INDUSTRIAL MANUFACTURING BLOG YOU SHOULD BE READING

What is the use of timer?

13 Apr.,2024

Countdown timers are often used on eCommerce websites to help drive sales. You can use them in various ways, by counting down to a specific event, counting up to an event, or even letting shoppers know the time left to receive free shipping on an item.

By creating a sense of urgency, a countdown widget can make consumers complete a purchase. No matter how you use them, countdown timers have some well-researched psychological principles.

This article will explain what countdown timers are, how to use them, and when best to utilize them. By the end, you will understand how countdown plugins can benefit your website.

Skip to:

Source: POWR

What Is a Countdown Timer?

Countdown timers are virtual clocks that count down from a date or number. Countdown timers frequently display a count toward the end or beginning of an offer or special event.

The most important use of a countdown timer is cultivating a sense of urgency for consumers. In eCommerce, you’ll find these timers on landing pages, showing the time until a promotion launches.

Today, many websites use countdown timers on checkout pages too.

Besides the sense of urgency, countdown timers also provide helpful information, like when a promotion will end. Finally, countdown timers also help drum up interest in promotions and build curiosity.

Making Countdown Timers Work For You

Adding countdown timers increases business revenue, and they are simple to implement. Additionally, they also don’t need to be tied to a sale.

One effective online countdown timer that can boost revenue is simply indicating how much time remains for next-day delivery (creating time urgency).

Source: Bose

By highlighting the time available for 2-day shipping, this countdown timer can encourage shoppers to make purchases to get their product sooner.

Adding a timer to your webpage costs next to nothing, but any sale you gain from this technique can lead to significant increases in revenue, making timers essential for any eCommerce business to use.

Consider using other POWR Apps to help boost sales on your website.

The way it works is simple - people tend to fear missing out and view scarce items as more valuable.

Timers help highlight both of these things because they emphasize the scarcity of items and build a consumer’s fear of missing out (sometimes called FOMO).

Source: Amazon

Research by Dr. Christopher S. Tang of UCLA’s Anderson School of Management corroborates the psychology of scarcity. “A seller could display a countdown clock showing the hours and minutes until the sale ends to nudge shoppers to buy right away,” said Tang.

According to research, a visual countdown app works to intensify time urgency, and this mechanism increases sales rates.

A great twist on a building scarcity theme is a counter that displays the percentage of stays available on Booking.com.

Source: Booking.com

This ticker essentially “counts down” to when all of the available stays in the area become unavailable, thus creating the sense of urgency described by Tang.

Thinking of creative twists on the countdown timer can help leverage the natural psychology of shoppers.

You can establish substantial available resources by accurately accounting for your inventory. Similarly, inventory warnings with a timer can also help increase conversions.

Timers are great because they are not vague, like statements such as “limited time offer.”

3 Ways to Use Countdown Timers Effectively

Now that you understand countdown timers and the psychology of counting down to something, we’ll explain their benefits and how you can use them on your website.

Create a sense of time urgency

Timers are reliable and push shoppers into making impulsive decisions that benefit your store. As explained earlier, limited resources and scarcity can drive consumer spending.

Countdown timers capitalize on this tendency and create a sense of urgency for shoppers.

Highlight products and deals

Countdown timers can help highlight a specific product, service, or deal. Countdowns are popular around the holidays and during holiday sales, for example.

Give a sense of product scarcity

Finally, you can use a countdown timer to drive site visitors to purchase by highlighting product scarcity. In a classic psychological study from 1975, researchers utilized two jars of cookies to show how scarcity impacts our perception.

In the study, researchers offered two glass cookies with cookies in them. One jar was consistently abundant, and the other was always scarce or allowed to become scarce.

Ultimately, the research subjects preferred the jar with more scarce objects.

In the same way, countdown timers can help drive shoppers to complete the sales cycle.

When and Where to Use a Countdown Timer

Countdown timers are used best when they appear on your website. One of the keys is that they can help close more sales and increase revenue.

If your website finds difficulty securing conversions, using the POWR countdown timer on your website could help you lose significantly more sales.

Another common issue eCommerce websites face is that users often leave a website without making a purchase.

Countdown timers are a great way to reduce your bounce rate because they can draw in customers and encourage them to continue shopping.

Countdown timers should be used in various contexts, whether on landing pages, homepages, checkouts, or product pages.

Many people also use countdown timers in email marketing. When used strategically, email timers can increase conversions by 400%.

And even better, when paired with a “tripwire,” a heavily discounted offer, or a great deal for a product bundle triggered when someone opts into your email list, a countdown timer can help bring you sales on autopilot without any continuous effort!

In any case, tailor the countdown to the specific product or offer you’re marketing. Today, many limited-release items will often feature a countdown timer for when a new release or “drop” is going to occur.

In the last scenario, a countdown timer can be a great way to build anticipation for your new product release.

Source: Dell

The Bottom Line

Countdown timers are a powerful way to drive conversions and help boost your website sales. Using countdown timers, you can help leverage psychology to increase shopper spending and your revenues.

Get your very own new countdown timer for your website, and watch your products fly off the shelf!

