What are Flash Sales? Benefits, Challenges, and Examples

Nothing drives business like a flash sale!

Some estimates predict that you can increase your sales by more than 30% by offering a short-term sale. Psychologically, you can see how it would work, as a temporary sale triggers your customers’ sense of FOMO or fear of missing out.

That’s why flash sales have become especially popular, a trend I don’t see dying off anytime soon. That said, retailers need to wield this power responsibly, as discounting too often or at the wrong times can hurt your business by undercutting profits.

In this blog post, you’ll learn what flash sales are, the benefits, tips, and examples to help you launch your very own.

Let’s get right into it!

Table of Contents

What is a Flash Sale?

A flash sale is a sudden reduction in sales prices, usually well beyond the standard degree, for a brief period, such as a long weekend or a holiday.

They’re fast and furious, with promotions as hard-hitting to maximize the short extent of the sale.

Benefits of Flash Sales

As you can imagine, flash sales have many advantages, so let’s take a look.

Immediate revenue boost

Who can resist a flash sale? If a customer had had their eye on one of your products but the price was the only thing holding them back, discounting your stock eliminates that problem.

Strategically putting your products on sale at convenient times, such as around the holidays, is another way to make a flash sale irresistible. You can expect a quick and large increase in revenue, which could just bail you out if you’ve had a poor quarter or month.

Inventory turnover

Another great reason to offer a flash sale is if you have a lot of inventory but aren’t sure what to do. If you’ve read the other eCommerce content on EngageBay’s blog (and if you haven’t, what are you waiting for?), you’ll recall that inventory depreciates the longer it sits.

A flash sale is an excellent way to offload that excess inventory. It won’t continue hogging up your precious warehouse space, which you can then use instead for the stock you want that is proven to sell.

Engagement (or re-engagement) of customers

Flash sales are also a fantastic means of connecting with your customers, including those you’ve recently converted. If you had trouble converting a few stubborn leads, re-engaging with them via a flash sale announcement could reactivate them and finally allow you to close the deal.

Moreover, these sudden sales will reinvigorate your relationships with your longer-term customers, incentivizing them to purchase from your eCommerce store again.

Key Strategies for Flash Sale Success

flash-sale-nyx — *Image courtesy of Sendpulse*

As I said, you can’t offer a flash sale anytime. You should be selective about it. These pointers and tactics will help you set up for a successful sale.

Timing and duration

First, you have to select the timing of your sale. Although a flash sale is often a quick, sudden announcement to your customers, it’s not news to you. You plan a flash sale as much as you do any other type of promotion, which means pre-planning in advance.

Here are some occasions you might consider a flash sale from January to December:

Early January to help people get a good start to the year
Valentine’s Day
Presidents’ Day
March for spring cleaning
Easter
The end of winter
The start of spring
Cinco de Mayo
Star Wars Day on May 4^th (if you sell anything applicable)
Memorial Day
The start of summer
Independence Day
Midway through the summer
Christmas in July
End of summer
Back to school
Labor Day
The start of fall
Halloween
The start of winter
Thanksgiving
Black Friday
Small Business Saturday
Cyber Monday
Holiday shopping
Christmas
Kwanzaa
Hannukah

Besides the time of year for the promotion, you must be choosy about the duration. The whole point of a flash sale is that it only lasts for so long. If it continues for too many days, it loses its sense of urgency and importance.

Your audience won’t prioritize it today when they can get to it tomorrow. That’s why a flash sale should only last for a few days at most and several hours at the very least.

Product selection

Another major strategy to weigh is which products you’ll put up for sale. This may seem like an easy decision until you have to make it. Then you realize how tough it can be.

Here are a few ideas to get you started:

Products that have performed well in your competitor’s audiences that you have a variation of, as this will help you close deals with newer leads.
Product bundles will be worth the money with such a steep discount.
Signature items that are your business’s backbone will attract consumers’ attention and get people buying.
Promising products that haven’t sold a lot yet.

As you can see, the products you choose for your flash sale serve different purposes. Selling bundles and slow-moving stock clears out more warehouse space for products you think should sell better in your target market.

Discounting successful trademark products will convert leads and improve long-term visibility and customer engagement.

Pricing strategies

The biggest consideration is how much you’ll sell your products for during your flash sale. Do you play it safe and offer a discount of 10% off, or do you go big and bold and do 40% off?

The answer, more realistically, will likely lie somewhere in between. You don’t want your flash sale to be so good that it’s the best sale of the year, but you don’t want it to be so small that it doesn’t move the needle.

A good rule of thumb is discounting luxury products by 10% or more. This might not seem like much, but if you don’t put these high-end items on sale often, customers will still pass up the chance to save money.

And if you specialize in every day, more affordably-priced goods, then a sale of 15% is a safe bet.

Promoting Your Flash Sale

valentines-day-flash-sale-example — *Image courtesy of SendPulse*

Flash sales don’t exactly sell themselves, as lovely as that would be. You have to use various promotional methods to get the word out. Check out this overview of your options.

