Scarcity is one of the best ways to improve your conversions and marketers use scarcity techniques all the time to boost their sales.
In the book Influence, Robert Cialdini tells a story about two groups of people. One group was given a jar with ten cookies, while the other group got a jar with two cookies.
Thrive Ultimatum Review
First Published on: June 9, 2016
Last updated: Jun 9, 2016
tl;dr Summary
Even though the cookies were exactly the same, the two cookie jar received the higher ratings!
Not only that, but when the ten cookie jar got reduced to two, the two cookies left got rated higher than what they rated initially.
Why? FOMO: the Fear of Missing Out.
When something suddenly is seemingly less available, we want it more.
This is where the new Thrive Ultimatum wordpress plugin comes in. After installing it on your site, it allows you to run limited-time offer campaigns and use the power of scarcity to skyrocket your conversions.
In this review, I’m going to show you how it does this.
How Thrive Ultimatum Works
Thrive Ultimatum is the latest Wordpress plugin in the excellent Thrive Themes suite of marketing plugins.
The key ingredient of the plugin is a countdown timer, which you’ve undoubtedly seen or used before. However, it’s actually much more powerful than that.
From your Wordpress backend, you can navigate to the Thrive Ultimatum Dashboard where you can create your campaigns.
You have unlimited campaigns at your disposal so you can use these for individual products, different seasonal sales at different times, or run a more targeted, perpetual ‘Evergreen’ offer.
Once you click to create a new campaign, you’re given a few different options to choose from:
- Fixed Date Campaigns – Allows you to run limited time offers for short-term promotions or to create your own ‘flash’ sales.
- Automatically Recurring Campaigns – This enables you to set countdown campaigns to occur at regular intervals (like holiday sales) that happen more than once.
- Ultimate Evergreen System – Lets you create targeted campaigns that are perpetually ongoing, that get shown and personalized for each particular visitor.
This last campaign option, is especially unique.
Not only can you run these Evergreen campaigns on an ongoing basis, tailored individually for specific subscribers. But they are also ‘cheat-proof’ as well.
For example, normal countdown timers can be easily reset if you refresh your browser. Or to cheat the system, a visitor might change to a different browser or switch to their mobile device to access your promotion and reset the timer.
However, Thrive Ultimatum includes a ‘Lockdown’ feature which will track individual visitors so that their timer won’t reset. The same countdown timer will appear, no matter how they access your site. So they can even refresh cookies, or change IP addresses, aand their access will be restricted once the time is up.
This ensures you don’t lose credibility by using a fake tactic to artificially increase sales when you don’t intend on backing the scarcity promise up.
Each campaign can then have a customized event timeline to start or stop promoting different campaigns at different times across your website.
You can even customize when the campaign will be promoted or displayed across your website, which brings us to…
How to Get More Site Visitors to See Your Offer
Countdown timers introduce scarcity to limit your visitor’s access to one-time only offers.
By themselves, they can increase your product or promotion conversion rates by getting more people (than normal) to take action before the offer goes away for good.
However, Thrive Ultimatum increases conversions by helping you advertise the sale across your website more effectively too.
So not only will your conversion rate be higher but you will also be able to expose MORE people to the offer in the first place (which is like a two-for-one conversion bonus).
For example, Thrive Ultimatum comes with two display options for your website:
- Floating Banners: These are sticky bars across the top or bottom of your site that calls attention to the time-sensitive offer.
- Widget areas: These are standard Wordpress widget areas on your website, like your blog’s sidebar, where you can drop in a countdown timer call to action.
Every options comes with its own set of professionally designed templates to choose from, making it easy to get one up-and-running in seconds.
Thrive Ultimatum also uses the same Thrive Content Builder functionality to tweak you designs exactly how you want them. So you can change your copy, colors, add images or even drop in custom HTML. That way you can customize the styling to match your company’s branding.
Thrive Ultimatum’s customizations don’t end there, though.
Other similar plugins will force you to display a single message site-wide, across every single page or post. But with Thrive Ultimatum, you can also select specific places where you’d like these banner ribbons or widgets to show up.
For example, you can easily select individual posts or even target entire categories to make sure the offer you are promoting is closely linked to what your users are reading.
It’s easy to customize or change things on the fly and you can easily run a short-term sale on one page, advertise it on other pages of your site, and drive visitors back in droves to increase effectiveness.
Final Thoughts
Thrive Ultimatum is easily the best product I’ve found that makes it seamless to add scarcity to your site. This makes it a must have plugin if you are trying to sell anything online.
If you want to pick up a copy of Thrive Ultimatum on its own, you can pay $197 for an unlimited site license or $127 to use the plugin on a single site.
An even better deal however, is to just sign up for the yearly Thrive Themes membership. Not only will you get Thrive Ultimatum, but you will also get access to their other great products like Thrive Leads and Thrive Headline Optimizer. I’ve been using these plugin across many of my sites, and they all do their jobs very well.
Support is top notch, and the developers are constantly adding amazing new features to every one of their products.