Flash Sales

A flash sale is a promotion or discount offered for a limited time. Companies use them to create marketing buzz, manage inventory, and collect customer data.

Business Objectives

There are many potential goals when conducting a flash sale. Each marketing campaign can meet several objectives at the same time. Examples include:

Create brand loyalty
Build contact lists
Attract new market segments
Reengage with inactive clients
Liquidate dead stock
Promote new products and services
Introduce customers to other delivery channels
Grow sales volumes

Flash Sales Tactics

The tactics for flash sales depend on system capabilities, which we cover below. The best way to evolve the approach is the expand what works and terminate what fails. It's the survival of the fittest strategy. Specific tactics include:

Keep trying new marketing techniques.
Structure each campaign scientifically. Change one parameter and measure the impact on the desired outcome. For example, run a sale on different days and measure the change in sales.
Synchronize pricing across digital marketing, e-commerce, point of sale, and digital shelf labels.
Create trigger events to launch and terminate a promotion. Promote shovels on heavy snow days and end them when inventory runs low.

Technologies

There is a considerable amount of technology available to promote flash sales. The required capabilities vary based on the industry and marketing strategy. Common features are:

Collect granular and accurate data from the website, retail stores, digital marketing, and advertising platforms. Integrating the different sources can be the biggest challenge, but it provides the most insights.
Have a process to test the quality of the marketing data. E-Commerce data can quickly generate data quality issues that create significant or unmanageable amounts of noise.
Segregate customers into groups that respond well to a given type of offer.
Issue new loyalty accounts on the spot.
Block bots from making online purchases by capping the number of orders from an IP address, shipping address, and card number.