 E-commerce flash sale guide. How to use flash sales to increase your overall sales. I think there comes a time when every business, no matter what it is, whether it's a physical product, whether it's a digital product, should consider flash sales. In this video, I'm gonna show you how to do them so you know in the very end what works, what doesn't work. And I'm also gonna point out the pitfalls that could cost you a tremendous amount of money. So make sure you watch to the very end. If you haven't subscribed so far, make sure you hit that subscribe button down there. Don't forget to ring the bell. Turn on all bell notifications so you're notified each and every time I go live or I upload a video. Thank you so much for watching. Let's get going. Now, according to data from e-commerce stores from 2020, flash sales, you're just gonna blow your mind, flash sales, websites that use flash sales increase their gross monthly sales by 64,000%. Yeah, that's what I said, 64,000%. But there's a problem with this and it could cost you a lot of money even though you increase your sales and I wanna get into it in this video so you knew what those problems are because they're some big ones. So let's define what a flash sale is. Basically, it's a sale, okay? Maybe it's a discounted product, maybe it's free shipping, maybe it's lower prices, whatever it is, but it's for a very, very short period of time and I wanna go through the basics of what you need to have in your flash sale. So let me go over to my screen now and I wanna put it up on the screen so you can see it. First off, flash sales are different from regular online sales in three specific ways. Promotions are more significant than other deals usually offered by your business, okay? So it's gotta be a great deal. The timeframe is much shorter than your online store's normal sale windows. Number three, the selection and stock availability of these products is very limited. In other words, if you run a flash sale and they don't buy right now, they don't take advantage of it, they may not ever see it again, they may not get that product, they'll never get that price again, so it's gotta be something that's really good for this to work. If you've done a flash sale in the past and it was the same sales that you normally do, that's probably why it didn't work. Okay, let's talk about some of the pros and cons of flash sales. First thing, what a flash sale can do is it can help you move out some old inventory. Maybe you've got inventory that's been sitting around, you couldn't move, it wasn't selling. You might as well get your money out of it because your money's tied up in that inventory. I think a lot of people worry, well, I'm not making my normal 20 or 30%. Well, if you're not selling that product, that's perfect product for a flash sale. If it's not going out the door right now, you might as well get your money out of it and buy some inventory that is selling, so it's really good for that purpose. The next thing you can do is we've got people on our list and we haven't sold them, but they've been on our list, it can attract new customers. If they're on your list, it doesn't mean they're a customer, that just means they're on your list. So having one of these flash sales could turn somebody on your list into an actual buyer, so it's really good for attracting new customers. The next thing you can do is it can boost revenue really fast. I've run some sales and I've done like 10 times what I normally do on a normal day because I've ran one of these flash sales. It can do the same thing for you, it can really boost your revenue if you need to get some cash coming in. It can also improve your brand loyalty. If people see that you do something like this every now and then they see it as you being loyal to a customer, you taking care of the customer, you doing something special and out of the way that you normally don't do and it lets them feel like they're more appreciated. Now, let's look at some of the cons. There are cons to this, okay? It can, number one, erode your profits, okay? A poorly executed flash sale can actually cost you money and actually hurt your bottom line, so you do want to keep that in mind. And when you attract customers, the next part is you could attract disloyal customers. In other words, customers that only want to buy something when it's so cheap that it looks like you're losing money. That's the kind of customer you can attract, unfortunately, with some of these flash sales. The next thing you can do is it can lead to disengaged customers. If you start running flash sales too often, people get add fatigue and they're like, oh yeah, they're always doing a flash sale and they may actually unsubscribe from your list if you're doing it too often. So it's gotta be a kind of a specialized thing. And of course, lastly, it can hurt your reputation. It can hurt your reputation and it can actually make customers expect these flash sales and if you do that, they don't buy during the normal periods so actually you hurt your overall income. So you have to do these with temperance. Now that you know the pros and cons of these and how they work, let's talk about the three reasons that flash sales fail because they do fail. But if you're willing to take the risk for the benefits, then let's move forward and look at why a flash sale would fail. First off, if you have a very large list and your website, let's say, is getting 1,000 visitors a day or 2,000 visitors a day and you run a flash sale and all of a sudden you have 50,000 people come to your website, that could crash your site, okay? So flash sales you have to be careful with. What I like to do with a flash sale is send it out to part of my audience first to figure out what works best and then send it out to the rest of the audience. You can also, with Cartra, the software that I will list below, there's a link for Cartra, you gotta check it out, it'll do all your digital marketing for you. There's a video there you can watch and if you like it, you can get it for a dollar. But what it can do is it can send out your flash sale to increments of people over a period of days so you don't crash your site and it can actually set the timer on your page if you're doing like a timer type thing to where when the person gets there, that's