilute the value of this infor­ma­tion for my pay­ing mem­bers. If you were a pay­ing mem­ber, wouldn’t you want the same, too? So, I must restrict the num­ber of users for qual­ity con­trol purposes.”

In the above case, the rea­son is very true and the lim­i­ta­tion nec­es­sary. Specif­i­cally, the author sells access to an insider’s direc­tory of “hot” real estate oppor­tu­ni­ties he finds through his unique scout­ing sys­tem, which he also teaches his members.

If too many peo­ple get their hands on these oppor­tu­ni­ties or the sys­tem, it will invari­ably lower the value of the infor­ma­tion to the member-​​base, and con­tra­dict the whole pur­pose of the site, which is to gain access to little-​​known, avail­able real estate.

Oth­er­wise, why would one join?

Exam­ple #2:

“We’re only human, and there are only so many hours in a day and so many peo­ple we can phys­i­cally attend to! So, in order to limit the num­ber of hours of coach­ing we do pro­vide, we must put a cap on the num­ber of new mem­bers for obvi­ous rea­sons. We can only guar­an­tee that peo­ple who sign up through [date] will qual­ify for mem­ber­ship in this pro­gram, which comes with per­son­al­ized coach­ing, custom-​​tailored sup­port, and this incred­i­ble set of free bonuses worth over $[amount]! So, don’t wait and join today. I’d hate to put you on a mile­long wait­ing list…”

This exam­ple demon­strates the impor­tance of the sup­port they offer pri­vate mem­bers and, at the same time, dri­ves home the idea that such a ser­vice is limited.

I’m sure the own­ers can hire part-​​time help, if the need ever arose. But noth­ing can replace exper­tise that comes straight from the experts — the more peo­ple join, the more indi­vid­u­al­ized coach­ing they must pro­vide, and the less time they have.

Exam­ple #3:

“If you act by mid­night, Fri­day on [date], you will get the three bonuses included with your spe­cial offer. But keep in mind, these bonuses come from var­i­ous third par­ties, includ­ing [3rd party name], over which we have no con­trol, and can be removed at any time with­out notice. I’ve only secured per­mis­sion to give away [amount] copies of this bonus bun­dle. So the time to act is now!”

The above is an exam­ple of mak­ing the offer lim­ited through a bonus. You can also accom­plish this quite effec­tively by tai­lor­ing your offer as a spe­cial back­end or alter­na­tive offer to a list of non-​​buyers, after they’ve seen the orig­i­nal offer.

Ulti­mately, add some kind of con­straint. Even if it’s just inject­ing a sense of urgency. Because such lim­i­ta­tions implore at some uncon­scious level that they must take action now, even though you’re not directly push­ing them to act.

Above all, always make sure to back up your lim­i­ta­tion with a log­i­cal, gen­uine, and believ­able rea­son in order to avoid appear­ring mis­lead­ing or disingenuous.

For the more you make them feel that pro­cras­ti­na­tion is a bad deci­sion, the more peo­ple will feel com­pelled to buy of their voli­tion… and not pres­sured into buying.

About the Author

Last 5 Posts By Michel Fortin

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