Never underestimate the power of a sale. Do you like buying things on sale? Say no more, you are certainly not alone.
A sale inherently works some of the most effective conversion tactics into an ad. These can be so effective that the ad itself can feature less information than usual about your product and still outperform your evergreen ads by a wide margin.
Sales immediately work the following elements into your ad:
Scarcity
It simply isn’t every day that something goes on sale. Most sales only happen a few times per year. People intuitively understand this.
All else equal, sales on holidays outperform the same sales we’ve run during non-holiday periods. Can you guess why? It’s purely due to scarcity — the holiday itself suggests that there’s reason to believe these sales are rare. We all know that holidays themselves are scarce.
Urgency
We all know that sales end. The expiry of a sale puts more urgency into the mind of a buyer, and they’re less likely to put off the purchase knowing their chance to score a discount will soon go away.
Value
Without communicating the value of the product itself, the simple proposition that your item is priced less than usual implies that amount of value all by itself.d) Loss aversion bias. People would rather avoid losing something than gaining the equivalent amount. While this might not seem like direct loss aversion, the idea that you’ll effectively lose the extra $20 (or whatever amount of the discount) by having to buy this item at full price in the future certainly rings notes of loss aversion.
Let me let you in on a little secret. We’ve seen companies run ‘sales’ that offered their products at virtually the same prices as usual, only they repackaged the savings and positioned it as more of a sales offer. That alone has often been enough to work down cost per acquisition to the point where they can scale their spend 2-3x or more and still hit their usual CPA targets.
