Using Scarcity and Urgency Tactics to Drive Course Purchases
You can use them to increase your course sales enormously. When used wisely, by appealing to our sense of fear of missing out and our tendency to procrastinate making decisions, scarcity and urgency can be very powerful psychological triggers to action. Here I want to share with you some of the tactics you can use to employ the power of urgency and scarcity to create a greater sense of need or urgency in potential students to buy your course.
Understanding Scarcity
Sensation of scarcity—that there are only a limited number of seats and limited availability for a particular course—is one of the biggest driving forces behind course purchases. Tell people that a product has limited availability or that it’s only for a limited time, and you’ll significantly boost the chances of them purchasing it. We’ve learned to recognize human psychology quite well, and when something valuable could be lost, we take it more seriously.
The Psychology Behind Scarcity
Scarcity spurs action. It pushes us to fear missing out (FOMO). When you think something is hard to find, it feels more valuable. It’s a great formula for marketing. You can use it to make your audience wake up and double-time it to your doorstep to learn.
Types of Scarcity
Any successful strategy for creating scarcity can be classified in the following ways, each having certain consequences for course offerings:
| Type of Scarcity | Description |
|---|---|
| Limited Time Offers | Courses are available for a short period, creating urgency to enroll. |
| Limited Quantity | Fewer spots or resources are available than demand. |
| Exclusive Content | Special material is only available to a select group. |
| Seasonal Availability | Courses only offered at certain times of the year. |
| Time-Limited Pricing | Discount rates that expire after a set period. |
The scarcity type in your marketing depends on how you frame those aspects for your audience. Used in combination with other strategies in your marketing, these approaches will not only encourage potential students to take action and apply right away because the opportunity won’t last, but also make them feel a scarcity that can drive interest and create buzz around your courses.
| Type | Influence on Sales |
|---|---|
| Limited Time Offers | Encourages immediate purchases. |
| Limited Quantity | Heightened awareness of availability. |
| Exclusive Content | Increases perceived value. |
| Seasonal Availability | Creates anticipation for enrollment. |
| Time-Limited Pricing | Appeals to budget-conscious learners. |
When you strategically employ these scarcity types, it creates a sense of urgency in your audience. You always want to ensure that the scarcity you’re promoting is real and that it truly reflects the scarcity at hand; this helps maintain trust with your prospective students. Seeing your offerings as limited and time-sensitive will certainly help increase your attendance and the likelihood of getting more people in your courses.
Leveraging Urgency
Use urgency as a motivator by promoting time-sensitive offers and countdowns. Urgency can be incredibly helpful to boost your conversion rate because it gives prospects who are interested in your course a good reason to act right away.
The Importance of Time Constraints
Urgency encourages your customer to make the decision faster. Simply adding a clock to your story induces a feeling of pressure, a psychological force that encourages people to act before it’s too late. For example, we know of one research lab that was able to boost sales by up to 300 percent by adding a deadline to an offer—that’s what persuasive power looks like.
Creating a Sense of Immediate Action
Urgency is any kind of language or offer that is ‘for a limited time only’ or only available to people who sign up by a certain date, or something like that—anything that will get people feeling like they have to decide now or they’ll miss out.
Creating this urgency that makes for speedy decisions can be accomplished via several tried-and-true methods, such as emphasizing the limited spots available, pointing to testimonials of early student buyers, or perhaps even leveraging countdown timers on your outward-facing promotional ads.
Forming this type of narrative that highlights the rare and exceptional nature of the path you’re laying out (i.e., why it’s valuable for a person to act now) not only helps thrust your course into becoming more than just an ‘opportunity’. It also helps your audience make an emotional determination to make a speedy and confident decision, as there’s a veritable story to lean into.
Effective Communication Strategies
With online course sales, there are three key things you need to do in order to maximize the effect of scarcity and urgency: communicate it well, make sure it’s obvious, and make your offer sound worthwhile. To find out more, make sure to read How to Close More Deals By Creating Urgency.
Crafting Compelling Messages
Your messages will resonate only if they convey a distinctive value in your course: testimonials, limited-time discounts, or access to special content that encourages people to take action at that very moment.
Utilizing Visual Elements
Use visual elements to supercharge your message; this helps engage and hold a viewer’s attention. Add images, visually arresting countdown timers, and exciting call-to-action buttons to your landing pages so viewers can see what your course offers.
A visual element like a countdown timer or a visual that makes use of the message ‘last chance’ or ‘last few spots’ will create scarcity and a desire for people to hurry. Timers and the usage of words also help create urgency and action very quickly in your prospect.
Your visuals also need to contain whatever information you want your customer to get right off the bat. You don’t want them to have to sit and read about how exclusive your course is; you want them to see it right away so it sinks in the first time. And remember, human beings like to respond to what catches our eyes.
