The one thing that we all love about online shopping is flash sales.

Flash sales are a strategy used by brands to drive customers into buying the products RIGHT NOW before the offer expires. They are an important part of the E-commerce toolkit, which can be run by any online store. These sales encourage impulse buying, increase customer loyalty and drive sales. However, a poorly executed flash sale can hurt brand image, erode customers and cause a loss of sales.

In this blog, we will cover everything about flash sales, including free templates to make your job easier.

What Is A Flash Sale?

A flash sale is a promotional technique where E-commerce stores offer a steep discount on their products for a short period. It usually lasts no longer than 48 hours with deals like 50%-60% off the regular price.

A flash sale differs from regular sales in the following ways:

• Higher discounts than every day
• Short buying period
• Limited product choices

The purpose of these sales is to tap into the customer’s impulse buying behavior by kicking off their FOMO (fear of missing out) through enticing deals. Brands can use their sales to increase their customer base, remove excess inventory or enhance short-term sales.

When Should You Run A Flash Sale Campaign?

All E-commerce experts will agree that there is no “best time” for running a flash sale. It depends on the type of products you are intending to sell and the customers’ buying patterns. Therefore, we recommend looking at your historical order data to determine the best time to run a flash sale.

We understand that running a flash sale can be daunting. Thus, here are some of the best times to flash them out.

Before The Holiday Season

During the holiday season, also known as “peak season”, E-commerce businesses bombard customers with sales and information, resulting in sales fatigue. Brands flood their inboxes with newsletters and promotional emails, which can cause customers to ignore them.

However, if you run the flash sale before the holiday season (around October), you will be presented with an opportunity to get ahead of your competitors and attract new customers. Coordinate the sale with carefully planned digital ads to double your success throughout the season.

After The Holiday Season

As E-commerce stores see a peak in sales during holidays, they also see a spike in returns after the holiday season. Customers start to return the unwanted gifts that were bought.

However, this shouldn’t discourage you. You can offset the influx of returns by running a flash sale after the holiday season. It will also help you compensate for the loss due to returns and retain customer loyalty.

Once In A While

Constantly running a flash sale can hamper your brand image. Timing is essential with these promotions and, therefore, you should run them every few months.

Tip: You can tie your flash sales with holidays like Mother’s Day, Father’s Day or Valentine’s Day, as online shoppers are often seeking deals.

Must Read: How To Run A Sales Event For Your E-commerce Brand?

Is A Flash Sale Right For Your Business?

Are you wondering if a flash sale is the right path for your business? Here are some advantages and disadvantages to help you make a decision.

The Pros Of A Flash Sale

A successful flash sale has the following benefits:

1. Increase brand visibility: Flash sale triggers an urgency within the customers, which converts casual visitors into buyers. These customers also share your brand and sales information with their family and friends, leading to word-of-mouth promotion and boosting brand awareness.

2. Improve revenue: A flash sale is a fast way to increase revenue and profits. These sales create urgency among the customers, motivating them to buy products and spend more than usual.

3. Sell excess inventory: Flash sales can help you sell out-of-season products or items that are not in demand anymore at a lower price. It will help you gain revenue out of these products, while making room in your inventory for new, in-demand items.

4. Attract new and loyal customers: Flash sales are a great way to attract new customers to your website. They serve as a low-stakes method for them to try on your products. If they are happy with it, they are more likely to return to your store to shop again.  

The Cons Of A Flash Sale

An unsuccessful flash sale can cause the following issues:

1. Lower profits: A flash sale discount usually offers customers 50%-60% off the original price. Thus, this can lead to reduced profits, especially if you already have thin margins.

2. Damage the reputation: Some companies are not able to effectively manage flash sales and run a risk of hurting their reputation. The mishandled campaigns can cause problems like slower website loading, shipping failure, poor customer service, or inventory mismanagement. Make sure your website is ready to handle the influx of customers; choosing the right E-commerce platform like Kartify is the key here. With Kartify, you can easily manage 1 Million concurrent users.

3. Attract wrong customers: A flash sale is often an appeal to one-time buyers, who will purchase from your website once during the sale and then disappear. You need to build customer loyalty strategies to ensure that they keep returning to purchase from your website.

How To Run A Successful Flash Sale

How can you make sure that flash sales have a positive and long-term impact on your business? Here are 8 tips that can help you.

Decide On The Goal Of Your Sale

The key to a successful flash sale is knowing your purpose for it. Are you looking to clear out inventory? Or are you looking to gain more revenue?

Here are some goals that can be achieved through flash sales:

• Clearing out old inventory
• Attracting new customers
• Increasing customer loyalty
• Winning back inactive customers

Your goals can certainly overlap. But prioritising them during the flash sale will help with product selection, customer targeting, timing and marketing strategy.

