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Every seller has three main goals: attract customers, sell products and encourage customers to make a second purchase (and a third one, and a fourth one…).
What if I told you there is a way to reach all these objective at once? Wouldn’t that be incredible?
In this article I’m going to talk about flash sales, specifically those aimed to registered users only, which represent an important tool to boost sales on your e-commerce store.
The power of flash sales
I already wrote a whole article about flash sales, since the chances this tool provide are potentially endless.
You must understand why sellers love this system so much that almost every online store uses it.
Whether it’s a discount, a free item or a reward, all of these circumstances trigger the same kind of reaction in customer’s mind: “I must take this chance! I must have it!”
This type of thought is caused by a Fixed Action Pattern theorized by Robert Cialdini called the Principle of Scarcity: if a product is about to run out of stock people are going to want it even more.
This works both in the small and in the large scale: consider one of the main experiments about this principles: two boxes of chocolate were offered to people: one was full, the other only had a few left. The experiment proved that the chocolate from the second box was not only the one people picked from the most, but also apparently tasted better.
This kind of mental process also applies to marketing, which explains why timed offers are so effective in attracting new customers and boosting sales.
Obama’s case
Getting new customers to come to your store is clearly a good thing, but what can you do to retain these customers and keep them coming back to shop at your store?
There are a few ways available, one of which is to offer a newsletter that would periodically inform them about your new products and offers, but getting customers to subscribe isn’t always easy.
Is it possible to combine business with pleasure? Can we use the full potential of timed promotions to make customers subscribe to your website and its newsletter?
To understand how to do this, Barack Obama himself comes in handy.
During his election campaign it was in fact possible to register to his website in order to receive real time updates regarding his political plan.
This moves is particularly effective since it once again uses the Principle of Scarcity: “if an offer is only available to a restricted group of people, then I must be part of it”.
By doing this, any time you create a timed offer and restrict them to registered users, you create a resonance effect which will increase general interest towards these offers and boost the number of subscribers.
So how can you create such an offer on your website?
- Hide the “add to cart” button and allow only registered users to see it. Put a registration button in its place for unregistered users to let them benefit of your offer.
- Display a countdown for these kind of offers to be visible to ALL users, showing the time left until the end of your offer.
- Enter the email of registered customers in your newsletter list in order to inform them about your timed offers that are about to expire.
Each bullet point in this list is a valid interpretation of the Principle of Scarcity and all of them together have a huge potential.
It may however seem difficult to implement all of these functions to your website. Luckily if your stores uses WooCommerce, you can do this in just a few steps by using the combined action of three plugins.
WooCommerce Catalog Mode allows you to hide the “add to cart” button, giving you the chance to replace it with another one that would redirect customers to the log in or registration page in your website, and many other WooCommerce catalog visibility options.
WooCommerce Product Countdown allows your customers to see the expiration date for timed offers and “while stock lasts” deals.
The WooCommerce Mailchimp allows the integration of the Mailchimp service in order to automatically register emails of subscribing customers, adding them to your newsletter list.
And that’s how you can integrate this function perfectly into your WooCommerce based store and can start exploiting its benefits right away: and if just one is effective, try to imagine what you could achieve combining these three together!