Implementing Tactics in Course Marketing
Another Marketing 101 trick is that if you create scarcity, it will increase your course purchases because you’re driving a lot of people to make a quick decision. If they say: ‘Oh, this offer’s gone. This content’s gone.’ That’s how The School of Life sells a lot of their courses. Or you might do things like time your offers if you’re offering different offers to different people.
Limited-Time Offers
Giving your marketing a sense of urgency by adding limited-time offers (or LTOs) means that it will resonate with a sense of immediacy. As soon as potential student prospects see an upcoming deadline, their sense of urgency increases and they’re more likely to convert more quickly before the deal end date or before that curriculum sells out. LTOs were found to increase conversions by as much as 30 percent among courses that use them.
Exclusive Access Opportunities
Thinking about exclusive access opportunities can also make your course more appealing. Making certain content, or perhaps delivering it early, available to learners who want to feel special will, naturally, make your course feel more special as well. Community-building ideas such as this help you earn not only the interest but also the loyalty of your best prospective students.
Use everything you’ve learned on value co-creation and apply it to how you sell these opportunities. Don’t say ‘everyone who signs up to my program will have access to this,’ because that would lower its value. Instead, say, ‘if you enroll within the next 24 hours, you’ll get exclusive access to this one-on-one private coaching call.’ Or you could say: ‘if you enroll today, you’ll get access to this super-limited webinar we hosted.’ Or ‘if you enroll before Friday, you’ll get an instant download to this bonus resource.’
Making these unique offerings time-sensitive and exclusive ups the value since not everyone can access them or has the chance to see the replay once the window of opportunity closes. It also helps you floor the accelerator and go straight from 0 to 60 mph. By tapping into their desire for exclusivity, the course you create will become more attractive, and you’ll see enrollments pour in. So there you have your five-step master plan—a framework for consciously creating a valuable learning experience.
Measuring Impact and Effectiveness
To really know if these scarcity and urgency tactics are working with your course purchases, combine analyzing your sales data and your customer feedback regularly and run different scarcity and urgency techniques (when to run, what would be offered, for how long, etc.). Use timed offers, adding additional bonuses, or running parallel offers with similar prices, so the decision you make becomes a struggle… Learn more about different tactics to choose from by reading our articles about scarcity and urgency techniques, such as While Supplies Last: 8 Scarcity & Urgency Tactics. Review your results and adapt your process to find techniques that work for your niche.
Key Performance Indicators
With these strategies, it’s important to choose Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to see how you are progressing on the campaign you’ve launched to achieve your predetermined course sales goal. Some metrics to consider are conversion rates, average order value, exposure, customer engagement, the overall cost of the campaign, and, finally, sales.
Analyzing Customer Behavior
A key part of improving your strategy is identifying customer behavior through tracking and segmentation. Given that you’ll know how customers generally respond to your offers, you can now be more targeted in your messaging and so improve your funnels.
Customer behavior offers some of the richest insight into who your audience is, what interests them, and what pains they have. Heatmaps and user recordings are two tools that let you watch people move through your course offerings, so you can track when in the sequence your courses start seeing more or fewer sales, or where people begin to get frustrated with urgency-based messaging. You can use this data to better inform your decisions and course corrections.
Ethical Considerations
And again, appealing to urgency and scarcity powerfully influences the medical ethicist, which is why these tactics will likely boost your course sales—with a caveat: your sales page should never deceive your audience. For more on maintaining your credibility while embracing urgency, read The Role of Scarcity in Your Sales Page Strategy.
Authenticity in Marketing
People tend to listen if you give your message with integrity; your marketing efforts will connect better, which requires putting the effort in to earn trust. When people believe your message, they are more inclined to become fully engaged and convert. Provide valid facts about courses and their start dates.
Avoiding Manipulation
Be truly authentic in marketing your class, and make sure that your RSVP deadline or other limits are not artificial. If you use tactics that appeal to your audience’s vanity but are ultimately false, you will destroy trust, and your reputation will suffer. Respect your audience, and give them real value.
Beyond a respect for brand credibility, avoiding manipulation leads to a more sustainable relationship with your audience and students since promoting scarcity can be based on events with true time sensitivity, such as a limited number of spots for face-to-face engagement and/or resources that are no longer available. This serves the purpose of efficient purchases, sticks to your ethical marketing vision, and helps you provide your students with an even better experience.
Conclusion
Overall, scarcity and urgency are useful tactics you can use to grow course sales because they both invoke a sense of limited availability or time constraints that make a decision a now-or-never decision. Utilizing these two marketing techniques can help turn prospects into students and make your courses seem more appealing. Recall always to operate ethically when urgency and intent are both considered. Using these tactics will turn interest into action and help you make sales.