Choose The Right Flash Sale Products

Once the goal has been discussed and decided on, you need to decide on the product(s) that will be included in the sale. The products will vary depending on the customers you wish to target.

If your goal is to attract new customers, look at the products that are popular with your competitors and offer them at a temporary discount.

However, if you want to boost brand awareness of your signature product, consider flash-selling only that particular item. In an ideal scenario, customers will likely come back again to repurchase the same product at the original price.

Lastly, if you are looking to increase loyalty among existing customers, look for products that have low conversions despite high page views. This means that customers are liking the product but not buying probably due to the high price. The flash sale will help you get rid of excess inventory of these products.

Prepare Your Shipping Strategy In Advance

Do you know what customers love more than a flash sale? Free shipping! It is a great incentive bonus for customers to ensure that they place their orders. Some customers prefer overnight shipping, while others expect their orders to arrive between 1-3 days.

Irrespective of your shipping strategy, it is vital to keep your customers’ expectations realistic for shipping, as the difference between a successful and unsuccessful flash sale largely depends on the shipping.

Thus, spend extra time ensuring you:

• Communicate up-front and in advance the shipping time
• Hire extra help to get your orders out of your warehouse
• Pre-pack the orders to reduce turn-around time

Must read: How to create shipping policy? (+ready to use shipping policy template)

Time Your Flash Sale (Shorter Is Better)

Time is an important part of flash sales, as you can’t have a long exposure sale. Therefore, the shorter the flash sale, the greater the urgency to act and purchase quickly. Ideally, it should run between two to 24 hours.

When should you run your flash sale? Look at your analytics and patterns to answer the following questions:

• What day of the week do people purchase on your website?
• What time of the day do people purchase your products?
• When are your highest email opening rates?

Promote Your Sale Ahead Of Time

A carefully planned flash sale can increase the chances of its success. Promoting your sale early will keep people on the lookout and interested in it. It will also help with increased traction.

Use or grow your existing SMS and email list and create a countdown message that leads up to the sale. Alternatively, you can also publish posts and stories on your social media account to motivate people to share them with their friends and family.

Use Urgency To Build Hype For Your Flash Sale

How do you spread the message about your flash sales and ensure customers buy your products? Use the urgency tactic to build hype around your flash sale.

You need to change the customer sentiment from “I can buy it later” to “I can’t buy it later”. Here are some ways to do that:

• Use social media to engage with your customers regarding the flash sale.
• Remind your customers regarding the sale with statements like “Only 15 minutes left before the sale is over.”
• Nothing builds urgency than seeing a clock. Use it on your social media pages and flash sale landing pages.

Keep A Close Eye On The Inventory

In a successful flash sale, inventory items sell out faster than anticipated. Imagine how excited your customer will be seeing the sale, only to find out that the product has been sold out. They will be disappointed and lead to a bad customer experience. This problem can increase two-fold if you are intending to attract new customers to your website. Use order management systems like Unicommerce and Zoho Inventory.

Must Read: Best E-commerce Tools To Improve Sales And Profitability

Prepare For Shipping & Delivery

After a customer hits checkout, this is the start of the customer service experience. Prepare your shipping and delivery strategy in advance to ensure a seamless process. Notify your logistics and fulfilment partner about the sale in advance and the expected influx of orders, thus guaranteeing that every person is ready when the time arrives.

Flash Sale Examples

Gadgets Now

Credit: Gadgets Now Website

Gadgets now runs a flash sale every day on one product, which is displayed on their website.

What we love: Gadgets Now uses a timer, which builds up an urgency for the customers to buy the product before the clock runs out.

Nykaa Beauty

Credit: Nykaa Beauty IGPage

Nykaa uploaded a reel to promote their buy one get one free sale, which they were running for only 3 hours on their website. Due to the short duration, Nykaa opted to use social media marketing to gain traction and was successful with their 1,100+ likes.  

What we love: The reel showed all the different products that are available on sale. Additionally, the short and catchy caption instantly brings our attention to the sale.

Aachho

Credit: Aachho Facebook Ads

Aachho used Facebook Ads to promote their flash sale, informing customers that the sale has been extended for more time.

What we love: The ad clearly states the products available on sale, including the price of the product, and a sale end date.

How To Write Flash Sale Email + Free Template To Use

We recommend sending out three flash sale emails in each of the three different phases to ensure maximum reach.

Notice Phase

This is the stage where your first email informing about the sale is sent out to the target customers. It includes details like the date, duration, the product(s) on sale, and the discount that will be offered. Ideally, it should be sent two days before the sale starts.

Launch Phase

In this stage, an email notifying the customer that the sale has kicked off. The message is short and enticing enough to get the customers to participate in the sale. It includes promotions, product(s) on sale, and duration.

