Thrive Ultimatum Review - Harness the Power of Scarcity

Thrive Ultimatum is a WordPress scarcity marketing plugin with built-in templates and campaign tracking tools from developer Thrive Themes.

The ultimate scarcity marketing tool for WordPress is here!
Discover how “fear of missing out” in your marketing will boost your conversion rates like nothing else.

Thrive Themes

How much does the WordPress Countdown plugin cost?

Thrive Ultimatum is not only available with the Thrive Suite membership for $24.00 monthly. This allows you to use all plugins and themes on 25 websites. If you cancel the suite, everything will continue to work as usual, but you will no longer receive updates.

The standalone plugin costs $ 97.00 per year for one website.

	Thrive Suite	Thrive Suite Agency
Audience	Private and sole proprietor	Agencies and web designers
Websites	5	50
Use on client websites	no	yes
Price	$ 299.00 / Year	$ 588.00 / Year
	To Offer	To Offer

All Thrive products have a 30 day return policy:

What is Thrive Ultimatum?

This takes advantage of the fact that many customers buy products directly when the quantity or purchase period is limited.

You have only 100 units of an offer. With each sale, this quantity decreases by one unit. Or the introductory price is valid for 30 days, after that the price increases. With the WordPress countdown plugin you can implement this super easy.

And you can have as many countdowns as you want!

With Thrive Ultimatum, you have all the most advanced scarcity marketing methods accessible to you too. Whether you’re taking an established business to the next level, or just starting out yourself.

Evergreen Countdown Timer

You may have heard the term a few times. Especially in the context of Landing-Pages, this expression comes up quite often.

An evergreen countdown timer is used to indicate the time a particular user has to take advantage of the offer. This is a great way to create a sense of scarcity, urgency and exclusivity.

Use this WordPress countdown to display some special offers to users who have arrived on your website and prompt them to buy the product within the specified time. This countdown timer sets cookies to ensure that the offer looks exclusive and scarce.

Here we are talking about artificial scarcity because Evergreen timer runs all year round and shows the same available time again for every visitor.

Scarcity, Scarcity and Scarcity

Teaching about scarcity is nothing new. You probably heard about it yourself in school. The topic is part of Marketing 1 x 1.

Artificial scarcity is the market behavior of a producer who keeps the supply of its products or services below the existing demand and drives up prices through this scarcity. In this case, either the production capacity is deliberately kept low, or only fixed quantities are issued per time period (day/month/year) or per “promotion”.

Wikipedia

Scarcity marketing has been used for decades by the world’s most successful marketers and companies.

Whether the scarcity is real or artificial, customers are incentivized to make a purchase under the pressure of urgency that would not have happened otherwise. This works best in conjunction with a one-time offer or a perk.

King in the discipline is watchmaker Rolex. The luxury models are limited, have to be pre-ordered and sometimes become significantly more expensive during the sales period.

The term FOMO (Fear of missing out) is often used to describe the fear of missing out on something.

Thrive Ultimatum Installation

If you already use other Thrive products, you already have the plugin installed, otherwise you need to go to the Member Dashboard of Thrive Themes and download and install the Thrive Product Manager. Learn how to install a WordPress plugin.

Now in the Product Manager menu, tick Install product under the Thrive Ultimatum logo and click Install selected products.

Thrive Ultimatum Review – Create Countdown

The scarcity plugin is set up like all other Thrive products, meaning you’ll be familiar with it right away if you’re already using another one.

Step 1: Create a new campaign

In the admin menu Thrive Dashboard > Thrive Ultimatum you will find your countdowns and all necessary settings. At first the screen is still empty, but we will change that in a moment.

To start, click on the big gray plus sign.

A modal will open where you can choose if you want to start with a template or without any template at all.

• Build from scratch (without template)
• 7 day offer (7-day offer)
• Christmas special
• End of month special

I choose the 7 day offer and click CONTINUE.

The 7 day evergreen offer is triggered when a user visits the website for the first time. Three days before the 7 day period expires, the status will change to indicate that the offer is in the last 3 days.

The next step is to give your countdown campaign a name. Use a meaningful name so that you can find the right campaign later. The name will only be displayed internally. > CONTINUE

Step 2: Countdown campaign settings

By the template we have already selected the type of Thrive Ultimatum Campaign, so the plugin suggests the Display Settings as the next step. However, for the sake of completeness, I’ll go through all the settings.

Campaign Type

The Campaign settings are about the type and duration of the campaign:

• Fixed Dates Campaign (Fixed end date)
• Recurring Campaign
• Evergreen Campaign (separate campaign for each visitor)

Each campaign type has its specific settings for duration. For my Evergreen Campaign, I need to select the duration in days, which will then start over for each visitor.

Further down you will find more advanced settings:

• Active Lockdown? (campaign page active during campaign time)
• Repeat this campaign? (Repeat campaign after x days)
• Set realistic end time? (End campaign at a certain time)

Trigger:

• Thrive Leads Conversion (For Thrive Leads subscribers)
• First visit to site (default setting)
• Visit to a specific page (When visiting a specific page)

This may seem a bit much, but the settings are almost self-explanatory.

