Thanks for the posts Dien, Don, and Mike. Great thread.

Sometimes I find it almost unbelievable how well the scarcity principle works.

Let me tell you about something I have been doing recently with my ezine.

When I release a new product I always offer it to my ezine subscribers first. And I always give them a good discount because they are my loyal subscribers and without them I would still be working 9 - 5.

Anyway, I used to use a deadline for the discount. They had to order within 24 or 48 hours to get the special price. But, what I found was that many of my subscribers didn't believe I was really going to raise the price. Since everybody and his brother has a "fake" deadline and "special price" for their product it's just not as effective a technique as it once was. Now, don't get me wrong, the technique still works just not as well as it used to.

Anyway, what I do now is I set a quota on how many people can order at the discounted price.

For example, I recently sent an email to my ezine list that had the following offer:

*************************************************
Here is the deal… if you are one of the first 75
people to subscribe you can get lifetime access
for only $xx.xx.

But, you must hurry! I am sending this out to my
entire list of ezine subscribers. Trust me –
it'll be gone before you can sneeze.

You will need to use this url to get the
discount:

http://www.exampleurl.com

Note: if the above url doesn't work it means the
75 member quota has been filled – didn't I tell
you to hurry :)

*************************************************
(by the way, the last paragraph utilizes a different but very effective marketing technique. Can you figure out what it is?)

That email worked better than I imagined. I sold the 75 within a few hours so I then sent out another email explaining that the 75 quota had been filled and they could still order but the price was now xxx (I raised it by 5 bucks but still discounted it off the regular price) if they ordered within 24 hours.

I ended up selling more the second time around because they REALLY believed me when I said it was a limited offer. If I had sent the second email first I would not have received near the amount of orders I did.

> It's a good example of the "scarcity
> principle". That is, the idea that when
> something is "scarce", suddenly we
> value it. We see it as being valuable, and
> it makes us want it even more!