I bought an expensive product about how to to do webinars from a famous and successful marketer. (Why would I do that when I am the king of webinars that sell? Because school is never out for the real pro.)
The product was okay but NOT worth the one-thousand-dollar purchase price. In fact, after I went through it, I thought about doubling the cost of my Webinar Selling Machine program!
His promotion to sell this program was intense and included a heavy last day, deadline based email campaign. If I didn’t order the product before the deadline, I would miss out on the tremendous savings he was offering. The countdown timers and his emails ticked away, moving dangerously close to zero. I bought well before the impending deadline.
Then it happened.
A couple of days after the deadline, I started receiving another series of emails, but this time there was a NEW deadline for the same product I had just bought, but this time it was at half-price!
So not only was this dude’s deadline fake but he also was making a better deal to people who didn’t buy during the original promotion. Obviously, I will never buy anything from this guy again because he lost all trust and credibility.
If you’re going to use deadlines for some of your promotions, and you should, make them real. I ran a promotion last week with a hard deadline of Saturday. I was mortified to wake up on Sunday morning to discover that the redirect on my sales page did not work when the clock hit zero. I fixed that problem because I never want anyone to think I’m using artificial deadlines.
By the way, I’m no saint. I’ve used this type of false scarcity in the past because that’s what “marketers do.” But just because everyone’s doing it, and it might fall under the category of “marketing license,” doesn’t make it right.
Sure, you might make a few more sales by using phony, manipulative strategies but at what cost?
~Dave “Off My Soapbox Now” Dee
P.S. You don’t need to use fake marketing strategies if you know the secrets of sales persuasion. And the best way to stay on the cutting edge of this most important topic is to become a Dave Dee Inner Sanctum VIP. Get details here: