How much time do you spend trying to convince your target audience that you have the best product or service for them? Probably a lot. After all, that's what most of marketing is supposed to do, right? So now imagine everything you've done is working. Your customer believes that you offer the best experience. They want to give you their money. They are ready to buy. But then they don't. It happens all the time, and it's the hardest thing to explain. What kept them from buying?
Finding a good answer to that question may be the most important question to ask yourself, because usually that happens for a very specific reason. Let's call that reason
the last hurdle.
The last hurdle is the final mental barrier in your customer's mind that keeps them from pressing that buy button or pulling out their wallet. The last hurdle is a killer. Beating it requires something that sounds super simple, but actually is quite hard: knowing what it is. If you can do that, you can devise a creative way to get past it.
To get your ideas flowing, here are two of the greatest examples I've recently seen of businesses who manage to help their customers past the last hurdle with a perfectly inventive idea:
1. Woolly Mammoth Theater Says "Bring The Kids"
If you are a theater lover like I am, and also have young kids - chances are you probably don't make it to the theater as often as you'd like. It's hard to always find babysitting for the kids or plan it ahead of time. So, to get you past that last hurdle -
Woolly Mammoth launched an experiment this holiday season where you can bring your kids with you and they will take care of them while you enjoy the show. It's a great way to get theater loving parents of kids to come out to the theater. And once they see it's possible, they might just come back for the next show of the season too.
2. Squarespace Volunteers To Give You A Discount
Website making platform Squarespace spends a lot of time and attention to show you templates of all the great websites you can build with their tools. They do an excellent job getting you through the online checkout process. But at the last stage you're confronted with that uncomfortably empty box that asks for a "discount code." So of course you open a new window and search for a code to put in there. But instead of a listing of expired codes from some site like RetailmeNot, Squarespace brings you
right back to a landing page - where they give you the code you were looking for (see image below). Why would they voluntarily give up revenue? Simple - because the sooner they get you back to the checkout process to finish, the less likely you are to be distracted and promise yourself to finish later (which may never happen).
