Limited-time offers, also known as urgency-bound or scarcity-bound offers. We all know what they are. A flash sale, a bundle, an offer with a discount, something that expires at a particular time... Deals like these are all around us - they come in all shapes and sizes. But what do you do when someone gets in touch to say they've missed the deal and asks you to honour it?
The only right answer here is NO!
Want to know why? And want to know how to say no without damaging your relationship with your customers?
Let's get stuck in then!
SOME EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS:
(3:33) Extending an offer that's expired is illegal!
(7:28) How hounouring an expired offer can lead your customers to start doubting you.
(8:10) If you lose your customers' trust, they won't buy from you again.
(10:00) What happened when we asked a company to honour an expired deal.
(12:00) When you should still honour an expired deal.
(13:59) When it's okay to offer your customers something different.
(15:51) How honouring your expired offers impacts your relationship with your affiliates.
(18:40) How to say no to expired offers while maintaining and strenghtening relationships.
(20:10) How saying no helps you 'train' your customers for future sales.
(22:15) Subject line of the week.
Extending expired limited-time offers is illegal
If a deal ended on Friday night at 10 pm, then it ended on Friday night at 10 pm. You can't and shouldn't extend it.
Why?
Well, first of all, it's not legal to state the terms of limited-time offers and then extend your deal beyond those terms. Similarly, if you say a certain deal is going to be available for the first 100 people who buy it (that's a scarcity-bound deal), then you can't sell it to more than 100 people.
It's as simple as that.
Because the minute you start to change the terms, it becomes false and misleading advertising. Not. Legal.
If you lose your customers' trust, they won't buy from you again!
When you're using time-bound or scarcity-bound urgency to promote and sell your limited-time offers, it comes at the cost of saying no to anyone who asks for that deal once it's over. We talked about the fact that honouring an expired offer isn't legal. But it's not ethical either.
Plus, saying no helps you 'train' your customers when it comes to future sales. Because the minute you change your mind and honour an offer that's expired, they're going to start wondering (subconsciously if not consciously) whether they should believe you or not. And next time you say that a limited-time offer or a deal will expire on a certain date, they might not believe you! They won't trust that what you say is true.
And what happens when the trust is gone? None of us can make any sales.
As business owners, we all have to build trust with our prospective customers. If people don't trust us - and don't believe they can get the results we're promising - they won't buy from us! We become dishonourable to the sale.
So the minute we say yes to a limited-time offer that's already expired, we damage our future sales. Because people will stop trusting us.
Think about it. They won't even bother rushing to get the deal before it expires. Because they know they can just drop you an email at any time and get it anyway. And when that happens, you have completely slaughtered your ability to ever use urgency with that customer. And you don't want to lose the ability to use urgency with your customers.
That time when we asked a company to honour an expired deal...
We have an example of this as customers. A while ago, we found out about this piece of software. They were running a great...
