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Ecommerce lead generation strategies: Create Irresistible Offers.

9 Min READ

Creating Irresistible Offers

Yes. It’s one of the most powerful words in the human language. If you think about all the things we do as marketers, it’s ultimately to get people to say “yes” to our offers.

When an offer is exclusive, scarce, or in high demand, it becomes more desirable. Whether they are whitepapers, free trials, memberships, sales promotions or downloads, these irresistible elements can overcome a lead’s typical friction, doubt or concern.

Why do these elements work? Because they trigger a physiological reaction that makes an offer more valuable. People need to perceive the value of your offer to be greater than what you’re asking for in return. The higher the perception of value, the more irresistible the offer.

When generating leads for your eCommerce business - both high in quantity and quality is a marketer’s most important objective. A successful lead generation engine keeps the funnel full of sales prospects while you sleep. Surprisingly, only 1 in 10 marketers feel their lead generation campaigns are effective. What’s that all about?

There can be a lot of moving parts to any lead generation campaign and at times it’s difficult to know which parts need fine tuning. In this series of blogs, we will expose the top 30 techniques marketers should utilize to increase leads and revenue. These tactics have been tested over the past 7 years and have been used by 8,000+ customers to generate more than 9.8 million leads last year.

So what goes into a best-of-class lead generation engine? In this blog post you'll have a chance to take a look at part one of our 5 part series: Content and Offers: Strategies for retail businesses.

  1. USING THE ELEMENT OF SCARCITY
  2. THE BANDWAGON EFFECT
  3. LEVERAGING NEWSJACKING
  4. CREATING AN AMAZING TITLE
  5. CREATE OFFERS FOR DIFFERENT BUYERS
  6. AVOID CORPORATE SLANG
  7. USE HIGH-VALUE OFFER FORMATS

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Use the element of scarcity

If you look at the principle of supply and demand, you’ll notice that when supply is limited, demand goes up. Scarcity has a psychological influence on us, making us want something even more if there isn’t enough to go around. Scarcity is great because it creates a fear of shortage, and thus a sense of urgency.

When using urgency as your tool you have to remember that this offer goes away, and it should. We all know the infamous "Good for a limited time only" way of selling products. A great example is Cyber Monday. An entire day built on the concept of a 24 hour limited sale. 

Example: What you should do...

Tiger Direct does a great job of offering a daily deal on a single item that changes everyday. Not only does it give the user reason to visit the website every single day, but also provides a compelling reason for you to add an item to your shopping cart. 

Screen Shot 2020-02-25 at 2.41.59 PM

Other examples of time based scarcity are holiday specials and special events/promotions. Remember when using scarcity, it must be clear to the user that once this offer is closed, it's not coming back. 

Limited time offers are among the most popular in the scarcity category. Just think about your average car dealership. Practically every commercial is a limited time deal. “Get 0% financing before it’s gone!”

When something is of limited quantity, it suddenly becomes more unique or exclusive. In some studies, limited quantity or supply offers have outperformed limited-time offers. Why? Because it’s hard to tell when an offer of limited quantity will suddenly become unavailable, while a time-based offer has a known end time. Limited quantity offers are great for not only getting people to say “yes” to your offer, but to avoid procrastination completely.

Groupon is the perfect example of using both limited time and limited quantity tactics. All Groupon deals end within a certain time frame, and they limit the number of people who can buy a Groupon. That’s a powerful combination. The site also packages these scarcity tactics with discounting, which is another great value-add, especially for eCommerce businesses.

It’s a natural tendency for humans to copy one another, even without realizing it. We like to be a part of tribes and social communities. So when we notice our social circle is doing one thing, we tend to follow suit. One great way to make an offer more valuable is to show that other people are participating in that offer.

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The Bandwagon effect

Proof in Numbers

When possible, a great way to indicate how awesome an offer is to mention the number of people who have purchased, downloaded, signed up, or donated.

Some examples include:

  • Webinars: On this page promoting our webinar with Facebook, we’ve stated that more than 40,000 have signed up.
  • Blog Subscription: Similarly, in our blog under our “subscribe” module, it indicates over 130,000 people have subscribed. This is proof that it’s a highly trustworthy and popular blog people should follow.
  • Conferences: Events like SXSW and INBOUND are some of the hottest events because tons of people flock to them every year.

Just make sure your claims are not only true, but believable.

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Leveraging Newsjacking

After Prince William and Kate Middleton got married in April of 2011, no one could stop talking about Kate’s wedding dress. Within hours after the wedding, vendors began making near-identical copies or similar styles of the Stella McCartney designed dress. Even vendors such as David’s Bridal now have a “Royal” category so you can dress “just like Kate.”

