STEP ONE

The first time someone visits your site they are in a unique place psychologically. Since they’ve had no prior experience with your product they are in a neutral state, which will never be the case again. In a neutral state, people just need one good nudge in the right direction and they’ll be willing to do what you want. Since we only want to target first-time visitors to the site with this tactic you need to install cookies to track visitors to your site. If it is someone’s first visit then it will trigger a drop-down bar from the top of the site.

STEP TWO

You can use a pre-made drop-down bar from http://www.hellobar.com, or you can build your own, either approach will work fine. The drop-down bar should appear about 3-5 seconds after the page loads as this will make it extremely noticeable, and it should also use bold colors that stand out. However, the most important part is what you put inside the bar.

STEP THREE

The bar has two critical elements within it, an offer and a time limit on that offer. The offer should be a meaningful discount to your product, but if they don’t take advantage of it within a specified time limit then it will expire. The time limit should only be an hour or so because we are wanting them to make a snap decision. The time limit should be displayed as a prominent ongoing countdown. If it makes sense for your discount, when they click anywhere on the bar it should take them to the checkout page with all the correct promo codes already applied. This removes almost all friction from the buying process.

CONCLUSION

Psycho Time: Now, anytime someone visits your site for the first time you are psychologically forcing their hand by utilizing the strong human fear of missing out. (Photo by Stu Seeger)