Successful Flash Sales: The Quick-Start Guide

A successful flash sale capitalises on fear of missing out (FOMO) to drive traffic, increase sales and move inventory. By utilising limited-time, can’t-miss deals, flash sales can attract new customers while rewarding existing ones. This here-today, gone-tomorrow tactic generates exceptional results in the ecommerce space.

But how do you execute a successful flash sale? Here is what you should know before launching your event.

What is a flash sale?

A flash sale is an online event that taps into shoppers’ FOMO. A flash sale has a limited duration and offers a limited number of product SKUs. This strategy can attract new buyers, increase loyalty, drive sales or offload excess stock.

A flash sale has a few distinct differences from a regular sale:

Objective: You can use a flash sale to increase website traffic, clear out inventory or attract new customers.
Duration: Flash sales are short-duration sales. Black Friday and Cyber Monday are classic examples of flash sales.

These events may last 24 hours or a couple of days. This duration creates a sense of urgency for buyers. A regular sale, on the other hand, may last several days, weeks or even an entire season.

Discount: Flash sales usually have more significant discounts than regular sales.
Advertising and marketing: Both flash sales and regular sales have strategic advertising and marketing efforts. However, companies promote flash sales differently and incorporate elements such as a countdown timer before the sale begins to drive excitement.
Inventory: Flash sales often have limited quantities, which may consist of older inventory or exclusive, new products. Regular sales also may include older stock but may be more seasonally or holiday-based.

The benefits of flash sales

Flash sales provide an opportunity to sell a large amount of stock in a short period of time. Customers will often make a purchase once they feel like they’re getting a good deal that has a limited duration. Even with a significant discount, flash sales can increase sales volume and revenue through the volume of items sold.

This benefit, in turn, leads to more space for new inventory and reduced operating costs. As flash sales clear out inventory, they maximise storage space and lower holding costs.

Flash sales not only attract new customers, but they also reward current customers. They can help foster a sense of loyalty and exclusivity, bringing customers back again and again.

Determining your target audience for a successful flash sale

woman sitting on a couch with a laptop on her lap and holding a new purchase

How do you know who to target for a flash sale regarding your audience? You may promote the sale to new customers, loyal customers or superfans. No matter who you want to shop your flash sale, the most important first step is defining your event goal.

Here are some common objectives:

Building a new audience
Test-driving a new product
Clearing out older inventory

Knowing your objective will help you segment your audience effectively. When considering which audience best fits your objective, look at data points. Take into accout demographics, buying behaviour, engagement level and place in the customer lifecycle.

The following are popular audience segments to target:

Inactive customers: Customers who haven’t purchased for a significant period of time.
Abandoned carts: Given that 70% of online shopping carts are abandoned, brands can target shoppers who left without completing a purchase. This group may also overlap with new, inactive and even loyal customers.
New or potential customers: Target those who have been casually browsing your ecommerce site. Include those with similar interests to your most loyal customers.
Existing customers: Of course, regular shoppers are always a good audience to target with a sale. Consider this audience if your objective is to drive customer loyalty and value in the life cycle.
Superfans: What better way to reward your biggest buyers than with an exclusive flash sale?
Insiders: This audience is a good choice for ecommerce shops that have a subscription or membership.

Keys to a successful flash sale

After setting the objective and determining the target audience, you are ready to plan and launch your flash sale event. One of the first things to consider is the mechanism behind the event. Outsourcing flash sale events to a vendor that specialises in building and executing events sets your brand up for success. A dedicated flash sale site ensures that additional traffic and increased transaction volumes don’t disrupt your main ecommerce channel. Look for vendors that are able to integrate with your existing platform.

In addition, vendors can partner with you on these key components of a successful flash sale event.

Strategy and Research

This phase is the most involved step for a reason. The effort you put into implementing your flash sale strategy and research creates the foundation for a successful flash sale event. Be sure to prioritise the following:

Channels: Choose the channels your target audience frequents and uses the most. That may include Instagram, TikTok, email marketing campaigns or, likely, a mixture of several.
Products: Which products will you promote for the sale event? You might want to consider limited edition products, collectibles, excess stock or best-sellers.
Pricing: Determine price points and how much of a discount you’ll be offering, if any. It is important to balance the potential to increase the volume of sales with profitability. You may also offer bundled offers or BOGO (buy one, get one).
Timing: When will you launch the sale? Some factors to think about are the season, day of the week and time of the day. Reviewing customer buying behaviour can help you make this decision.
Testing: In some cases, you may want to test different audience segments, messaging or products before fully launching the sale.

Advertising and Messaging

With your strategy in place, move on to getting your advertising and messaging in place prior to launch.

Social media: Promote the flash sale on the appropriate social media channels with a countdown and sneak peeks.
Reviews and testimonials: Use product reviews and customer testimonials to establish credibility with your target audience.
Messaging: Be sure to share the time and date of the sale, the products and how to access the actual sale.
Access: Consider how buyers will access the sale. Will you require an email address, access code or app download? Asking shoppers to provide basic, zero-party data is a smart strategy. But be sure to consider the value of customer information versus the friction caused to the buyer.
Personalisation: Always make sure your marketing is personalised. Personalised marketing has higher conversion rates than generic messaging.

Technical Preparation and Execution

This third stage is critical. Take time to thoroughly prepare the technical components and infrastructure to not only launch and execute the sale effectively.

Due to the nature of flash sales, your sale is likely to be a high traffic, high volume event. The additional stress on your website can cause numerous problems that can result in loss of sales and frustrated customers.

High traffic to your site can overwhelm your servers. This could mean that the site loads slowly or that some customers cannot even access your site. Your infrastructure must be able to handle sudden surges in traffic without slowing down or crashing.
Stock levels change very quickly during flash sales. With hundreds or thousands of shoppers adding items to their carts, stock can be depleted within minutes or hours. Without real-time inventory level tracking, you risk overselling. Overselling not only creates a poor customer experience, but it also burdens your systems when you have to issue refunds.
High volumes of checkout transactions is another stress to your systems. Processing hundreds or thousands of payments in minutes puts added demands on your payments system. This means payment confirmation takes longer or payments may not go through at all. In addition, an inadequate infrastructure and high transaction volume puts your brand at increased risk for fraud.

To ensure success, make sure your front end and back end systems are robust and tested before launching your sale.

Analysis

Post-event is the ideal time to review the performance of the sale and determine ways to improve future launches. Look at your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) such as sales volume, traffic and customer acquisition costs to review overall sales performance. Also review site performance to identify weaknesses or opportunities to improve your infrastructure. You may use this information to retarget customer segments and personalise your outreach and to upgrade your internal systems.

A Turnkey Solution

A well-executed flash sale is not to achieve. We have helped brands drive millions of dollars in revenue and make hundreds of thousands of fans happy by providing sale events that combine the best customer experience with a cutting-edge solution designed to perform.