9 Ways to Use Scarcity to Boost Your Sales
Even if you’re a big supply chain, you can probably use scarcity to boost your sales, it’s almost like magic. The effectiveness of scarcity has been proven time and time again to raise the value of products.
Back when things such as classic pokemon cards and first-issue magazines were being released, their value probably would’ve been a fraction of what they are today, valued in the thousands.
This leads to the question of how you can use scarcity in order to boost your sales, does it work with most businesses? And if so, how can you use scarcity to boost your sales? Here are 9 techniques you can do immediately to improve your sales using scarcity.
How Commonplace Are Your Products?
You can’t create scarcity by constantly creating the same product, even if you’re selling things like soda pops and candy bars. The thing is, you might believe that you can’t limit the number of products you offer, if so, you can do something else.
Have you tried creating a smaller line of slightly more expensive yet entirely unique product features? Samsung phones do it all the time. They might make their own collaborations with other copyright holders, and sell limited editions of their phones that have that unique theme, homing into that exclusive effect.
Fashion brands and high-end watches businesses also believe that scarcity can also mean exclusivity, they have their own catalogs and they name each and every piece they sell with its own name, giving it a unique identity.
It really isn’t about the high price, it’s about the exclusivity, high buying power shoppers tend to gravitate towards what’s unique, and they dislike having things that everyone else has.
Create Limited-time Offers
If your product isn’t rare, it’ll be detrimental to your production to artificially create a sense of urgency, there is a way to circumvent this.
You can induce scarcity in the form of time, having limited-time sales is a great way to not only excite people to shop in your store but it’s also been shown to create a scarcity effect on your products.
Say you’re typically only making sales on an individual product, like a can of soda. If you instead created a limited-time offer on the 6 soda pack for a 10% discount until the end of the day, people are almost guaranteed to flock towards that offer.
Show the Remaining Quantities
Oftentimes misused, this technique can go hand in hand with both the previous points.
You can add a counter that drops whenever someone purchases a limited product, and this will produce excitement and credibility for the product.
Keep in mind to never lie about your remaining quantities, or to simply add a countdown timer instead of a legitimate product count, as this would be unethical, not to mention it’ll be found out easily enough through your website code or backlogs.
Is Your Design Convincing Your Audience?
The way you design your promos actually helps you with creating this sense of urgency that scarcity needs.
You shouldn’t be ignoring the effectiveness of color psychology, it’s been shown to help influence people’s actions!
Just like how hospitals use white colors to calm patients down, you can highlight your promo text in red, as that will create a sense of excitement for the viewer. In addition to that, orange creates a sense of security and credibility.
Is Your Copy Convincing Your Audience?
The thing with writing your promotion piece, if you go for the big and smart-sounding words, you’ll just be turning people off. Granted, while your design will attract most people to check your offer, your copy is what will get them to click your ad.
Even if you’ve managed to create the perfect unique product, you won’t be able to get anyone to click your ads or your product page if you don’t have a targeted copy intending to capitalize on it.
While we don’t go into detail with the “word-for-word” aspect of copy, we recommend using words such as “limited time”, “until quantities end”,“today only”, and “in celebration of __ for 12 hours promo”
What’s Really Stopping Audience From Buying into Scarcity?
It’s not that your audience doesn’t have the buying power, and it’s not that your product isn’t rare enough. It’s the fact that the hardest thing your potential customer can do is to care.
If your product is so rare, why wouldn’t people be interested in buying it? It’s simply because they don’t think it’s a priority. You need to help enhance their loss of not buying your rare product. Since people react more to pain than pleasure, you can induce a FOMO effect on anyone that’s seeing your promotion.
Scarcity pushes people to make purchases, and it rewards them for being the first to act. If your promotion is done well, you can help your audience realize that they have more to lose than to gain by not capitalizing on this offer.
Have your Audience Compete to Boost Prices
This probably won’t work as well if you’re selling commercial products. However, if you’re working in real estate, or if you’re selling some sort of NFT, this can be a real goldmine. If you have a specifically lucrative plot of land or building, even if you own a rare one-of-a-kind NFT, you can have your potential customers compete in an auction.
During the auction you’ll have one advantage where everyone would be listening to you with rapt attention, they already have their investment ready, yet they need to be convinced that their investment would be worth their while.
By auctioning what you’re selling, you create the ultimate sense of scarcity. After all, it wouldn’t be worth auctioning if it wasn’t at least one of a kind.
Leveraging Scarce Sizes & Colors
This would be particularly effective only for clothing and fashion brands. Say you’re browsing on a website, checking the newest clothes, and see this really great yop that you want to get.
Thing is, you’d love for it to be in black, the website does offer black colors for this top, however, they’re sold out! If you really liked that top, what would you do?
A lot of business owners have a fear of implementing scarce sizes of colors, as they are scared of this being a sales detriment to those whose sizes are unavailable. However, what ends up happening is that this creates a sort of indirect social proof.
Your potential customer will see that sizes and colors are running out due to the popularity of your product. As a result, they buy into that scarcity effect, and they feel that rush to be first in line to get this exclusive offer.
This is also a great technique if you’re a clothing store that doesn’t have a set line of clothing but releases new designs every season. Having half of your homepage products say “sold out” really drives in that scarcity element, and encourages potential buyers to act fast to get their favorite clothing pieces, if not now, then on your next promo.
Returning Previously Pulled Products in Limited Quantities
There’s something about being one of the first few people to own a particular product and boasting about it online.
Bragging rights can be a huge incentive for someone to buy a scarce product, think of Nintendo selling out all their switch consoles hours after they’ve hit the stores, wouldn’t that mean that people love Nintendo so much?
In reality, top brands like Apple, Nintendo, and other giants tend to create an artificial sense of scarcity on their products by advertising them and creating hype around them, followed by providing retailers with a small supply.
Their fans would already be lining up in front of stores, hoping to be first to get the product, only to find that there are no more than 5 products available for close to 50 people, after pandemonium ensues, of course, the products will be sold out.
However, keep in mind that this can backfire immensely on your brand’s reputation. Don’t be like Mcdonalds’ when they returned the Szechuan Sauce back to their menu after pulling it out back in 1998.
The reason was that a TV show highlighted how great it was, and that caused unintentional hype around it. When Mcdonalds provided their stores with limited amounts of the sauce and announced that they were adding the sauce back to the menu, hundreds of fans flocked to their stores.
You can imagine their responses when they found out the limited amount of sauce provided, how can they brag about having a tablespoon of sauce?!
As a result, Mcdonalds’s lost a lot of fans that day, and while they did survive in the end, your business might not be able to.
We hope you’ve been able to understand the importance of using scarcity to boost your sales, and how you can create scarcity even in the most commonplace products.
If you’re looking to boost your sales using a uniquely creative marketing agency that can help you create strategies to scale your business, schedule a meeting with us! Here at Cosmic, we’re excited to help take your brand to the moon.