Social media

By far, social media is the best vehicle for driving the announcement of your flash sale. You can post a story on Facebook, a graphic on Instagram, a cryptic tweet on Twitter, or a short teaser video on TikTok, covering all your bases.

The nature of social media, in that it’s always in flux, makes it perfect for announcing something as transient as a flash sale.

Another benefit of promoting the sale on social media is using stories and live videos to draw more attention to your original post if some of your audience missed it.

Email marketing

Most flash sales live on email. You’ll announce the sale to your email subscribers, send them all the deets (such as what’s on sale, how long the sale lasts, and what the discount is), and give them a sales code if required.

One of the keys to successful email marketing is writing memorable subject lines. The subject line inspires your readers to open your email and learn more about the flash sale in the first place.

While you’ll find lots of subject line best practices on the blog, here are a few of my favorites relevant to promoting sales and discounts:

Capitalize the occasional word and no more than two words in the subject line. Example: FLASH SALE is happening now! Save 15% for two days only!”
Use punctuation, but only one mark per sentence. An exclamation point here and there drives up the urgency and excitement of the sale much more so than using a period would.
Ask a question that doesn’t have a yes or no answer, as this makes your readers think for a moment and inspires them to open the email to learn more. Example: “Who wants to save? Our flash sale is happening now!”
Provide full details in the subject line, incorporating numbers such as the percentage off or the sale dates.
Use emojis, but no more than two, as that’s overkill. Example: “💥Our biggest flash sale of the year is happening NOW 💥”
Trigger their emotions, such as curiosity, urgency, and especially FOMO. Example: “You can’t miss our flash sale! Save 30% this weekend ONLY!”

Email timing is also essential, but you can use automation to ensure you get this right.

Blog posts

A short, promotional blog post about an upcoming sale will also pique curiosity, even though you won’t get the surprise element of a sudden sale.

If you don’t mind that, do a small write-up, post it around social media, and share it with your email audience as your official flash sale announcement.

Technical and Operational Preparation

By now, the backbone of your flash sale strategy has come together. However, before you launch, you must still concern yourself with some operational and technical elements to ensure your campaign goes off without a hitch.

Here’s how to gear up.

Testing website readiness

Your website will hopefully have a lot of traffic, perhaps more than your site has ever seen. You need to know if it’s built to handle that influx.

This is where load testing comes in handy. Also known as stress testing, you gauge how ready your website is for mass amounts of traffic by testing simulated demand.

After all, “breaking the internet,” as it’s become known, may sound like a catchy buzzword, but it’s ultimately not good. You don’t want your website to crash when too many users converge, or you’ll hurt your sales.

Warming up your email IP

Flash sales usually appeal to more significant portions of your audience than usual. I still advise you to segment your audience, but you can send bulk emails to announce and promote the sale.

Well, if your business usually only sends 300 emails and suddenly, you’re trying to send 3,000, that tips off internet service providers or ISPs. As a result, the ISP could block your email from reaching the recipient.

That’s why you have to warm up your email IP. The best way to do that is gradually. Rather than jump from 300 to 3,000, which you know will get you flagged by an ISP, go from 300 to 500, then 500 to 900, then 900 to 1,300, and so on.

It might take more time, but it indicates to the ISP that you’re a trustworthy IP who’s only upping their email limits. As a result, you’ll be granted the freedom to send more emails without being blocked.

Confirming your payment gateways work

You would hate to find out too late that one of those new payment gateways you were super excited about implementing doesn’t work. That’s too big of a risk, as you will undoubtedly miss out on sales.

Use load testing for all payment gateways. After all, it would be just as bad if one of your gateways fails midway through the flash sale because it’s not equipped to handle such high traffic loads.

Monitoring inventory

You must implement an inventory management tool before issuing a flash sale. One minute, you can have a huge amount of stock, and as the sale gets underway, the stock will go, going, gone.

That’s what you want, to sell out, but you have to keep your website up-to-date when that happens so your customers know what they can buy and what they can’t because it’s unavailable. The only way to do that is with a reliable tool.

Implementing shipping management

You should have all your shipping strategies planned before announcing the flash sale. Bear in mind that you’ll have a much larger order volume than usual, which means you must be able to ship all those orders.

If you offer priority shipping during the flash sale, those orders must get out the door first, followed by those customers who opted for free shipping.

Common Pitfalls and How to Avoid Them

colourpop-flash-sale — *Image courtesy of ActiveCampaign*

While flash sales are excellent, there are some risks and mistakes associated with them that can hinder your attempt at earning cash quickly. I’ll tell you what to know and how to dodge these issues.

Waiting too late to plan and promote the sale

You can’t say this Tuesday that you want to do a flash sale next Wednesday. That’s not how it works. Although they’re not always seasonal, they require as much planning as you would for a seasonal or holiday-related promotion, i.e., several months of prep work.

