Email Copy Tested: How adding urgency increased clickthrough by 15%

You have exactly 60 seconds to retweet this blog post. If your tweet isn’t detected by our internal twitter monitoring algorithm by then, your hard drive will be completely erased.

Don’t believe me? That is probably because I’m lying. I have no way to erase your hard drive and no algorithm (I know of) that tracks whether you will retweet this post.

I’m feeding you a false sense of urgency to get you to take an action.

The truth is, urgency is a powerful copywriting tool. And, while a false sense of urgency might work in the short term, it will over time erode your conversion rates.

But when used authentically, urgency can be quickly added to almost any piece of copy for a lift in conversion.

For example, here is a recent email test for a MarketingExperiments Web clinic invite:

In this test, all we added was three words near the call-to-action to intensify the urgency of the click. And we told the truth. The Web clinic is limited to 1,000 attendees.

All we had to do was mention it in the copy.

Where are you missing out on urgency in your copy? Where are you creating a false sense of urgency? Let us know in the comments NOW! (Or don’t. No rush.)

Related Resources

Sales Call Optimization: How to get more prospects on the phone with a banner

Email Marketing: Why Newegg’s daily-deal alert emails garner a 60% average open rate

Holiday E-commerce: Make online shopping a rewarding experience for customers, not just an extension of the holiday hassle

Copywriting on Tight Deadlines: How ordinary marketers are achieving 103% gains with a step-by-step framework — Learn more about copywriting in our free Web clinic on June 6, 2012, 4:00-5:00 p.m. EDT.