Evergreen Persuasion You'll be Thanked For
Man Bites Dog I guardianmarketing.substack.com
Throughout the past 15 years I've participated in and personally created many many many offers and products across a huge range of markets and audiences.
As a curious person, I find nuanced but wildly different behavior in highly similar situations to be fascinating. It's like a little puzzle of understanding, and I must crack it. As a complete NON marketing example, in college I studied Iconoclasm (the destruction of images). We'd look at old stories from hundreds of years ago of people who would become so angry at paintings that they'd physically attack them. And I'd wonder, how can one person look at the painting in awe, and the other want to kill it?
So when it came to marketing and selling, I'd see two very similar offers and products, getting two wildly different conversion outcomes from the same audience, and I'd think ... why do people fall over themselves to buy one and not the other?
Why does one $47 guide on email marketing sell 100x more than another very very similar $47 guide on email marketing?
From my time in the coffee industry, why did one roasted coffee offer I made sell 10x more than another of the exact same coffee?
So I've pondered the seeming gap between offer similarities for many years, until I stumbled upon a common denominator.
I call it,
Inverted Urgency.
Why one offer, product, or service might be so easy to sell you could email about it every single day for a year and never dry up the well, and another very similar equally priced offer can only be presented occasionally and in the right rare framing.
Or
How to leverage one of the most evergreen persuasion techniques which your prospects would thank you for using.
It’s not about Scarcity ...
Urgency is used to drive purchases because of some limiting factor. Limited quantity available. Limited time its going to be available, etc. It works because people are willing to delay the return they get on their purchase if they believe delaying that return is the only way they can get what they think they want.
In other words, now is the only time to get the offer, doesn't matter when I get the result from it.
Inverting it is using the same emotional hook - when am I going to get what I want? And instead of saying "you have to buy now in order to get it at all" we create an offer which has immediate return. Or we compress the return on investment as much as possible. If a person believes they can get a return on what they are buying on the same day they are far more likely to buy now vs waiting.
Before I get into a couple examples ...
Some SCIENCE
The science of Urgency
I'm actually not going to go in depth on the details, if you like there are many well made studies on the biology of urgency. Here's an interesting one:
Urgency temporarily forces stimulus driven action overriding conscious mental control.1
For our purposes, urgency makes it more likely you'll decide something different than what you would have done without the urgency.
(Sounds kinda duh, but I like things backed by science so we can understand fundamentally what's going on)
Inverted Urgency - I see a similar structure. No scientific research here, this is all just my observation. Something I have made up.
You're more likely to make a purchase if there's a perception - whether conscious or subconscious - that you'll get a return on that investment immediately.
I pulled the term Inverted Urgency out of the ether because the forces feel very much alike, but nearly opposite. Whereas Urgency uses scarcity to force your hand lest you miss out, Inverted Urgency uses the immediacy of reward as the force.
That's going to be technically less "effective" - as people are more driven by fear of loss than by potential for gain.
However in the purchase of something, there is always a layer of both conscious and unconscious questioning of whether or not you're going to get what you think you're going to get when you spend your money.
Are you going to actually enjoy what you buy?
Are you going to get the results that you expect?
Is your investment going to give you the return you want?
Let me use coffee as an example.
As quick reference, I worked in the specialty coffee industry for almost a decade, publishing a consumer enthusiast focused magazine all about coffee.
So I've sold a lot of coffee and coffee related products over the years.
Specialty coffee is an interesting space.
There's kind of an invisible wall for each person approaching specialty coffee created by assumptions and past experiences. Until you've had high quality specialty coffee - meticulously hand picked and processed coffees of different processing methods, varieties, and origins ... you just won't believe that it will taste as good, and as different from what you're used to, as described.
Until you taste it yourself.
So there's always this barrier to getting people to try much more expensive specialty coffee. By much more expensive I mean …
You can get Costco coffee for less than $6 a pound.