Campaign Display

The display settings are about where the Thrive Ultimatum campaign should be displayed and where not.

As you can see in the screenshot, I have all pages (All Pages) and all posts (All Posts) selected. If you scroll down a bit, you will find the same settings where you can exclude certain content types and also individual pages.

You can also save these settings as a template, so that you have quick access to your selection again later.

Campaign Lockdown

The Campaign Lockdownfeature is only available when the Thrive Leads Conversion or Visit to Promotion Page trigger is selected.

In a locked countdown campaign, the campaign page is only accessible to participants and during the campaign time.

In the Lockdown menu you need to select the Pre-Access Page (page for before the campaign), the Promotion Page and the Expired Page (page for after the campaign).

At the bottom you can create a link to this campaign for emails. To do this, you must first select your autoresponder and click COPY.

Countdown Timer Design

First you need to choose which countdown design type you want. There are four types available:

• Top Ribbon (bar at the top)
• Bottom Ribbon (bar at the bottom)
• Widget (WordPress widget in the sidebar)
• Shortcode (Shortcode for free positioning)

I selected a Bottom Ribbon and then clicked on the Edit icon. This will open Thrive Architect Lite, where you can directly select a design.

Here I get only the designs for the ribbons displayed. If you choose another design type, you will get the corresponding templates here.

You can now edit your Thrive Ultimatum Countdown freely. If you already use the Thrive Architect Page-Builder, you will feel right at home. If you then use the keyboard shortcuts for the Thrive Themes Editor, you will quickly reach your goal.

With the round green button at the bottom right, you can add more variants of your theme. You can then add this variant to a second step of your timeline in the Dashboard. This way you can point out the urgency again shortly before the counter expires.

When you are done with your design, don’t forget to save your work with SAVE WORK. After that you can close this tab.

Timeline

The timeline is very useful if you want to split your Scarcity countdown timer into more steps.

For each timeline event you have to create a design or a design step in the editor and select it here. Additionally you choose the start of this event before the countdown end.

Conversion Events

The conversion events are optional. They allow you to successfully complete a countdown. There are two possibilities.

• User subscription (the visitor has subscribed to the newsletter)
• Visit to Conversion page (e.g. the purchase confirmation page)

Additionally, you can move a user to another countdown campaign after a successful conversion.

Launch Thrive Ultimatum Campaign

Your campaign is in Paused status after creation. Clicking on the orange status will change it to Running and change color to green.

You have successfully created your first countdown timer and are now using the power of scarcity.

Step 3: Measuring success

First of all, you should carefully check on your website if your countdown is running as intended. Also click on the button, or sign up in the form. It doesn’t matter if your 1 – 2 test conversions show up in the stats.

Back in Thrive Dashboard > Thrive Ultimatum, you can find all your campaigns here. For each campaign, you will get the most important information presented here.

In the graphical statistics you can track the participation over time. Directly below you have the absolute numbers:

• Impressions (impressions)
• Conversion rate (completion rate)

With these numbers you can determine the success of your campaign.

Thrive Ultimatum Settings

In the Thrive Ultimatum dashboard you will find a small menu in the upper right corner called Settings.

The basic settings for the shortage plugin are related to date and time only:

• Date format
• Time format
• Time zone

For a countdown it is of course important that the set end time corresponds to your own clock.

Support

Hardly any other provider offers such a good support as Thrive Themes.

First, you will find small play icons in each plugin, which open a detailed explanatory video. Thus, almost all questions are answered directly within WordPress.

The Thrive Knowledge Base really goes into depth. There you will find countless instructions and descriptions for each option for each product.

In the support forum you can ask specific questions.

All accessible via your member dashboard.

Thrive Ultimatum alternatives

Apart from OptinMonster, no other tool can compete with Thrive Ultimatum. Most other plugins are simple timers without the marketing and conversion capabilities.

• OptinMonster (can also do much more)
• ConvertBox (real OptinMonster alternative)
• ConvertPro (popup plugin)
• Countdown Timer Ultimate (simple countdown)
• Countdown, Coming Soon, Maintenance (different timers)
• Evergreen Countdown Timer (Free and Pro)
• HurryTimer (Free and Pro)

Advantages and disadvantages

Conclusion

For scarcity marketing, there is no better tool than Thrive Ultimatum. At least, I haven’t found one yet. Especially if you want something more than just a simple WordPress countdown, you can hardly avoid this plugin. The best thing to do is to use the Thrive Theme Builder for optimal compatibility.

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Updates

18.02.2022

• One year later the plugins and themes of Thrive Themes are available again individually.

01.02.2021

• Thrive products are now only available with Thrive Suite.

06.07.2020 – Version 2.2.16

• Consolidate update warnings in WP

28.02.2020 – Version 2.2.10.2

• Added improvements to the general typography settings from the theme builder