Case Study: How Urgency TRIPLED Software Sales
In 2007, I co-founded a startup that sold an online marketing analysis tool called Market Samurai.
Market Samurai was the described as the “Swiss Army Knife of Search Engine Marketing”.
It would gather a heap of data about the topics your potential customers were searching for online, assess how popular those search terms are, measure how valuable they stand to be to your business, and help you to develop a strategy for getting your website to appear at the top of Google Searches for those phrases and topics.
Since its launch, over 450,000 marketing agencies and entrepreneurs have downloaded and used the Market Samurai software.
Even today – almost a decade since I sold my stake and moved on – the same marketing strategies are still being used to promote it…
And it’s still one of the must-have tools for any marketing agency or entrepreneur wanting to rank well in Google.
The Key to Market Samurai’s Success
One of the keys to the sales success of Market Samurai was the effective use of urgency.
People typically look at your website, and either buy – or not. And this was certainly true of Market Samurai. A portion of our users would immediately recognise the value of the software, and purchase on the spot.
But the rest of our user base needed a bit of a “nudge” to spur them into action.
When we began offering a special discount for purchasing within the first 7 days of your trial, sales increased.
And when we began sending reminders to users ahead of their 14-day trial expiring – encouraging them to purchase before their free trial ran out – sales increased again. (Even among users who had never downloaded and installed the trial version of the software in the first place!)
All of this was supported by big ticking countdown timers that followed customers around – inside the app, targeted to users on our website, and in email follow-ups.
The trend among buyers became (almost laughably) obvious and predictable:
One-third of people would buy immediately;
One-third of people would buy in the few hours before their discount expired;
And one-third of people would buy in the few hours before their free trial period expired.
So the effect of creating urgency – and following users around with ticking countdown timers – was a tripling of the sales we would have otherwise achieved.
You don’t need to launch big new marketing campaigns to increase sales. In fact, just tweaking your existing marketing first can give you bigger increases in sales – and deliver those sales to you overnight.
In 2017, my typical client achieved a 115.35% increase in sales over 2.5 months – more than doubling their revenues! (Some clients even surpassed this.)
Tiny tweaks to your existing marketing can make a massive difference to your sales.
Right now, I have the capacity to help 2 new clients – so I’d like to find two new businesses that would like to help me break my record from 2017, and achieve a greater-than-115.35% increase in sales.
If you’re interested, let Christine (my personal assistant) know that you’d like to apply. We can begin analysing the potential gains you could make, (if you’re an ideal candidate) we will book in a one-on-one phone call to show you the tiny tweaks that are likely to make the biggest difference to your sales.