Average good specialty coffee can easily be $20 a pound. Most of the time the small roasters are going to sell a bag that is 12 ounces not 16 (less than a pound), and the price for that bag is going to be $15-18 if not more.
These aren't huge sums of money.
(Though some of the most enjoyable and rare coffee experiences can run you $80-$100 for a 4 ounce bag of roasted beans)
But few people like to spend money on a gamble of whether or not you are going to like something like that. And the price difference is a shockingly different perception.
Paying more than 3x for (what is perceived as) the same product? Why would I do that?
The psychology is interesting.
A new buyer of specialty coffee will be really hesitant to buy a full bag of coffee of something they've never had before, regardless of how well reviewed that coffee is (part of the reason is everyone says the same things about how good their coffee is, and all the experiences are different - but that's a whole ‘nother rabbit hole).
So if you're thinking of buying a bag of coffee, of a much higher price and quality and different experience than you're used to, you not only have to overcome the increased price and the risk that you'll have wasted money on something you don't enjoy, but then you also have to wait for that coffee to be roasted and shipped to you - or if you're buying in a store you've got to wait until you get home to brew it, etc.
On the other hand.
If you're in a cafe and the barista says "hey wanna try this new coffee we got? I have it fresh brewed here."
The barrier to purchase is much much lower - because you can try it immediately.
Sure there's the argument that it's a smaller purchase (gonna be $5-7 instead of $18-20) ... sampling and all that. The environment has an impact. The fact that it's prepared for you by a barista. It's not a perfect conclusion.
But don't underestimate the power of the person being able to immediately have an answer.
If it was just lower risk due to the price, selling samples of roasted coffee would be just as easy - and it's not.
Application of Inverted Urgency
Using Inverted Urgency in your offers, products, and sales means reducing the time between the purchase and the perceived return on their purchase.
This is easier when there's money involved - that is if they are, for example, buying an information product you sell to learn how to do something which will positively impact their revenue.
If there isn't direct money involved, that is they are purchasing something for a reason other than the impact it's going to have on their monetary resources, you can still consider how the immediacy of an experience can impact their likelihood of making a decision (see the coffee example above).
For an example around a purchase that you might make expecting ultimately an impact on your revenue or income, let's look at the R3 for Email book itself (not yet published as of this writing)2.
If I want to leverage Inverted Urgency in an offer around the book, the whole book itself doesn't really do the trick, because the time between buying a book, reading and implementing everything in it is uncertain and has a long time horizon. But if I create an offer including, around, or related to the book which focuses on quick implementation of a single tactic within the book itself, I can compress the perception you'll have on the immediacy of your return on your investment.
Let's try:
A 15 minute step by step walkthrough for implementing Allegiance Capital throughout every component of your current email strategy. A process so astonishingly straight forward, you could take my video, hand it to an assistant to set up (or do it yourself with just a few minutes per email), and be Allegiance Capitaling your way to victory this very afternoon. If you take what I show in the video and ONLY apply it to your lead gen pages, you'd likely see an immediate significant bump of the first email open rate (if you're getting 50%, going up to 80% wouldn't be surprising).
I just made that up as I was writing.
All I did was think through the various immediately implementable tools, tactics, and strategies in the book to find one which could have a quick and noticeable impact.
But imagine an offer centered around that, possibly bundling the book in or using it as an upsell, compared to just selling the book itself. Even if it's the same price - you're going to be ... what were those words again from Urgency? ... temporarily forced toward action beyond your conscious mental control.
:)
If you want this dynamic to have an impact on the offer and drive more sales, then your prospect needs to have this perspective before they buy.
In the above example, I intentionally stressed the immediacy of the impact.
This probably looks obvious in retrospect, and you've likely used compression to the ROI naturally in some of your offers, but consciously being aware of it changes the dynamic of your whole strategic approach (at least in my experience). It becomes another tool in your belt to bring out at the right moment.
But,
You don't always have to use this as a perception before the prospect buys.
