Speaker 1: Get ready for your daily dose of marketing strategies and tactics from entrepreneurs with the gile and experience to help you find success in any marketing capacity. You're listening to Marketing School with your instructors Neil Patel and Eric Siu.

Eric Siu: Welcome to another episode of Marketing School. I'm Eric Siu.

Neil Patel: And I'm Neil Patel.

Eric Siu: And today we are going to share the killer conversion hack that marketers don't really want to share. So I'll get straight to the point and we can elaborate on this a little more. But the killer conversion hack is urgency, right? So Neil, when you sold your courses, what percent of your sales came from the last minute? When did those pour in?

Neil Patel: I kid you not, almost 50% of the sales came from urgency. And enough marketers don't use it. And they all think, "Oh, it's a sham. I know better. I don't care about this. I'm not going to fall for these tricks." I don't care who you are, they work.

Eric Siu: Yeah, and so the think is this, when you look at a sale, for example, I remember a couple weeks ago, Bonobos, which is where I like to shop online, it's like "30% off, expiring in a couple hours." Boom, what happened? I took out my credit card and then within 30 minutes, or less than 30 minutes, probably 15 minutes, I'd ordered a bunch of stuff, right? So the urgency thing works. But the thing is this, it's not going to work, people can read from a mile away when you're trying to do something shady, when you're trying to be sneaky.
So here's an example, there's this one girl that she's an Instagram model or Snapchat model, whatever you want to say, but the way she does it is she basically says, basically every one of her Instagram stories is something's expiring. "It's expiring in the next few hours." And the next day, "It's expiring in a few hours." When you start to do that over and over, that just shows that you're trying to take advantage of people, and people aren't going to trust you after that. You can't do that. It has to be true scarcity or true urgency where you actually are shutting something down or something truly is going away. But if you start to cry wolf all the time, people just aren't going to trust you anymore.

Neil Patel: Yeah, and with the urgency, one really good way that you can end up putting it on steroids is let's say it's expiring within a few days and you get all these people to hit your page or your landing page or the checkout page, more so the checkout page, but they don't complete the purchase, which is going to be over half in most cases. What you want to do is then remarket all of those people and do a video ad on Facebook and YouTube. Not a banner ad, I'm talking about a video ad. And you talk about how this promo, the product, the discount is going away and all the people are loving it and what you normally charge and just talk about why they got to seize the day and seize this opportunity. And what you'll find is it'll be your highest converting ad that you ever run.
So when you combine urgency with remarketing on Facebook and YouTube, video based ... And you're only running these video ads for a few days because you're doing urgency in it, the offer expires after a few days or whatever the time period may be. It really put steroids to everything and it just makes your conversions go through the roof.

Eric Siu: Yeah, and so let's say Neil's launching a new product and he wants to do some kind of prelaunch thing. So what he can do is he can hit his list and say, "Hey guys, for a limited time, I don't know how long the betas going to be but you can pay 99 bucks for the beta." And then after that maybe it's like, "Okay guys, if you pay $149 right now you can get in on this price for life." It's like, "We are going to take the price up next time." So basically what you're doing is the urgency that you're establishing is yes, the price, you're going to get this price for right now but it's going to continue to rise over time. So that's one way, one tactic you can use to establish urgency without seeming like you're trying to scam someone.

Neil Patel: Yeah, and when you're using urgency there's a few things you need to note if you want to maximize your conversions. One, you're going to end up doing email promotions, telling people about this offer. Put countdown clocks within your email. Not just on the landing page, it also has to be within your email. Of they're within the email and they're counting down, you'll notice that your click the rates will go up, your conversions will go up. Your countdown clock on the landing page has to line up. And then by doing that, what you'll notice is there's consistency in your urgency messaging. And then of course you want to do remarketing and you want to do remarketing through videos as we mentioned. But if you follow those simple little things, what you'll find is it works, versus if you do all of those things and let people buy after there's no more urgency, then they're going to get ticked off and then you're going to end up losing trust.
The last thing I like doing when it comes to urgency is I found that a ton of traffic still comes after the offer expires, I then end up changing the landing page copy, letting people know, "Here's what the offer was, it expired, put your email and phone number, the next time you want to be notified when there's a future offer." And then what we do is we don't just email them, we also text them because they felt they missed out, which they really did, and when you email and text them your conversions, again, go up.

Eric Siu: Yeah, I recommend looking into the Jeff Walker product launch sequence. And so towards the end looking at how it's structured. Or maybe even just subscribing to a couple people like Frank Kern or Russell Brunson. You can see when things are going away and what their sequence looks like. So a lot of people are a little hesitant. It's like, "Well first, I don't want to do the urgency thing." The second thing is a lot of great marketers out there, I'm not saying you need to copy this exactly but it's good to know, the last day or maybe the day before it's not just one email, it's multiple emails. We're talking three, four, maybe even more emails. Neil, what did you have set up for your expiration?

Neil Patel: I think it was three or four emails within a two day period.

Eric Siu: Yeah, so it's a little more aggressive. You're turning up the heat. So just keep in mind, people are busy. We're all doing things all the time. It's hard to get people back into the thick of things. This is why people do cart abandonment campaigns. You got to remind people that it really is going away. And then from there you're going to get a lot more sales and you're going to be a lot happier. Neil.

Neil Patel: Well, urgency also doesn't have to be expiring. I know that's what we're talking about right now. But there's different ways to do it as well if you don't want to end up doing that. Eric launched a product using urgency. When was it? A few months ago?

Eric Siu: Yeah, about three months ago.

Neil Patel: Okay, and your urgency was a bit different. You didn't do it expired, you did the first ... Break it down for us.

Eric Siu: Yeah, so for the product it's a one-time price. And then basically our thing was, "Hey, we're probably going to charge a couple thousand dollars this year so if you want it now, you think this is interesting to you, we don't have it ready for you yet but here, click this PayPal link and then pay us $499 or $549 and we'll give it to you. And I think we sold, I don't know, 20.

Neil Patel: And then you also did it where the later you purchase the more it costs as well.

Eric Siu: Yes. Yeah, so I think we did them at $499 and then $549.

Neil Patel: That's right. And that was his sense of urgency in which he was saying the first X purchasers will get it at this price. After that it goes up. And then after that price it keeps going up. So then people started buying because they're like, "Oh wait, I can get it for way cheaper. Why not?"

Eric Siu: Exactly. So anyway, that's it for today. That is the secret. Don't be hesitant. Use it in a way that matches your style and definitely learn from other people. But anyway, before we go we have a special giveaway. This is a giveaway of Crazy Egg, which is Neil's heat mapping analytics tool. Just go to singlegrain.com/giveaway to learn more. And we'll see you tomorrow.