Whatever the case, times are tough and brands are doing any little thing they can to stay afloat. “The other facet is that we don’t do sales as a company,” he went on. Some of that, he said, was due to the countdown timer and overall user experience. “It was the most successful sale in the history of our company,” Saraceno said. With that as a guiding force, he and Surefoot launched the week-long weird times sale, which had a quick and dirty message: things are weird, the company is discounting items and there’s a timer to show it won’t last forever. “The people that subscribe to our email newsletter do it because they like our backpacks.” “I’m still getting these emails about Covid-19 updates,” he said. The one big thing, said Peak Design’s marketing director Adam Saraceno, is “just don’t sound tone deaf.” Brands, he fears, are getting too caught up in the current mayhem. It’s this kind of quick thinking and cultural adeptness that marketers are forced to keep in mind. It’s no longer relevant to send an email asking what people are watching on Netflix on Tuesday night, since they’re watching it every other night too. For the most part that means understanding that people aren’t going out - but also launching promotions and ads that fit with the fact that people are more likely to buy their online purchases in the moment. “We’ve had to change all of our messaging to be totally in line with what everyone is doing,” he said. Saucey has had to make quick changes to its CRMs and deploy campaigns that fit with the pendulum-like national behavior shift. Before, it would send at most one email to customers a week now it’s increasing that output and highlighting new product-lines because demand has shifted in such a drastic way. What’s more, the frequency of the company’s messaging has changed. “They do have to be more appropriate given the behaviors we’re seeing,” Vaughn said. Given all the big changes, the company has had to rethink its campaigns. Thus, a countdown clock, which in Saucey’s case gives people 30 minutes to act, is an especially important tool when customers are more likely to pull the trigger at a moment’s notice. “That time to first-time purchase is extremely high - and the second purchase is also extremely high,” he said. First time conversions, said founder and CEO Chris Vaughn, used to be between 14 and 21 days - over the last month that’s shrunk to as little as a day. Saucey has used a countdown timer for certain promotions for the last two years, but has been seeing it become more useful over the last month. With that, Stude said that there’s “definitely less oversight or layers that have to go through.” Often these companies don’t have the in-house resources to devise and deploy a new sales campaign in a short time window. “What we find ourselves doing with a number of brands,” she said, “is spinning up these experiences within one or two days.” Most companies are strung thin nowadays, dealing with sales changes and supply chain woes - and perhaps even having fewer team members than before. Stude specifically has been seeing a great deal of demand from online brands needing to figure out new digital campaigns. While this digital touch may have been an afterthought, with consumer behaviors changing overnight - and a very bizarre anxiety sweeping the world - countdown timers are a perfect example of small features potentially having outsized impact. And many businesses for years have used the graphic sparingly or gratuitously, depending on their digital aptitude certain companies may put up a counter for a Black Friday sale, and other (usually legacy) retailers have been known to send out “one day only sale” emails every week ad infinitum. They’ve long been used by travel websites to get people to pull the trigger on that supposedly last room available at a hotel - or stop them from mulling over whether they should or should not buy that impromptu trip to Bermuda (both are quandaries, sadly, that no person faces right now).īrands have used the clocks during the checkout part of a transaction to ensure the sale is completed. Countdown clocks are certainly annoying but also psychologically intriguing.
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