What is Deadline Funnel?
Deadline Funnel is a software that you can use to create uncheatable countdown timers for your scarcity marketing campaigns.
This way you can leverage scarcity marketing to let customers know that they have a limited time to get your offer, before the deadline expires.
You can display timers on your website and even show countdown timers in emails. The timers are synced so the same deadline will show on your site and in your emails.
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The idea of potential loss plays a large role in human decision making. In fact, people seem to be more motivated by the thought of losing something than by the thought of gaining something of equal value.
Robert B. Cialdini // Bestselling author - Influence: the Psychology of Persuasion
Why use Scarcity Marketing?
Scarcity marketing gives potential customers a reason to buy now instead of later. Using scarcity marketing effectively in your online business can boost conversions and increase profits for your business.
So here are four techniques you can use to sell more using urgency:
How to implement Scarcity Marketing in your business
Price Reduction
Decrease the price of your product for a limited time
Price Increase
If you are about to increase the price of your product, promote lower price till the last minute
Last Chance
Sell more of the products (digital/physical) that you will discontinue soon
Bonuses
Give away bonuses (with purchase) for a limited time/quantity
What does it do?
Deadline Funnel creates real scarcity by allowing people to visit your “special offer” page only when the customer is supposed to.
After the customer’s deadline ends, they’ll automatically be taken to “sorry, you missed out” page and they cannot return to the special offer page.
Once a customer’s deadline is set, they can’t cheat it by visiting from another browser, on another device, using incognito mode or even using a different email address to sign up again.
I tried beating the system using different techniques and failed every time.
You can use Deadline Funnel to create:
One-time scarcity campaigns
Campaigns where the deadline is the same for everyone and it’s a fixed date and time.
You’d use this in a product launch kind of scenario where the offer closes for everyone at the same time.
Evergreen campaigns
Campaigns where the deadline is different for each person depending upon when they entered the funnel.
You’d use these in an evergreen webinar funnel kind of scenario where the offer closes for everyone at a different time based on when they entered the funnel. The duration of the offer for each person remains the same though.
For example when someone signs up for your healthy living webinar, you want them to be able to buy your “Ultimate Guide to Healthy Eating – Video Course” at 50% off within 3 days.
After that they will be sent to the page where they can buy it for full price (or be simply be told that they missed their chance).
These funnels can be triggered when:
Limited sales campaigns
Campaigns where you’d close the offer after X number of sales have been made.
For example: Your new ebook will be sold at a discount for the first 100 copies and once they are sold out, the customers will be sent to the full price sales page.
Other campaigns
You can also set deadlines to expire on a certain day of the week like Monday or Friday. Great for sale of the week type of campaigns.
You can even set the day of the month (for example the countdown ends on the 20th of each month). Great for sale of the month type campaigns.
And you can also set the funnel to close on the 100th day of each quarter. Some highly specialized businesses (I guess the ones in the finance market) could make great use of this. I don’t think quarterly deadlines makes much sense to the average blogger.
You can set recurring campaigns for promotions that happen on the same dates every year. For example: You can set 20% off all items on your store on Black Friday or Christmas.
So basically, you can setup a funnel for almost any type of campaign with Deadline Funnels, no matter what you goals are.
Deadline Funnel has 3 kinds of countdown timers:
- 1Floating Bar Timer - which is shown at the top or bottom of the page
- 2Inline Timer - which can be shown anywhere on your page
- 3Email Timer - which can be shown inside your emails
You can customize the colors and fonts of your countdown timers to match the look & feel of your page.
You can also translate the labels to convert DAYS, HOURS etc to your language.
Customizable countdown timer styles
Customizable Floating Bar Timer
How Deadline Funnel Works:
Deadline Funnel is a platform you login into and select the kind of campaign you want to create, customize your campaign (including the look and feel of the countdown timers) and you use scripts (or their wordpress plugin) to display these countdown timers on your site or in emails.
Deadline funnel then tracks each person going through your funnel and makes sure that they can only avail your special offer during their promotion duration.
It does this by creating a digital fingerprint of each person and then tracking all their interactions with your funnel making it uncheatable.
Of course the creators of Deadline Funnel aren’t going to tell us exactly how it works (or we’d know how it can be cheated) but my guess is it works using:
- 1IP Address tracking
- 2Browser Cookies
- 3Special links to recreate associations with these tracking methods in case of device or browser change
- 4Some special sauce that doesn’t let you cheat the countdown even when the email address is different (basically, it’s digital voodoo)
What tools does it integrate with?
Click image to see the full list of Deadline Funnel integrations
Deadline Funnel integrates with popular email marketing software, shopping carts, webinar tools and even Facebook and Zoho.
Really, you can integrate DF with any platform you’re using Zapier and Webhooks.
If you’ve never heard of or used webhooks, don’t worry, it’s easier than it sounds and DF support team will help you set it up within minutes.
So if you want to add a countdown timer to your Mailchimp emails (or any other email marketing tool), it’s easy.
Deadline Funnel have created step-by-step integration guides with text, images and video. And if you get stuck you can contact the chat support.
So integrating DF with your existing tools is easy even for beginners.
Here's a list of tools that work with Deadline Funnel.
Build an Evergreen Scarcity Funnel
Create real scarcity that sells your products on autopilot!
