eCommerce Flash Sale Practices to Increase Summer Sales

How would you like to promote your brand while selling more than usual?

Offering the customers something more can create a sales hype.

Among hundreds of opportunities, a flash sale is an eye-catching solution that instantly creates hype around the market. 

One-third of the e-shoppers in the USA expected 20 to 30% discounts in 2024, which is a piece of strong evidence that discounts matter.

So, why not grab that wonderful chance to grow your summer sales this year? 

This blog will show you what, why, and how to blend your summer sale with a flash sale.

Flash sale: what and why

A flash sale is a limited-time offer a brand gives to promote products with the maximum possible discounts. 

Flash sales come with massive sale opportunities within a short duration, though, assuring minimal profit margin. 

Since a flash sale ends within a short period of time, it creates urgency. It’s a remarkable attempt to get attention amid the competitors and immediately attract on-the-go customers.

Why choose summer for running a flash sale

There are many reasons to consider the summer season for flash sales. You can organize it while most brands have accomplished diverse promotional campaigns by then. When the winter ends after Black Friday, Christmas, New Year, Valentine’s Day, etc, offers, summer comes with no generic holiday-based promotion opportunities. So, you can take it as a scope for promoting your brand in a custom way.

Less competition

As flash sales are not likely to prioritize any occasion, you can pick up any one/two weeks when your competitors typically remain silent.

Moreover, flash sales come with extensive discounts that your competitor brands cannot easily surpass. 

You get a perfect market gap to enter. You make the right drive, you win.

Stock clearance facility

After the huge stock growth in your inventory during the winter, you might be seeking an opportunity to clear the stock that you had expected to finish selling during the last season. 

If the products were considered to be sold during the winter and could not find a smooth way to end at once, summer might be logically less applicable for clearance. But with a great number of discounts, the remaining products might get sold instantly.

Grabbing new customers

Summer is the season when ad campaigns, paid advertising, and promotional discounts almost come to a standstill. 

New customers who would not have prioritized a new brand might take a chance on you because of the silence of the big brands. Use this opportunity to grab new customer attention.

Simplified customer engagement 

It’s always hard to engage a busy customer rather than a resting person. During summer, people usually get rid of the work-life rush and have more time to intensely engage with social media, online shopping, influencers’ content, etc. So, applying the scopes of omnichannel marketing, you can connect your target audience to your online presence everywhere.

Overcoming a low sales period

When do we consider it the summer season? For sales, it starts in May/June and ends in September. So, you have a longer period, and you can choose, for example, a few days of any one month to run a summer sale campaign. During these longer periods of several months in a row, you can choose a compatible one to overcome a previously witnessed low sales period.

Challenges behind running flash sales

Flash sale is an exciting opportunity for both the seller and the buyers, but what does it cost? It literally costs a lot. You need to compromise the profit margin, manage the inventory, get ready for the after-sale stock clearance, and many more challenges, you name it.

Cost optimization

Flash sale requires a seller to display big discounts, no matter how superb the product quality is. On the other hand, you need to push your marketing strategy and urge for faster shipping. So, cost optimization is a prime challenge to make sure the flash sale, at the end, comes up with estimated profit, not only ends up with revenue gain.

You can apply a few proven strategies to ensure impeccable cost optimization of the flash sale:

• Decide the flash sale season much earlier and reduce shipping costs
• Start market research and reach your target audience organically
• Analyze customer data to estimate the precise amount of inventory
• Make your pricing strategy work with the same effectiveness standard during the sale

Profit margin

It’s hard to manage the profit margin when you provide large discounts on the products you used to sell every day. Again, the sale pricing should also be reasonable, logical, and credible to your customers.

Then, how will you manage to maintain the profit margin?

• Choose certain products that have a larger profit margin than others
• Accept less profit ratio if the product has already made enough profit
• Reduce operation and marketing costs where applicable

The ‘perfect’ discount percentage

Let’s say your brand provides more than a 20% discount whenever possible. In that case, 30% will not be much of it. On the contrary, if you typically provide equal or less than 10 percent, then a 30% discount is much exciting for your brand.

The discount strategy depends more on your company’s pricing culture and the expectations of your customers. Plus, the market competition is another battle that you need to win.

Balancing inventory

You are more likely to predict the inventory size much before the flash sale season starts. The wrong prediction can ruin the impact of the flash sale and create a negative impression of your brand.

So, what should you do to make it work right?

