Welcome to Lesson 10.
In this lesson, you’ll learn how to use the power of FOMO (the fear of missing out) to successfully launch products, boost subscriptions, and increase sales.
This lesson shows you how to use unbreakable countdown timers to get your visitors to act quickly before your offer is gone!
Using Thrive Ultimatum, our scarcity marketing plugin, you will learn to use countdown timers to promote special events, premium products, or a limited-time discount.
The key to building a successful scarcity-driven campaign is to show the right offer, to the right audience, at the right time. Or in this case, with the right time limit.
Hard deadlines encourage visitors to sign up to newsletters and commit to purchases before it's too late. However, use caution to avoid creating false scarcity.
Let's Start Building
To complete this lesson, you'll need to prepare:
- A sales page for a product (for example: Premium Online Course or Membership Offer)
- A check-out page for your product (for example: Thrive Cart as a check-out system)
To start creating your first Thrive Ultimatum campaign, you can either choose one from a selection of pre-made templates or build one from scratch. You'll also need to pick the type of campaign you'll want to run:
- Fixed Dates Campaign - a cart open / cart closed approach
- Recurring Campaigns - a repeating schedule approach
- Evergreen Campaigns - a user action-trigger approach
If you choose a date-related campaign type, you'll need to specify the start and end date. As for where to display your countdown timer, make your selection from the Display mode - either on your sales page, homepage, blog post page or any other pages.
Design Your Countdown Timer
Now for the fun part - choosing your countdown timer design:
- Top Ribbon
- Bottom Ribbon
- Widget
- Shortcode
If a ribbon design is what you've chosen, next you'll need to select an editable template from Thrive Themes' wide variety. If you'd like to change the style (font, color, background, borders and more) of the countdown timer element, perhaps this article on our Knowledge Base might be useful:
How to Edit Your Thrive Ultimatum Design With our Editor
Your call-to-action button will need to be given a purpose - where to direct visitors to. Select the Button element, then specify this in the Main Options tab, under Target URL (sales page, product check page, etc).
Activate Your Timer
In order to deploy and activate your countdown timer on your sales page, change the campaign status from Paused to Running.
To protect your sales page from visitors intending to purchase your product after the cart has closed, you'll need to enable Lockdown. This means that you'll need to craft the following pages:
- A Pre-access page and Expired page Both pages will enable your audience to get information about your online course or membership. You may wish to include an opt-in form so people can sign up to be notified when enrollment is open.
- A Promotion page
Adding your sales page to this list will make it available only during the running of the campaign (specified launch dates).
The last step is to queue up your campaign triggers on specific dates in the Timeline section. Here, you get to customize your countdown timer design in order to express a greater sense of urgency to your visitors through a new state - for example: a message reading "2 days left on the clock" on a red background.
Watch the Thrive Ultimatum Walkthrough Tutorial 2021 to learn more about this FOMO-inducing marketing tool.
If you'd like to understand the ins & outs of scarcity marketing in greater detail, then read our blog titled Add Scarcity Marketing to Your Next Launch, Event or Sale with the Best Countdown Timer for WordPress.
Once you’re done, share your first campaign in our Official Facebook Group, so we can give you feedback and cheer you on!
Feel free to contact our helpful Thrive Themes support team via email ([email protected]).
Click Next to move on to Lesson 11.