Is it easy to use?
It’s very easy to use. However, the interface is a tiny bit quirky and could have been made a bit more intuitive.
But that said, I’m definitely nitpicking here, because I can’t find much else that’s wrong with Deadline Funnel.
Except that, if you want to add your countdowns to some of pages on your site but not on some other pages, you’ll need to copy the code into all the pages where you need the countdown to be displayed.
This can be cumbersome if you have a large site AND need to display the countdown timer on a large number of pages, but for small websites (or for funnels where the countdown doesn’t need to appear on many pages) the process won’t take too long.
Side note: You can add unlimited number of URLs to any funnel.
Do they have a WordPress plugin?
If you’re using wordpress, you can use Deadline Funnel plugin to display floating timers across any page using their plugin.
The plugin also allows you to add shortcodes to display timers within your posts, pages, widgets or anywhere else within your WordPress site (including the product descriptions in your shopping cart).
Overall, the plugin is not incredibly useful, but it does work as promised.
In order to be a great marketer, you have to be focused and intense and look at scarcity, urgency, activity and passion in the marketplace.
Dave Ramsey // New York Times bestselling author - The Total Money Makeover
Cool things you can do with Deadline Funnel:
Here are just some of the really cool things you can do with DF:
You can set the funnel to end within minutes or hours, so you can easily ask your new newsletter subscribers to buy your low priced tripwire offer within minutes.
Tripwires allow people to become comfortable buying from you and that’ll make them more likely to buy your higher priced products.
(it's kinda how fast food chains lure people in with incredible deals on soda and then sell them burgers and pizzas once they are in the store)
You can set the countdown to remain hidden till the last few days or hours before the promo ends (you can set the number of hours).
So you can create your Christmas campaign months in advance but it'll only show right before Christmas.
You can select a pre-launch page which will appear if the visitor tries to access the countdown before it has started.
On this page you can say something like “The offer is not open yet. We’ll send you an email when the offer opens”.
When the funnel has opened, visitors to this page will be redirected to the main offer page automatically.
If you decide to change the look of your countdown timers in email or on your site, you can change their appearance in your Deadline Funnel dashboard and the changes will reflect wherever the timer appears.
This saves you from having to go into each email and page to update the code.
Deadline Funnel loads their script asynchronously (in the background, while the page is loading) so it doesn’t slow down your site.
What about support?
Deadline Funnel has been in existence since 2014 and have thousands of customers.
They offer live chat support from 9am to 6pm EST and email support on weekends.
Using the lowest priced plan, I reached out to the support team several times (to test them) and they’ve been quick every time. Also, the support staff know what they’re doing and I haven’t got a reason to complain yet.
For higher plans you get priority support and phone support.
You can also self-test your funnels with a built-in testing feature which will clear all tracking fingerprints for you (while still keeping them active for your visitors) so you can go through your funnel and self-detect any issues.
What other say about Deadline Funnel
We quintupled sales five times to over $1 million
Automated Deadline Funnels were a huge turning point
I could make money on a consistent monthly and daily basis of my products without having to launch anything
It allows me to focus on other things, like creating new courses, new funnels, speaking, having a mastermind, doing all these different things
Melyssa Griffin - Entrepreneur
I love Deadline Funnel
Make no mistake; procrastination is the ENEMY.
Deadline Funnel is the hero; the perfect way to add ethical urgency to our marketing and increase the impact we have on the people we’re seeking to matter to.
Andre Chaperon - Top Marketing Coach
Value for money
Deadline Funnel provides all features in each of their plans. You are only limited by the number of leads and funnels you can create. All pricing plans allow DF to be used on unlimited sites.
With a large number of features and integrations on offer and pricing starting at just $49/month for 1000 leads ($0.049 per lead), and considering the sales boosts you can get from scarcity marketing, Deadline Funnel is good value for money.
Deadline Funnel Alternative
There are a few scarcity marketing solutions out there, but the only one worth considering is Thrive Ultimatum because it is the only tool which is as well built, secure and feature rich as Deadline Funnel.
No other tool out there can compare with these tools.
Conclusion
Deadline Funnel is a feature packed tool build with one specific purpose – to allow you to create unbeatable scarcity on your site and in your emails.
It's a well built tool and it works reliably. The team behind Deadline Funnel provide excellent support and it's priced really well too.
If you decide to add Deadline Funnel to your business, you can be confident that you've made a great decision.
However, if you’re using WordPress on a self hosted platform (like Siteground, Bluehost etc), you should consider Thrive Suite as well.
They have a full suite of conversion focused tools for your business that are just incredible.
The downside is to Thrive Suite is that with Thrive Ultimatum you'll lose some scarcity marketing features like countdown timers in emails & deep integration with your email marketing tools (and a few more) ...
but you'll also gain a powerful landing page builder, quiz builder, lead gen plugin and much more.
I suggest you check out both Deadline Funnel and Thrive Suite to figure out which tool fits your business best.
But if you're not running self hosted WP, Deadline Funnel is the only tool out there that allows you to create uncheatable countdown timers.
Deadline Funnel have a 14-day free trial, so take it for a spin and see what it can do to boost your sales.
And that’s it for my Deadline Funnel review.
If you have any questions or feedback, please leave a comment below.
