A lot of people have written how they doubled, tripled, their sales. But I am going to tell you about one of our customers, the largest harry potter fan site on the web, increased their orders 33-tuple (compared to previous 6 months).

Screenshot of hits (since I can’t show you actual order info)

It was quite simple actually, yet I never knew it could be so dramatic. Their call-to-action was irresistibly urgent. You see, Warner Brothers took them over as of this month. The point is, they announced on their site a couple of months ago that they would no longer be carrying the Harry Potter products because of the acquisition. Like black magic, the orders began to snowball. It makes me wonder how sites like Woot do with their urgent calls.

Whether its a 1-day-sale, or seasonal product, urgency pretty much falls into the fact that something is limited, and therefore scarce:

LIMITED TIME (e.g. Today only)
LIMITED AVAILABILITY : (e.g. Limited to first 100 buyers)
LIMETED OFFER: (e.g. get a free item thrown in)

Combination of the above: “This weekend only, we will be selling 500 edition limited prints.” Maybe throw in a discount too if that helps.

One qualm I have with things like “Limited to first 100 buyers” is all the people that buy thereafter, pay full price, and then want a refund because they didn’t make the deal in time; I believe there are better ways.

My point is, can you find existing ways to drive your shoppers to action? Okay, be genuine, and not be cheesy like “Expire offers today at midnight,” and that message is there every day; and/or other similar tactics. Urgency alone won’t help something people don’t want in the first place. You will just end up with returns.

I would like to hear your story out there about a urgency related, call-to-action (Call-to-action: Your invitation to cause people to want to act upon some specific task) that has resulted in incredible results.

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