Scarcity sells.

We’re hard wired to want scarce stuff, it’s part of our survival instinct.

The trouble is, most things aren’t really scarce.

Especially not downloadable products where, unless the internet stops working totally, they can be available at the click of a mouse.

So how can you ethically use scarcity to increase your sales, whether those sales are for your own product or one that you’re selling as an affiliate?

Dime Sales

These work by increasing the price by an amount that you set at intervals that you set.

A typical internet marketing dime sale raises the price by 1 cent or more after every X sales (where X is usually between 1 and 10).

That works well in the initial flurry of sales because there’s usually a true scarcity with the price as other buyers are in the market.

But it doesn’t work when you come back to the page 24 hours later, press the refresh button and find the price hasn’t changed.

Then you get the signal that the product is no longer selling which, in turn, makes you desire it less.

So after the initial enthusiasm, a dime sale can work against sales and my personal preference for my own products is to change the price to a fixed one after the first few days.

Other vendors work differently and some will use timescales instead, so the product will be available at the introductory price for maybe a day and then rises. If the product launch is set to be spread out over a week then often the price will rise each day of the launch.

A big plus point with using dime sales for scarcity is that you can set them up using software and then everything else just “happens”.

Time limits

This can be used to indicate that a price will only be available for a set number of days – furniture stores regularly use this tactic, so do supermarkets for their special offers.

Or it can be that the product will only be available for a set number of days. Given that the lifespan of a lot of internet marketing products is close to that of a fruit fly – around 7 days – that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Some marketers claim that after the initial trial price the product will rise in price a lot, maybe moving marketplace from Warrior Plus to Clickbank in the process.

That’s all well and good.

But you need to remember to go back and keep to your word.

There’s nothing less convincing than saying that an offer that “will only be up for 7 days” and then leaving it there. One such offer I’ve got bookmarked has been there for 21 days at the time of writing, others I’ve come across can stay at the initial 7 day price for much longer.

If you’re selling a product as an affiliate you don’t have control over that kind of time limit but you can introduce your own time or quantity limited bonuses.

For instance, you could offer a bigger quantity of bonus items for people who purchase through your link in the first 24 hours.

One thing to keep in mind if you decide to do that is that not everyone opens their emails immediately – they may be at work or asleep or away when you send the email or they may have a routine where they only check emails once or twice a day.

You need to decide whether or not you’re going to honour time limited bonuses after the time limit.

Obviously you wouldn’t publish that you were prepared to do such a thing but you need to think whether or not you will do so if someone asks you to.

It’s your decision and it could tip the balance between keeping a subscriber or not.

Quantity limits

Artists do this all the time.

They offer limited edition prints of their work- often numbered – and that helps with the scarcity aspect because buyers know there won’t be any more.

I’ve not read an advert of theirs recently but Franklin Mint used to limit the quantity produced to the number of people who decided to buy in a given time frame. So the limit would depend on the popularity of the product.

When I was younger, record companies would offer a picture cover for singles that was only available in a limited print run. They knew that fans would make their purchases fast to get the collectible cover and that this would help drive the single faster up the charts.

That’s not really possible with digital downloads as there’s no printed cover and I’m out of touch with the singles market so I don’t know what the record companies are doing to get that initial surge in sales apart from allowing the track to be available for pre-order on places like Amazon.

If you’re offering a chat session via Skype that will naturally be limited because there’s a fixed number of hours in the day. So you can use the known fact that your time is limited to reinforce the quantity limit.

If you can work out a way to include genuine quantity limits they are a very good way of using scarcity and pushing sales.

Countdown timers

These are not my favourite device. I find them distracting on screen and generally cheesy.

But some people seem to be able to use them and get away with it.

Countdown timers can be genuine – everyone experiences the same countdown – or they can be false.

If I had to use a countdown timer, I’d use a genuine one.

False ones are easy to spot – they’re often used in Clickbank products.

Opening a new browser tab with the same URL sometimes resets the clock. Other times opening a different browser (Firefox instead of Chrome, that kind of thing) does the trick.

As soon as I find a page like that, I disbelieve everything else it’s telling me as well. So I’d suggest that you avoid using that technique.

One reason people think that false countdown technique helps sales is the time difference that automatically happens on the web. As I’m typing this page, it’s about 9am here in the UK which makes it about 4am on the East coast of America and around 2am on the West coast. It’s lunch time in India and about 6pm in Australia.

Add in the fact that you don’t know when people will open your emails and it becomes tempting to start the clock for each person – there’s software out there to perform that kind of trick.

But my guess is that this quickly falls into the area of not being able to fool all the people all the time and that you’ll soon lose credibility.

One time offers

These usually start by claiming that you’re only going to see that particular page once.

Usually they appear immediately after you’ve bought the main product but before you’ve had chance to find out whether or not the quality lives up to the promise on the sales page,

One time offers give the appearance of being only available once but that’s rarely the case. Partly because it’s not easy to program them to be only available once, partly because the product owner is almost always happy for you to make another purchase even if it’s not immediate.

One time offers are used because you’re in buying mode. They’re far and away the best time to make the add-on sale because you’ve already committed to buy the main product.

I do my best not to buy one time offers immediately – I don’t know whether the main product is something I’ll end up using – but a good sales page and a good reason to buy the OTO can work wonders for sales.

But I’ll often copy the URL and load the OTO page into a different browser to see how “one time” it really is and then email myself the link on the offchance that I’ll buy the OTO at a later date, always assuming it’s not on the product download page or inside the members area at the same cost anyway.

One time offers – especially genuine ones – can definitely help increase scarcity.

Test!

Testing is the only way that you’ll find out the best way of using scarcity to help increase your sales.

Remember that things change over time – so a method that may have helped boost sales a year ago may no longer work or may work less efficiently than it once did.

That applies a lot in internet marketing – people discover a successful method, someone puts up a post or an offer about it and suddenly a technique that was rare becomes commonplace.

It applies a lot in other markets as well – wander round your local supermarket and check how many products are on buy one get one free deals or are offering extra product free. It’s difficult to come up with truly original ideas on a daily or weekly basis.

So remember to check your stats every now and then to make sure that what you thought was working to increase sales is still working.

And if you’ve got any thoughts about using scarcity, feel free to use the comments box below this post.