Type of clock

This article is about the type of clock. For the 2009 film, see Timer (film) . For the cartoon character, see Time for Timer

A typical kitchen timer

A timer or countdown timer is a type of clock that starts from a specified time duration and stops when reaching zero. A simple timer is an hourglass. Commonly, a timer would raise an alarm when it ends. It can be implemented as hardware or software. Stopwatches operate in the opposite direction, upwards from zero, measuring elapsed time since a given time instant. Time switches are timers that control an electric switch.

Hardware
[
edit
]

Mechanical
[
edit
]

Mechanical timers use clockwork to measure time.[1] Manual timers are typically set by turning a dial to the time interval desired, turning the dial stores energy in a mainspring to run the mechanism. They function similarly to a mechanical alarm clock, the energy in the mainspring causes a balance wheel to rotate back and forth. Each swing of the wheel releases the gear train to move forward by a small fixed amount, causing the dial to move steadily backward until it reaches zero when a lever arm strikes a bell. The mechanical kitchen timer was invented in 1926 called a fan fly that spins against air resistance, low-precision mechanical egg-timers are sometimes of this type.

The simplest and oldest type of mechanical timer is the hourglass - which is also known as "the glass of the hour" - in which a fixed amount of sand drains through a narrow opening from one chamber to another to measure a time interval.

Electromechanical
[
edit
]

Short-period bimetallic electromechanical timers use a thermal mechanism, with a metal finger made of strips of two metals with different rates of thermal expansion sandwiched together, steel and bronze are common. An electric current flowing through this finger causes heating of the metals, one side expands less than the other, and an electrical contact on the end of the finger moves away from or towards an electrical switch contact. The most common use of this type is in the "flasher" units that flash turn signals in automobiles, and sometimes in Christmas lights. This is a non-electronic type of multivibrator.

An electromechanical cam timer uses a small synchronous AC motor turning a cam against a comb of switch contacts. The AC motor is turned at an accurate rate by the alternating current, which power companies carefully regulate. Gears drive a shaft at the desired rate, and turn the cam. The most common application of this timer now is in washers, driers and dishwashers. This type of timer often has a friction clutch between the gear train and the cam, so that the cam can be turned to reset the time.

Electromechanical timers survive in these applications because mechanical switch contacts may still be less expensive than the semiconductor devices needed to control powerful lights, motors and heaters.

In the past, these electromechanical timers were often combined with electrical relays to create electro-mechanical controllers. Electromechanical timers reached a high state of development in the 1950s and 1960s because of their extensive use in aerospace and weapons systems. Programmable electromechanical timers controlled launch sequence events in early rockets and ballistic missiles. As digital electronics has progressed and dropped in price, electronic timers have become more advantageous.

Electronic timers are essentially quartz clocks with special electronics, which can achieve higher precision than mechanical timers. They have digital electronics, but may have an analog or digital display. Integrated circuits have made digital logic so inexpensive that an electronic timer is now less expensive than many mechanical and electromechanical timers. Individual timers are implemented as a simple single-chip computer system, similar to a watch and usually utilizing the same, mass-produced technology.

Nowadays, many timers are implemented in software. Modern controllers use a programmable logic controller (PLC) instead of a box full of electromechanical parts. The logic is usually designed as if it were relays, utilizing a special computer language called ladder logic. In PLCs, timers are usually simulated by the software built into the controller. Each timer is just an entry in a table maintained by the software.

Computer systems typically have at least one hardware timer. These are typically digital counters that either increment or decrement at a fixed frequency, which is often configurable, and which interrupt the processor when reaching zero. An alternative design uses a counter with a sufficiently large word size that it will not reach its overflow limit before the end of life of the system.

More sophisticated timers may have comparison logic to compare the timer value against a specific value set by software, which triggers some action when the timer value matches the preset value. This might be used, for example, to measure events or generate pulse-width modulated waveforms to control the speed of motors (using a class D digital electronic amplifier).

One specialist use of hardware timers in computer systems is as watchdog timers, which are designed to perform a hardware reset of the system if the software fails.

Software
[
edit
]

These types of timers are not devices nor parts of devices, they exist only as software. They rely on the accuracy of a clock generator usually built into a hardware device that runs the software.

Applications
[
edit
]

Due to the increasing popularity of mobile phones, many timer apps have been developed that mimic the old mechanical timer, but which have also highly sophisticated functions. These apps are also easier to use, because they are available at once, without any need to purchase or carry separate devices. Timers can be software applications phones, smartwatches, or tablets. Some of these apps are countdown timers, stopwatch timers, etc. These timer apps can be used for tracking working or training time, motivating children to do tasks, replacing an hourglass-form egg timer in board games such as Boggle, or for the traditional purpose of tracking time when cooking.

Apps may be superior to hour glasses, or to mechanical timers. Hour glasses are not precise and clear, and they can jam. Mechanical timers lack the customization that applications support, such as sound volume adjustments for individual needs. Most applications will also offer selectable alarm sounds.

Some timer applications can help children to understand the concept of time, help them to finish tasks in time, and help them to get motivated.[2] These applications are especially used with children with disabilities like ADHD,[3] Down syndrome, etc., but everybody else can also benefit from them.

References
[
edit
]

Previous: Are High-Quality Color Coated Steel Coils Worth It?

Next: Do people still use paper invitations?

Guest Posts