Post Purchase Inverted Urgency
Think through all the components of R33, how we walk people step by step through our world, how we use Allegiance Capital and expectation management to consciously and subconsciously guide people through an experience with our business, painting the picture that we are the ones they really want to follow and pay attention to above all others.
One of the tactics we use with customers to manage buyers remorse, to transition them onto a path of progress toward success, growth, and the next product or service level, and to give HFMs, centers around unannounced bonuses that you provide after the sale.
From the buyers remorse perspective: This is a very shortened version which we'll expand on in time ... Buyers remorse is largely caused by selling to someone in a heightened emotional state - after the peak comes the valley (the fall in emotion is the buyers remorse). This is can be triggered by offers which include a huge stack of bonuses, which are designed to emotionally push you to get the main product/service. (There are many other reasons for Buyers Remorse to happen, this is just one example)
Instead of pushing people's emotions by bundling the bonuses before purchase, you secretly surprise them with the bonuses after they buy.
Yes you'll get fewer up front buyers, but, that HFM after purchase of getting a bunch of extra stuff is a positive unexpected bump which can keep people out of the valley and quickly transition them towards moving forward ...
Now imagine if that secret bonus is the immediately implementable tactic?
Not only do you arrest buyers remorse, provide an HFM, and move them in the right direction but you do it with an immediate win ...
And what this does is teach people that when they buy from you, they immediately win.
This doesn't increase the conversion rate on your first offer, but it does have massive positive downline impacts for future business with your customers.
This all fits in with our "let them watch" philosophy. We like the approach of creating impact and serving people well, but doing so without the pressure, the push, the scarcity. We'd prefer people not buy, but sit back and watch, because in time they'll learn what they are missing. Eventually they'll either regret missing an opportunity enough to never miss one again, or they'll learn that the benefits of taking the opportunities are so great they can always rely on taking the opportunity even if they aren't sure exactly what the outcome is going to be.
More on "let them watch" another time.
Back to Inverted Urgency.
Laurel Portié4 does this very well.
I mentioned this in Stage 2 of R3 for Email, in the context of setting your new customers on a forward momentum path with quick wins.
What I didn't mention there is that this is an opportunity to leverage Inverted Urgency. To create the experience on the back end that when you buy something with Laurel, you are going to win FAST if you take the action handed to you.
In Ad Coaching for $75, as soon as you join, you're presented with a straightforward and easy to implement 7 day step by step guide to getting your basic ad ecosystem up and running (and a lot of people get business just from this immediate step).
Even though Ad Coaching for $7 is only ... well, $7 ... all the same basic psychological fundamentals of buying stuff applies. Taking the trust people put in you with their money and showing them a ridiculously fast return on their investment is a powerful long term R3 move.
Whats next for you?
If you currently have offers, paid or unpaid, consider this dynamic. You may have the opportunity to leverage Inverted Urgency in order to tip the hands of people who are curious.
One of the aspects I really love about Inverted Urgency, which I haven't discussed in any of the above, is that this dynamic can be used any time.
Urgency is great, but you can't always use urgency. And if you get into a position where you are manufacturing urgency in order to drive sales, people are going to catch on to the deceit and you will NOT have raving fans.
But Inverted Urgency does not depend upon scarcity.
It does require that you actually deliver the promise - a quick return on their money and time - but if you think through the powerful impacts you can have on people through all your products and services, I'm sure you'll discover an abundance of ideas you can present in this way.
Of course, you can use both in conjunction. Create an Inverted Urgency offer which has limited time availability, seat availability, etc. As long as your scarcity based urgency is legitimate, this approach can synergize really well. (Specific live workshops around immediate action are a great example of this)
Have thoughts or questions about applying Inverted Urgency to YOUR situation? Comment below and let's chat :)
Be Useful. Be Present. Love the Journey.
, CMO Man Bites Dog
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You had me at "inverted," Joseph. I LOVE the generosity and demonstration of value inherent in the idea of inverted urgency.