Want to create a sense of urgency in your customers to drive more sales for your online store, without being sleazy or manipulative?
Here are 4 organic ways to create urgency without being too pushy.
When there is so much to buy and look at, at the end of the day, customers do not want to miss an opportunity. The key is to tap into your customers’ sense of FOMO, or fear of missing out. Making these tweaks on your website can subtly put your store at the top of their priority list.
- Highlight Shipping Deadlines
The first way to create urgency is to highlight shipping deadlines to guarantee delivery by a certain date. This is powerful technique that works great around holidays, like Christmas, Valentine’s, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, etc.
Once you’ve worked out your processing time and confirmed delivery guarantees with your shipping carrier, it will give you a sense of the total processing time from order to delivery.
Once you have that Order By date, you can highlight on your website in a few ways.
If you’ve built your online store using the Website.com site builder, you can add the shipping deadlines to your website using the site builder.
In the online store, you can highlight the shipping deadline in the product description itself. This is a subtle place you can put the reminder, and this is a great option if each product has a different shipping deadline date.
If you want to make the shipping deadline more prominent, you can add as a ribbon. When you edit a product, you’ll see a Ribbon field, and that’s where you can enter “Order By (shipping deadline date)”.
Now if you want even more attention-grabbing options, and your order deadline is the same for all products across your website, you can highlight this on your home page. Either create a new section and add that, or add it to the description on your welcome section.
Lastly, you can create a Pop Up to inform shoppers of the upcoming order deadline.
Under Marketing & SEO, choose Pop Up. Create a pop up. You can edit right by clicking on it – go ahead and change the text and image. If you want you can also change the pop up design.
Toggle on the pop-up, and you can play around with the pop-up settings. For the button, be sure to link it to your store.
- Hold Seasonal Promotions
Now another way to add urgency to your online store is to hold seasonal sales.
For example, if you offer 20% off sitewide for the holidays, you want to make sure customers know it’s an exclusive promotion, only available for a limited time.
You can use any of those methods mentioned above to highlight this across your site – a pop-up or a home page announcement would especially create that urgency.
- Offer Exclusive Product Drops
One more way to move your customers to buy from your website is to offer exclusive product drops. What this means is that you will only offer a product within a limited sales period, so customers know they only have that window to make their purchase.
To do this properly, you’ll first need to build hype. Let your customers know of an upcoming exclusive limited time product drop. You can let people know through a newsletter, your social media, or even highlight it on your home page. Build the momentum leading up to the actual drop.
In the meantime, you can get your product set up on your online store, and just keep the visibility checked off. Once the product drop time hits, you can turn the visibility checkmark on, and save. Publish any other changes on your website that you want to go live. That will make the product live on your site.
When the exclusive sales period is over, all you have to do it turn the visibility off again.
Make sure you honour your exclusive sales period, as this builds trust with your brand and a true sense of urgency for the next time you offer an exclusive drop.
- Display Inventory Status
One last tip that triggers customers to make that purchase is to show when inventory is low. Again, you want to ignite that fear or missing out, pushing customers to make a purchase so they don’t miss their chance.
One quick way to do this is to change the inventory status for your low stock inventory to “Low Quantity” when you edit the product in the site builder. “Low quantity” will be displayed on the product page for that product.
Or, if you prefer to let the website builder track inventory, you can do that. You can track inventory for each item in your store. For each product, just enter the total number of inventory of that product, and choose to stop selling when inventory is out. The product page will show the quantity that is left for that item.
Another way to highlight the low inventory to drive sales is to display it as a product ribbon. Using your own discretion, once the stock dips below a certain number, add LOW INVENTORY in the ribbon field for that product.
Want to watch a video that goes step by step over these methods? Watch below!