Collect and analyze customers’ general interests, preferences within your brand, scrutinize the abandoned carts, survey and polls, and whatever you think can link to proper stock management.

Best practices for successful eCommerce flash sales

An eCommerce flash sale is way more expanded than just being a discount sale. If you play your cards right, it can generate a profit of several months in only a few days.

Here, you get several applicable strategies to successfully run a flash sale.

Set the goals and plan accordingly

Not every flash sale comes with the same traditional marketing or sales goals. Sometimes it’s about broadening brand awareness, sometimes generating revenue in a few days, or sometimes clearing the warehouse. 

You might think of several business goals while running a flash sale, but the fact is that every goal should align with each other. For example, if stock clearance is your primary goal, you can also add upselling and cross-selling to the purpose, but cannot include ensuring more profit.

Find the answer to a few questions before you plan for a flash sale.

• What is the primary target of the flash sale?
• Are you targeting the new customers or the old customers?
• To what extent will you compromise the profit margin?
• What is the maximum level of discounts you will offer?

Set the goals, and exclude the ones that align with the basic target.

Ensure the best timing

Every day is a good day for a sale if your customers are excited to shop. Anyways, to ensure good timing, you need to know your customers.

Find out the answers to a few questions:

• Which regions do you target?
• Are you targeting any occasion?
• What are the psychographics and demographics of your customers?
• What are the unique selling propositions for the discounted products?
• How many days do you want to prolong the sale?

It’s either before or after the holiday season that best matches the flash sale. Remember that the flash sale itself is an occasion, so it’s not mandatory to highlight any occasion.

Rearrange the pricing

You need to embed a system where the pricing can be changed simply. You can use the Fluent Forms calculator demo to keep the pricing updated easily.

Make sure the new pricing doesn’t cross the break-even line, and put the discounts accordingly.

Promote the low-converting products

Flash sale is a great way to increase the conversion rate of low-selling products. When running discounts on all products, your low-converting products’ stock can get cleared if you utilize the scope.

In that case, you can also utilize the power of price anchoring.

What is price anchoring?

Price anchoring is the technique to highlight a lower-priced product beside a higher-priced one. It makes a clear difference and influences customers for impulse-buying.

It’s needless to say that you have to highlight the discounted price near the reference price, which means the price before giving discounts.

Introduce seamless inventory management

Having both hard-to-clear stocks and easy-to-vanish stocks can be equally the reason for stopping sales immediately.

The use of automation and predictive analysis can be a mastermind strategy to win the battle of the uncertainty of inventory.

Maintain the brand value

If there is a slight doubt in the customer’s mind that your brand is offering discounts as an average store, not as a standard brand, there is no doubt that the game is over. So, keep up the brand value while upholding the brand visibility. You can turn these discount-freak or one-time buyers and visitors into consistent customers anytime through excellent branding techniques.

• Enhance positive customer experience
• Eliminate low-quality products
• Conduct value-driven marketing

Conduct omnichannel marketing

Along with maintaining a consistent branding, omnichannel marketing intensifies purposeful sales strategies. Whether it’s a flash sale or a clearance discount, shout out to all channels before it starts and continue until it ends. It makes you sell more during the season and creates long-term brand awareness.

Run targeted ads

Targeted ad campaign, a crucial step of eCommerce personalization, helps reach out to the exact customers defined as per the unique value propositions of your brand. In that case, you need to connect the crucial aspects of targeted advertisements: buyer persona and customer behavior.

You can apply a few worthwhile strategies to run the targeted ads successfully.

• Collect leads from potential sources
• Create urgency and FOMO
• Create irresistible copy
• Make CTAs that can earn a high click-through rate

Create abandoned cart alerts

Remind your customers of the carts they left without purchasing. A flash sale, providing big discounts, is more likely to recover abandoned carts. It especially encourages those customers who left carts because of pricing.

Collaborate with other brands

Whether it’s a collaboration of content, promotion, or influencer marketing, brand collaboration helps exchange brand awareness, expand the audience, and maximize profit.

In terms of flash sale, you can apply brand collaboration to areas like social media marketing, product bundling, lead generation, etc

Wrap up

The hassles you overcome at the beginning define the way how smoothly you can finish a flash sale.

The combination of timing, targeting, and pricing is the key area where prediction and strategy will lead you to a successful flash sale. Make sure the brand awareness and visibility you create become the reasons for long-term customer retention.