This is a transcript from the Business Secrets Podcast With Robert Kanaat. Click here to view and subscribe on iTunes.
Hello and welcome to another episode of Business Secrets. My name is Robert Kanaat, the founder of wanderlustworker.com – the premiere online destination for all things inspirational and transformational. I’m back in Hungary right now. I’m in Budapest, and just got back here actually today.
Had about a three and a half hour drive from Zagreb, which is in Croatia. One of the coolest things about being in Europe really is the fact that you can drive from one country to another, literally within hours. It’s super, super cool. Plus you can fly anywhere in a really short time too. But it’s kind of novel driving. But the one thing about driving across the border – like for example from Hungary to Croatia – is you have to stop and wait for a little while, while they check your documents.
I think that they run your documents through like three different systems. Like a European criminal system, Interpol, etc, etc. They’ve got to check like your registration of your car, and man it takes a while. But anyways, I guess I’m really, really used to the American system of just like things happening really quickly. But anyway, so back here it’s about 30 degrees Celsius, which is kind of weird for me – like even speaking in Celsius, as an American. But that’s about like probably 85 or 86 or 87 – something in there. It’s pretty warm.
What I was thinking about actually when I got back here was – I needed to speak to you guys about urgency and scarcity. These are really important concepts in business, and probably two of the most important concepts when it comes to sales and marketing. Let’s face it, right – sales and marketing is going to run your business. Because if you don’t have sales, like you can’t do anything. You can’t expand, you can’t build a larger company, you can’t hire more employees. You can’t do all that stuff, right?
So really it comes down to urgency and scarcity. I’m going to talk to you guys a little bit about creating the offer too. The core offer. I think that will help you scale out your business, no matter where you are today. The reason why I want to talk to you guys about urgency and scarcity is that I was on a phone call with three really, really successful entrepreneurs, helping them with their business, and trying to help them strategize about how they can build an offer, and how we can best integrate urgency and scarcity into their offer.
It really got me thinking about urgency and scarcity and how it could really transform a business. So if you’re in business, you’re an entrepreneur. You sell anything, or you want to sell something, or you want to sell something else aside from your core offer. Urgency and scarcity really can change your entire business.
It can 10X, 100X your results. It can literally transform your business, as long as urgency and scarcity is used the right way – and it’s not fake urgency and fake scarcity. Because let me just tell you this. People know when it’s fake urgency and fake scarcity. You can’t shut down an offer one day and reopen it the next day and expect people to really believe you. It just doesn’t work that way.
So let’s talk about urgency and scarcity and how you could implement these two principles in your business today to exponentiate your results. So what is urgency, and what is scarcity, and how can you kind of use it in your marketing materials? Now whether or not you’re an actual marketer yourself. Whether or not you’re marketing your business, or you’re responsible for marketing your own business. If you’re an entrepreneur, you need to know this information. Because it can change the game – literally change the game for you.
So when we talk about urgency, we talk about time constraints, right? So when something is urgent, something needs to be done now or very, very soon – or you’re going to lose out. So this is FOMO, the fear of missing out, right? You’ve heard that before, its part of pop culture. FOMO is a really big driver of people doing certain things. Because when it comes to friends and going out and these kinds of things – something that I’m not interested in. Well not the friends part, but actually the going out part.
When it comes to that, people often have FOMO. So they have a fear of missing out, so they’ll go and do the thing that they were invited to do. Because they don’t want to potentially miss out on something really big. The way that urgency works is you literally put the fear in somebody of missing out on an offer, right? So how is urgency used in marketing?
Youve probably seen it a million times before. Likely on Amazon. On Amazon, for example – you see urgency with the countdown clocks for when you can get it for the next day shipping or for two day shipping. It tells you exactly how much time in hours and minutes you have left to place that order. But you’ve also seen it on webinars and sales. You will see a countdown timer counting down the minutes on when the sale is going to actually close down, or when the offer is going to close down. So that creates urgency, right?
It can also be displayed in like graphics and titles and stuff like that. But the countdown timers are huge. But you also see like little icons here and there. Like you can see an icon saying that its selling fast or almost sold out. You could even see countdown timers on like flash sales and stuff like that. But you can like literally really, really change your business by adding some urgency into your offer.