Last Call Phase

This flash sale email is aimed at creating a sense of urgency among the customers and kicking off their impulse buying behavior. The email informs them that the sale is ending in a few hours and, thus, is sent 4 to 6 hours before the close of the sale. The email should contain promotions, the sale closing date/time and the products on sale, and a link to purchase.  

Here are some free templates for you to use in your flash sales.

Flash Sales Email Template #1: Notice Phase

Subject: Flash Sale Alert | 50% off selected items

Headline: Free shipping on orders above [insert amount]

Body:

FLASH SALE

50% OFF*

Snag your favorite [insert item names like clothes].

The sale kicks off at [insert time and date] for only a day.

[Any other information like an exchange, returns, code, etc.]

[Button that says “Shop Sale”]

*On selected items only

Flash Sales Email Template #2: Launch Phase

Subject: WE ARE LIVE | FLASH SALE

Headline: Free shipping on orders above [insert amount]

Body:

WE ARE LIVE!

FLASH SALE

50% OFF*

[Picture of product]

Get your hands on your favorite items before they run out.

Sale ends in [insert last date/hour of sale]

[Button that says “Shop Sale NOW”]

[Any other information like an exchange, returns, code, etc.]

*On selected items only

Flash Sales Email Template #3: Last Call Phase

Subject: Clock is Ticking | Extra 10% off

Headline: Free shipping on orders above [insert amount]

Body:

Extra 10% OF*

Flash Sale

[Picture of product]

With only 4 hours to go, let’s make things interesting.

Offering 10% off on top of 50% off.

[Any other information like an exchange, returns, code, etc.]

[Button that says “Shop Sale NOW”]

*On selected items only

Best Practices Of Flash Sales

1. Use Popups to Attract More Customers

Social media and email marketing are excellent and proven ways to increase visibility about flash sales. However, it is also essential to convert your existing E-commerce website traffic into flash deal customers.

Use promotional pop-ups on your website to announce your flash sale campaign, which will direct your existing customers to your sales page. It will create visibility and drive better sales. We recommend using a countdown timer to build urgency or words like “limited-time, hurry, limited stocks, etc.

2. Segment Potential Buyers

There are a wide range of customers you can target with online sales. However, in flash sales, you should segment and target your potential customers in the below two categories:

Targeting your loyal customers with a flash sale

• Offer exclusive flash sales to your loyal customers only, to appreciate their association with your brand.
• Broadcast emails do not work well for flash sales targeted toward loyal customers. Use different communication styles and personalise them for the customers.
• Identify your inactive customers and run flash sale campaigns to make them purchase your product(s).
• You can also convert your customers who abandon their carts with flash sale emails to ensure they click the checkout button.  

Targeting new customers with a flash sale

• Display Inventory countdown on products that are under sale. Showcasing the number of products left nudges the customers’ buying impulse and influences their decision to have the product right away.
• Run Google and Meta Ads for your flash sales. Use the exact keywords related to your flash sale products to trigger limited-time ads for selected customers.

3. Highlight The Difference From Regular Sales

Why should your customers buy a product(s) from you now rather than at a future sale? It is important to highlight the difference between a flash sale and a regular sale. You can use bigger discounts or limited stocks as a pulling out to establish urgency among your target customers.

How Your E-commerce Platform Plays A Key Role In Flash Sales

The most dreaded and, unfortunately, common flash sale failure is when your E-commerce website crashes. It will bring your sale to a complete halt when customers cannot visit your site to purchase or view your products. This problem is not limited to only small-scale businesses, as it can happen to large brands too.

What is the solution? First, generate a forecast on the traffic expected using the behavior response to the marketing campaigns. Once these expectations are set, you can take the necessary steps to meet the increased demand and prevent crashes.

Some of the steps you can take are:

• Load testing your website
• Evaluating Extra server capacity
• Adding an ability to scale up on demand

In some cases, you might also consider switching your E-commerce platform. We recommend Kartify, a highly-scalable and conversion-optimised E-commerce platform that caters to businesses of all sizes.

Essentials such as website building, product listing, sales and inventory tracking, payment processing, marketing & analytics are built into the Kartify platform. It means you don’t have to juggle multiple platforms to manage your store and can handle it all with one centralised hub.

Want to know more about Kartify, contact our E-commerce experts today!

Conclusion: Turn Your Flash Sale Strategy Into A Revenue Engine

A flash sale can turn into a huge success with increased customers, brand awareness, and revenue. Or it can turn unsuccessful, causing customer disappointment and a decrease in profits. But you can make it successful with strategic pre-planning, preparations, marketing, and flawless execution.

Want to run a successful flash sale? We can help. A Flipkart group company, ANS Commerce is a full-stack E-commerce growth partner that can help you plan and run your flash sales, from marketing campaigns and inventory to customer service.
To know more, book a free consulting session with us today!