When something is buzz-worthy, it creates high demand. In situations like this, you can align offers with “what’s hot.” Companies will often leverage newsjacking for this type of technique and it works very well for offers too.

As an example, back in 2013 people couldn’t stop talking about Pinterest. HubSpot capitalized on this craze by creating the first Pinterest ebook for business owners and marketers, “How To Use Pinterest for Business”. It quickly became one of HubSpot’s most successful ebooks with more than 125,000 downloads to date. Because it was the first and only ebook available on Pinterest (and they made sure people knew that), and learning how to use Pinterest for marketing was in high demand, it made the offer more unique and thus more irresistible.

That’s the power of leveraging both timing and popularity!

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Creating an amazing title

Brian Halligan, HubSpot CEO and co-founder once said that “you can have a great offer with a bad title and no one will download it. But if you have an amazing title, suddenly everyone wants it.” Yes, people do judge a book by it’s cover. If your offer is a piece of content, such as a whitepaper, ebook, or presentation, put effort into creating an amazing title.

As an experiment, we changed the title of an ebook and ran an A/B test to see which one would perform better. We took the original title “The Productivity Handbook for Busy Marketers” and changed it to “7 Apps That Will Change the Way You Do Marketing.

lead-generation-strategies-hubspot

As you can see, the revised version outperformed the original by 776% at generating leads (first time submissions). Not only that, but it resulted in more customers as well. If you’re struggling to come up with the perfect headline, try using the Headline Analyzer Tool by Advanced Marketing Institute or read 7 Proven Headlines that Convert.

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Create offers for different buyers

The most common offer seen on most websites is “Contact Us.” Sure, you want all your prospects to talk to sales, but not everyone is ready. As you know, buyers are more likely to do their own research before engaging with a sales rep. Also, every prospect is at a different stage of exploration. Some may need more education than others. That’s why it’s important to develop different offers at different buying cycles.

Someone at the top of the buying cycle may be more interested in an informational piece like a guide or ebook, whereas someone more committed at the bottom of the cycle might be more interested in a free trial or demo. You don’t need to pick and choose. Create offers for each phase, and include a primary and secondary CTA to these offers on various pages throughout your site.

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Avoid corporate slang

A professional image is necessary but you still want to avoid the dreaded corporate slang. What is corporate slang you ask?

These are jargon terms and phrases that have been over-used and abused rendering them meaningless (you’ll find them mostly in the high-tech industry, but everyone is an offender at one point or another). These words are meant to add more emphasis on a particular subject but instead they make your eyes roll.

Avoid these words when describing your offers:

  • Next Generation
  • Flexible
  • Robust
  • Scalable
  • Easy to use
  • Cutting edge
  • Ground breaking
  • Best of breed
  • Mission critical

Avoiding these types of words and phrases will help you come off more human in your marketing and will allow you to sounds less like a robot. You don’t want to risk confusing your target audience. Just because you have heard of these terms doesn’t make your messaging any more clear. Too many terms can be confusing. Lastly, you aren’t fooling anyone when you use buzz words or corporate speak. It sounds disingenuous to the reader and can make you appear less professional.

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Use high-value offer formats

Not all offers are created equal. Some “formats” of offers perform better than others at converting leads. For example, what’s more valuable, a whitepaper or an ebook?

Below are the types of offers, in order of performance, that generate the most amount of leads.

  • eBooks or Guides
  • Templates or Presentations
  • Research & Reports
  • Whitepapers
  • Kits (multiple offers packaged together)
  • Live Webinars
  • On-demand Videos
  • Blog (including offers in the nav or sidebar)
  • Blog posts (if there is a CTA in the post)
  • Middle-of-the-funnel offers: Demo Requests, Contact Sales, RFP, etc. (more sales-ready offers)

It’s important to test different types of offers with your audience to determine what works for you. While ebooks score high on our list, you may find that reports, videos or other formats do better.

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Let's wrap this up...

When you are creating offers, the whole point is to find your way into the psyche of your customer in order to get the desired effect (usually resulting in a sale or qualified lead). To recap, you will want to make sure that your offer has: 

  1. An emphasis about how valuable your product or service is in terms of time and not just money.
  2. Identify the audience and find out what resonates with them
  3. Offer something of value. Your customers will appreciate it and reciprocate.
  4. Emphasize the product and/or services using terms that are easy to understand.
  5. Create offers in formats that provide high value to your customers..

Which of these tips will work best with your product or service? Are you consciously using other tactics in your marketing strategy? If you would like to learn more about our marketing services, please feel free to contact our Marketing Consultants.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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