So figure out a way where you can create an offer. So for example, a sale. Make it urgent for people that they need to sign up now. So like for example I was talking to these three entrepreneurs about creating a pilot program, and then – and only allowing 200 people into the pilot program. So that is the scarcity part. But then only opening that offer up for three days, right? So like a 72 hour offer. Only open to 200 people. So you have the urgency and the scarcity there.
So what are other ways that you create scarcity? For example, like lets say you are shopping on an ecommerce store, and you look at the different sizes available for something that you want to buy, maybe a t-shirt. You’ll see that it says like, medium sold out. That is creating scarcity in the actual variation. So like in like the sizing of the actual shirt. That’s scarcity. Another way to do scarcity is by saying that something is going back into the vault, right?
So like lets say you have a book, and you only have 1000 copies available, and after that its going back in the vault and you’re not going to be selling it for a while. Disney does this often, where they put products back in the vault, and then theyll bring them out, and they’ll release a movie for like a limited time – and you only have a short period of time to actually buy that. So that is scarcity and urgency happening there, right?
So those are great ways to add urgency and scarcity. Again, Amazon is a prime example – no pun intended. Is a prime example of doing urgency and scarcity. They do it all the time. They are great at it. Like I said, flash sales are terrific, holiday sales are terrific. Any type of sale where there is a certain period of time to buy, and only a certain quantity in stock.
Another way that people do scarcity is – they’ll say only two per customer, for example. I mean that really is kind of saying that really is a scarcity offer, because what they’re telling you by saying only two per customer is that more people want to buy more of these things than they do less – so like one person might want to buy more than two. So by saying only two per customer, you’re creating some scarcity there, right?
And so scarcity and urgency can really transform things. They can change the entire game for you. The next time you actually see different companies create offers, take a look at how they’re building urgency and scarcity, right? Take a look at how their marketing is gearing you towards that. If you see email sequences all the time, you’ll see them talking about the offer closing down in three days. The offer closing down in seven days. Or the offer closing down at midnight, right? Youll continue to get these emails from marketers saying like the offer is almost closed, the offers almost closed. So that is creating urgency and scarcity there, right? So like there’s the time constraint with when the offers going to shut down. But then also there is scarcity, because the offer will no longer be available.
So people often want things that they know that they’re going to– They’re not going to be able to get later on. It’s just human psychology. So figure out a way that you can build urgency and scarcity into your offers, into your email sequences, into your sales letters. Into everything, because it’s huge, right?
You can use a lot of cookie based urgency and scarcity tactics as well. For example, you can shut down an offer to an IP address by cooking that IP address. So you have to be careful – privacy laws and stuff like that now with like GDPR. You just shut that offer down via the cookie. So like if a person saw a specific page, you can give it 72 hours. Like for example Deadline Funnel is one way to use it. But there are tons of other tools that will shut down offers based on cookies, right?
So like that person will see the offer expire. Then what you do is you send them to a waiting list, and you have them subscribe to a waiting list. So what does that do? That is a micro commitment. You’re getting them to commit to you by filling out a form. As small as that form might be, it could be just the name and a phone number, or name, phone number and email address. That youll notify them when the offer opens up. You drop those people into a new email sequence.
So urgency and scarcity are your friends. They’re actually going to be probably your best friends if you leverage them the right way – no matter what business you’re in. If you figure out a way to angle your offer based on urgency and scarcity – you are going to crush it. Literally you are going to absolutely crush it.
So take a look at your offer, take a look at your product line up. Figure out how you can add urgency and scarcity into your existing offer, and integrate that into everything. Into your sales letter, into your sales funnel, into your email sequences – everything. Take a look at how that changes the game for you. Literally take a look at how that changes the game for you. It is going to be like night and day – if you are not using urgency and scarcity right now, they are going to be your best friends, literally.
So I hope that this helped you guys out. I hope that you got some value out of this. If you like this podcast, please tell your friends about it, please subscribe on iTunes, please share and comment and like it. I really appreciate it, and I read through all the comments. So thank you so much for listening. Again, I will see you guys next time.