JASON DROHNWhy Flash Sales Work
The whole goal of a flash sale is to get a prospect to take action, using scarcity
and discounts as the motivational tools behind it.
If you know you only have three days to make a purchase for an extreme
discount, then each day that passes makes your action more and more urgent – if
you want what they’re selling of course!
For instance, over the weekend, Woot had a FitBit wristband for sale. I saw the
email, but didn’t take action. I logged in this morning (knowing of course that
it’d be gone), and it was.
And I kicked myself for not checking the site sooner!
The same thing will happen with your customers. They’ll understand that
you’re giving them a HUGE discount. They’ll know that they have a few days
to buy. If they don’t, they lose out!
Fear of loss is a very powerful motivator.
Now, there’s a reason why we see flash sales all over the place. Honestly, it’s
not about the income they produce (especially if you’re selling a digital
product).
If you have a video course that’s $47 and you discount it to $7 for a three-day
flash sale, that’s a big break for your customers. But... If you sell 100 copies,
you’ve only made $700.
The REAL reason you run flash sales is to get more of your customers into an
upsell funnel. (They are also great for raising the clickthrough rates of your
emails.)
If you have a $7 front end offer and then the next offer in the upsell funnel is
$47, you might have 30% or 40% who take you up on that!
And, if there’s a second upsell at $197, you might have 10% who take you up on
that!!
So, the $7 front end product is really more about qualifying buyers than
anything else, and moving them through your upsell process. If you want to
move more of your prospects to buyers – run a Flash Sale!
Closing the Flash Sale Down
At the end of the flash sale, you need to shut it down.
That means you can stay up until when it’s done and redirect the page, or you
can employ any one of the countdown widgets to redirect the page for you.