Did you know that by using scarcity and urgency on your sales pages you can increase your conversion rate up to 300%? Sometimes more, sometimes less, of course, depending on how you do it. I’ll show you how.
If you don’t believe me just Google ‘scarcity conversion rate’ and you’ll find a bunch of articles and case studies on how business owners used some scarcity or urgency tactics to increase their conversion rates by significant margin.
You can use scarcity in multiple ways, with two most popular being:
- Time limitation (ex. Special offer ending in 10 days – Get it now)
- Limiting the number of available products (ex. Only 57 copies left).
The thing is, most of these tactics used online on different websites were custom coded. There simply wasn’t a good, bulletproof, intuitive, easy to use and effective solution for scarcity available as a WordPress plugin – until now.
Trust me, I have done my research and tested them all. They either don’t work at all, or they work really bad and are complicated to use.
Finally, someone built a product to do just that. And who else than the geniuses from Thrive Themes, who brought us the best WordPress list building plugin (Thrive Leads – check my review here) and the best WordPress landing page builder (Thrive Content Builder – check my review here).
I present you – Thrive Ultimatum.
Thrive Ultimatum – WordPress Scarcity Plugin
Thrive Ultimatum is new, launched today (30.05.2016.), WordPress scarcity plugin, made by Thrive Themes.
Before I get into reviewing the actual product let me tell you why is it important to buy any WordPress plugin, in this case scarcity plugin, from a well established company, and not just some newcomer, interested in making money only during the launch without and intention of upgrading the plugin in the future.
Here’s what you can expect from Thrive Ultimatum:
- Regular updates and bug fixes, including compatibility with latest WordPress versions
- New features added or improved monthly
- Amazing and quick support
- Affordable price
- Drag and drop design feature (with the help of their content builder – included within the plugin)
- More pre-made template designs (added often)
- Education on how to use scarcity to increase your sales
I’m sure you’ll agree this isn’t your usual WordPress plugin and service, it’s the best one, you have my word for it.
To learn more about how to use scarcity in your business take a look at these two great video tutorials and one infographic from Thrive Themes:
- The Massive Psychological Influence Of Scarcity Throughout Time
- This one technique resulted in 2.5x visitor value increase
- How to create scarcity (step-by-step video tutorial)
Now that you know a few things about scarcity tactics, let’s see how exactly will Thrive Ultimatum help you achieve success during your next launch or special promotion.
Thrive Ultimatum – Review, video and screenshots
Let me start this review with a video tutorial. This one was actually made for affiliates by Paul McCarthy (cheers mate), one of Thrive Themes co-founders, but since it’s really amazing I decided to share it with all of you guys.
It’s a bit long, about 17 minutes, but if you want to see this scarcity & urgency WordPress plugin in action, there’s no better source.
I honestly suggest you to watch it, especially if you plan to buy it, you will learn so much.
If you are still thinking whether to buy it or not, again, watch it, you will see just how powerful Thrive Ultimatum really is – nothing comes close to it.
Until you try it for yourself it might look complicated, but it really isn’t.
Everything is point and click, and you have instructions shown, directing you onto the next step.
With Thrive Ultimatum, you can create:
- Fully customizable countdown widgets and floating banners and display them (or restrict them from displaying) on your blog posts, pages and anywhere else on your site.
- Different scarcity campaigns running at the same time, on different parts of your website.
- Automatically recurring campaigns, whether itÂ’s a seasonal sale, a monthly special offer or a timer that runs every day to show how much time your customers have to still be eligible for next-day shipping.
- Evergreen countdown campaigns, which allow you to create time limited offers that run for each individual visitor.
To show you first hand I made some screenshot with explanations, for all of you who don’t want to watch the video review above.
Building First Scarcity Campaign with Thrive Ultimatum
Let’s start with by building our first scarcity campaign.
Here you see four options (at the moment of writing this article):
- Build from scratch
- 7 Day offer
- Christmas special
- End of month specials
The last three options are pre-made campaigns which you can use right away. None of those are really interesting to me at this moment so I’ll continue with ‘Build from scratch’ campaign.
After you choose the first option and give it a name (for internal purposes), you’ll see some more options as shown below:
The options available are as follows:
- Campaign Type (Fixed date campaign; Recurring campaign; Evergreen campaign)
- Display (ie. Targeting; choose the pages/posts on which your scarcity campaign will be active)
- Open Campaign / Lockdown Campaign
- Designs
It’s important to know that you have visual / text guide on which step to use at each point (pointed with red arrow on the image above), that way you know how to proceed and what’s your next step.
So, let’s click on Campaign Type option.
As I mentioned above, you have three options to choose from:
- Fixed date campaign – Use this campaign type for an offer with predefined start and end dates. For instance, an offer available between the 5th and 12th of November.
- Recurring campaign – Use this campaign type for an offer with a definite repetition cycle. For instance, an offer that starts on November 5th and is repeated monthly.
- Evergreen campaign – Use his campaign type for offers triggered by user actions, not by dates. For instance, an offer showing for 7 days after a new user subscribes to a newsletter
You can see more info and setting for each option in this animated gif image below:
For the purpose of this article I will choose Fixed date campaign.
After that, you need to choose Display settings (page/post targeting). If you already use some Thrive plugins like Thrive Leads you are familiar with these options (shown on the image below).
Our next step after choosing campaign type and display options (targeting) is to choose and/or create design of our scarcity message.