The results will be lackluster if you wait too long to announce your sale. You’ll get an equally tepid response if you don’t promote the flash sale. A lack of promotion can undo all the months of hard work and planning you poured into the sale because no one will know about it, and they won’t buy.

That’s why you have to be ready early. Plan the promotional elements of your flash sale and use automation to implement everything quickly.

Using online ads to promote the sale

Listen, advertising online is one of the best ways to promote your products, which I’m sure you already know. But the thing about flash sales is that they’re so brief that paying for a social media or display ad doesn’t make sense.

It can take days for someone to see the ad, and the sale could already be over by the time they do. You’re better off saving time and money and funneling both toward your email and social media marketing tactics.

Not optimizing your content

The rules of SEO don’t go out the window during a flash sale. If you don’t optimize your content and, on the whole, your website, you might get fewer leads. Take the time in your campaign planning to do keyword research and delve into your audience and their pain points.

Managing high traffic

Another issue to be aware of is struggling with high traffic. While stress-testing your site will reveal what it can handle, what if you find out your site isn’t good enough? Pushing ahead is not the right idea here. Your site will inevitably crash when demand is at its highest, ruining your flash sale.

If your webhost can’t handle the strains of your flash sale, then you need another one, it’s as simple as that.

Upkeeping customer service quality

When dealing with such many buyers, customer service quality can take a bit of a nosedive. However, that won’t fly. Putting your customers on the backburner will make them feel forgotten and unappreciated, impacting the success of your next promotion, flash sale or not.

Rather than let the chips fall where they may when it comes to your audience, hire extra manpower to handle the customer demand. Now is also a great time to look into AI chatbots. You can train AI through machine learning to answer questions for you, letting your customer service reps handle the heavier-duty responsibilities.

Too regular sales

You’ve heard that too much of a good thing can turn bad, right? Well, the same logic applies to flash sales.

When you have flash sales too often, you harm your reputation. For one, they can get tired of all the flash sales, and the announcements could even annoy them. This puts you at risk of losing subscribers or being reported for spam.

Also, the sense of urgency disappears entirely. Customers begin to feel that if they don’t buy anything for your current flash sale, they’ll have another chance in a few weeks, so why bother? Some customers can end up putting off their purchases indefinitely.

Ultimately, you must be selective about the right time for a flash sale. If you pump them out one after another, you will bore your audience and fail to make the money you were hoping for.

3 Examples of Successful Flash Sales

How about some flash sale examples to inspire your planning? Here are the ones that have stood out the most to me.

1. Wayfair’s Way Day

Wayfair graphic showcasing that year's Way Day — *Image courtesy of Wayfair*

Wayfair is already known for its affordability, but its products become even more affordable during Way Day. Throughout the multi-day event are temporary flash sales (only for 12 hours at a time), new deals available twice a day, and savings of up to 80%. Oh, and there are also doorbusters. I mean, can it get any better?

There is no bigger sale for Wayfair than Way Day, making it one that customers relish, as they can get the cheapest home décor of the year.

2. Amazon Lightning Deals

amazon-lightning-deals-example — *Image courtesy of eStore Factory*

If you’re lucky, checking the Prime Page or Today’s Deals page on Amazon sometimes yields Lightning Deals. These short-term flash sales only last for a certain number of hours, so it’s prudent for customers to buy the item at that price right then and there or risk missing the savings.

Interestingly, the one day when Amazon limits the Lightning Deals is Prime Day, when only Prime Members can enjoy flash sales. It makes sense to reward those paying for Amazon somehow.

3. Sephora’s Beauty Insider Appreciation Sale

Becoming a Beauty Insider for Sephora means first hearing about their latest news and releases. There’s also its beloved Beauty Insider Appreciation Sale, which caters to just those members of its club.

The Beauty Ins

sephora-beauty-insider-appreciation — *Image courtesy of Sephora*

ider Appreciation Sale replaces Sephora’s twice-a-year flash sales. Insiders have been able to get up to 20% off beauty products accessible only to members.

Conclusion

It’s time for a flash sale!

These strategic sales are an excellent way to meet more business objectives, especially financially. That said, one must walk a careful tightrope when having flash sales, as too many will hurt your company’s bottom line rather than help it.

EngageBay is an all-in-one marketing, sales, and customer support software for small businesses, startups, and solopreneurs. You get email marketing, marketing automation, landing page and email templates, segmentation and personalization, sales pipelines, live chat, and more.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

1. How long should a flash sale last?

A flash sale can be anywhere from 12 to 72 hours, with a shorter sale sure to yield more sales because people know better than to miss it.

2. What types of products are best suited for a flash sale?

You can sell almost anything, which explains why flash sales are so appealing! That said, businesses tend to veer toward popular items or slow-moving stock, including bundles.

3. How can I ensure my website handles the surge in traffic during a flash sale?

Load test, load test, load test! Determining how much stress your website can handle is the only way to be confident it can withstand the incoming traffic.

4. What are the best ways to promote a flash sale?

Social media, your website, and email remain the three best ways to quickly and efficiently get the word out about your upcoming flash sale.