Using Scare Tactics to Increase Conversions

How many times have you made a purchase, clicked over to another web site or even changed your daily regimen because of simple scare tactics?

The other day I was listening to Pat Flynn’s podcast series and he did an interview with Glen from ViperChill. What was interesting was how Glen said he likes to choose his niche markets based on three different angles… them being passion, fear and problems.

Obviously picking a niche in any of these areas can swing drastically depending on the audience and niche market. However, all three are extremely important and effective ways to target your audience and build ad campaigns that work

• Passion is what keeps people driving and what one is truly interested in
• Fear can be what keeps people achieving their goals or holds them back
• Problems need to be solved and are always being searched for online

What’s interesting is when you can take any of these angles and put them to use on landing pages and ad campaigns.

There is an offer called Instant CheckMate available on the LeadSmack network that has an interesting pre loader that grabbed my attention.

Instant CheckMate is one of those sites where you can look up information any person or name that you come up with. It will then look through the millions of public records out there and compile results for you. The majority of people will come across the site when they are doing phone number or people searches through Google, then probably see their banners through Adsense while they are browsing other sites.

The bottom line is… the majority of people don’t care or need this info, but the ads and notices on their site MAKE you want to find out.

Take another look at the notice in the picture above and read the last sentence in the top paragraph.

“NOTICE: Learning the truth about the history of your friends and family can be shocking, so please be cautious when using this tool.”

If that’s not a perfect pitch for increasing conversions, I don’t know what is. How many people will end up joining the site just in hopes of finding something juicy? This notice alone will get a ton of people to join the site just from pure interest.

But wait… that’s not all!

Getting back to striking fear into users… what about your personal data?

How many people are going to sign up for this web site and see what information is listed about them? It’s a perfect marketing ploy.

Running a simple Google Image search for “InstantCheckMate.com” images will also prove useful. Take a look at all of the banners and ad copy that you have to choose from. Most of the targeting towards curiosity of who is living around you, and “fear” with the keep your family safe banners.

As you can see, there are plenty of ways to use fear and information to increase conversions and attract and audience that was never really looking for this type of offer in the first place. How many parents or people with past records will be browsing the internet and see one of these banners, than click over to their site.

Now that I have your brains churning with ideas on how you can promote this offer, you might want to know more about it. The offer is currently available on LeadSmack and currently paying out in the $20+ sign up range. After using the Google Image search, you will see a lot of other ad copy being used by marketers and it looks to be getting some nice activity among the social networks.