There are 3 options presented:
- Top ribbon – Shows at the top of the screen
- Bottom ribbon – Shows at the bottom of the screen
- Widget – Display in any widget area on your site
All three options are really great. I would personally choose Top ribbon option, but that’s just my opinion. The best thing to do would be to test each options and see which one converts the best.
After you decide which one will you use, you will need to actually design it per your needs, and change the text of course, plus link the button to appropriate sales page.
So, to do that, you need to click on the edit icon as shown on the image below.
After the click, a new window (tab) will open and present you with 6 countdown templates for your scarcity ribbon.
Yes, there are just 6 options at the moment, but without a doubt Thrive Themes will add new templates really soon. Even if they don’t, you can design your own very easy.
And when I say easy I really mean that, because you have a full featured content editor (the one which comes from Thrive Content Builder; also available within Thrive Leads), and that means you can create any kind of design you want with simple drag and drop of huge selection of elements.
And that’s it, you are ready to go live. But wait, there’s more. Let’s take a look at some extra Thrive Ultimatum features.
Thrive Ultimatum – Extra features
There are some more features packed in Thrive Ultimatum plugin, you’ll go crazy when you see how great they are.
ADD NEW STATES
Within your content editor (while modifying your scarcity design) you can even add different states, which is amazing, because you can use those different states to automatically show to users at the time period you want.
For example, as shown in video review at the beginning of this article, you can create a new state and add extra notifications to your main design, like “Ending in 24h – Hurry before it’s gone!“.
Now, after you created a new state with that new notification, go back to your Thrive Ultimatum campaign and take a look at your timeline options. There, click on the green plus icon to add new event on the timeline (as shown on the image below).
This is one of the best features, all automated, I really like it. You can add even more states, like “6 Hours left” etc. Use your imagination 🙂
CONVERSION EVENTS
So you got your first buyers, your scarcity tactic worked, now what? They will still continue to see your scarcity banner, but what’s the point, they have already bought whatever you are selling, right?
Fear not, Thrive Ultimatum comes to the rescue.
You can add a so called conversion event and set your trigger.
There are two Conversion events available:
- User subscription (works only with Thrive Leads WordPress plugin)
- Visit to conversion page (for example, your ‘Thank you for purchasing’ page)
Ok, now it gets really interesting. I am discovering this plugin’s features as I write this article and I am amazed with everything there is in there.
So, ok, they bought whatever you are selling, or subscribed to your list, now what?
You can:
- End the scarcity campaign for them (so that your scarcity banner is no longer visible)
- Move to another campaign
Upsells anyone? OMG, this is so cool. So they bought something from you, why not sell them something else? Yes – UPSELLS!
You can show them another scarcity/urgency banner, but this time use it for something else, and sell more. Thrive Ultimatum – Mind = blown!
LOCKDOWN CAMPAIGNS
To explain this as simple as possible I’ll repeat what Paul said in the review video…
Integrate your scarcity campaigns with autoresponder (supports Active Campaign, GetResponse, ConvertKit, Aweber, MailChimp, Infusionsoft, Ontraport and others) and send link to people in your mailing list and that will trigger a scarcity campaign. This is what Lockdown Campaign feature is all about.
To start go and Edit your Scarcity Campaign type and activate Lockdown (shows on image below).
Note: This feature is available only for Evergreen campaigns.
When you activate that feature in the Campaign type editor and click save, you’ll be able to edit Lockdown Campaign options.
Now, when you are in the Lockdown Campaign editor, you have three options to fill in to make it work.
- Redirect to pre-access page before the campaign starts – Example: Your email opt-in page – If the user still haven’t seen the promotion advertisement or didn’t trigger the scarcity campaign
- Show promotion page while campaign is running – Example: Your sales page – If the user has already triggered the promotion and the campaign is running
- Redirect to expired page after campaign ends – Example: Your ‘Offer expired’ page – If the campaign has ended
After you do that you just choose your autoresponder service, connect it through API if you still haven’t, and your special email link will be generated.
It might sound complicated, but it’s really cool once you’ve figured it out. I suggest that you watch the video at the top of this page where Paul explains this feature with examples.
UNLIMITED MULTIPLE CAMPAIGNS
The last but still powerful feature is the ability to run multiple scarcity campaigns at once.
For example you can run one campaign for new subscribers, another campaign for people who bought product X, another campaign for people who bought product Y. And so on…
You can run campaigns based on which page users have visited.
If one person qualifies for more campaigns you can even order the campaigns in terms of priority.
The possibilities are almost endless.
Wrapping it up
When I started writing this article I thought it was going to be a short one, but boy was I wrong. With so much features to cover I just couldn’t left anything hidden and had to show you everything.
Thrive Ultimatum launched today May 30th (at the time when this article was published), and will be on a special discounted price until June 6, 2016.
I strongly suggest you to get it ASAP before the price goes up.
I am actually also a Thrive Themes membership user so I got this plugin for free (included in my membership), that’s one of the many benefits of having Thrive membership. Not only you get a complete set of awesome WordPress plugins and themes for your online business (Thrive Leads, Thrive Content Builder, Thrive Headline Optimizer and others), you also get whatever comes out within your active membership period.
You can join Thrive membership here.
So that’s it guys, I hope you really like Thrive Ultimatum, I personally am amazed and will be using it on every upcoming project.
Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments below.