Internet Marketing Complete

Hi Troopers

If you don’t read this message within 10 seconds, the computer will blow up!  - Where have you heard that sort of thing before?? How about on nearly 90% of sales pages.  We are taught from an early (Internet Marketing) age that we should inject Scarcity into our sales copy, but sometimes it can be taken too far which can result in refunds…let me explain.

In case you’re not sure what I mean by scarcity, I’m talking about when you see an offer and it states that you had better buy this today otherwise the price may go up tomorrow, or they will run out of copies etc.  This of course is effective because people don’t like the thought of missing out on a good deal or missing out on getting a product that others will have, giving them an advantage.  But be careful…

Now don’t get me wrong, it’s actually ok to use this to a degree if there really is a limited number of copies left, or you will close the site soon, or you really do plan to raise the price, but if your customers see that 6 months or more down the line, it’s still selling at the same price, then they may feel cheated.  This principle is also used for concert ticket sales.  I myself have been to quite a few ‘farewell’ concerts, only to then see the adverts for ‘the come back tour’ the following year.  Let me tell you where this backfired, in my opinion..

I recently bought a fairly expensive Internet Marketing product ($500) and it had this counter on the screen counting down from 30 seconds to 0 implying that there was a time limit for me to buy.  There were lots of other scarcity tactics at play too which was mounting the pressure.  The product sounded great and I wanted it but I already spent quite a lot on products recently.  In the end, with 3 minutes to go, I thought I’d better buy it.

Now, the long and short of it was after going through the material, I found that I already knew about 40% of it, and really should have been priced much lower.  Maybe the price was used to give a higher perceived value?  I very rarely do this (in fact this was the first time) but I got a refund.  Now, if it had been cheaper (I would have said $197 would be fair) and it didn’t have the over the top scarcity thing, I probably wouldn’t have asked for a refund.

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