when the timer starts. So each time a person gets there, the timer restarts over, it's not one set timer for everybody. It gets complicated, I know. Cartra will do it for you, watch the video below for Cartra at the end of this video. The next thing you can do, if you don't have inventory controls on your website, which on some of our sites we do not and we've run into this, is you have inventory oversell. Inventory oversell, what does this mean? Well, you sold more than you got, okay? With us, it's not so much a problem. It can create a delay because we actually manufacture food. And the other products we have are digital products so you can't run out of inventory there. But if you have a product where you have set number of items there, you've got to watch your sale closely so that you don't oversell. In our case, if we oversell some of our canned meats, we can say, hey, it's gonna be another two, three weeks. We got inundated with orders or whatever. You can cancel your order or you can switch over to this other product. We have a very, very loyal customer base that in most cases just wants to wait but a lot of them will switch over to another product. So you got to take that into consideration. That's another thing that can cause your flash sale to actually fail. And the last one, shipping delays, shipping delays. Now, we experienced this in 2020. We sell survival food and there was a food shortage. So you can expect that we were pretty busy. And we had a lot of problems with shipping and we had problems with shipping because we ran out of some products. We didn't have them for weeks or even months. And then shipping times got really long because all these carriers, UPS, FedEx, Mail Service and all that got really slow for a period of time. So there were big shipping delays. This is another problem that can arise from flash sales. Now, remember in the beginning of this video, I told you I had great flash sales or now I'm telling you all the problems. But you need to know these things, okay? If I told you that everything's wonderful and rosy and you went out and did this and ran into some of these problems, you'd say, hey, J.R., you didn't tell me about these other things. You didn't tell me about these other things that can go wrong. So just make sure you're prepared for them, know about them, understand them, try to prepare for them. You know, if we go back to the inventory thing, just keep checking your sales and make sure you don't oversell. Let the customers know that you oversold and that there's gonna be a delay or they can have a refund or whatever the case may be. But be on top of it. I think too many people run into a problem in business and they think the thing to do is ignore it and it'll go away. Well, that's not how it works in business. If you ignore it, it grows and grows and grows and becomes a bigger problem than it was in the beginning. Just handle it in the beginning. Now, a couple other things I would tell you to look out for. And you need a software like Cartra to do this, but once you have Cartra, it will give you when emails are getting open the best days to send them. So you wanna make sure you time this on the best days to send them. And it's not always the best days, it's also the best times of year. So prior to some holiday is a good time to have a flash sale. After some holidays is a good time to have a flash sale. You probably have noticed this over the years that you're getting pre-Christmas or pre-Black Friday emails or post-Black Friday or post-Christmas emails to buy particular products. So keep that in mind. Those are really good time to do these things. And I want you to think about what your goal is when you're doing this. If your goal is to turn more people on your list into buyers and avoid the people who are already buyers, you can do this in Cartra, this digital software I'm talking about. I know I've talked about it a lot, but it works so well. You could just send your emails out to people who are non-buyers so far. If you do it that way, what you've done essentially is you've targeted people and tried to turn them into buyers. So that may be the goal of your flash sale. If your goal is to sell to everybody, then of course send it to everybody. The other thing I want you to think about is using influencers. Influencers work well nowadays. I think a lot of people aren't taking advantage of it. They're scared, they don't know what to do. I have another video on influencers. If you just search my channel for influencers, you're gonna find that video and you're gonna find out how to select those people, how to approach those people and how to make money with those people. And they can be very profitable. So you may wanna check that out too. You want to also be cautious. Let's say you're selling a product for $200 and a lot of people have just bought it at $200 and then you decide to do a flash sale at $125. You may not wanna send it to the people who just bought it for $200. You may wanna exclude those people so that you don't upset them. The other thing a flash sale works really well on is abandoned carts. I've done videos on abandoned cart emails and they work really well, but you gotta keep in mind upwards of 75 to 85%. The numbers are all over the place. Of people who actually put something in their cart, actually abandon the cart they leave. So you may wanna target your flash sale towards the people who have abandoned their cart. You can do all this through Cartra, the software I've been telling you about. Check it out, it'll make you a lot of money. Also make sure you select the right products. The goal of your flash sale will be determined by the kind of product. So if you've got a product that's super popular that never goes on sale, that would be a great product for a flash sale. You gotta have a sale on. If you've got a lot of inventory in the warehouse and you just wanna move stuff out and you just wanna get some money back, that's great product to have a flash sale for. If you've got a popular product that people like a lot, that's a great product to have a flash sale for. So depending on what your goal is, you wanna target your flash sale towards those goals. And lastly, I hope I don't have to say this, but you gotta give them a good deal. You gotta give them a good deal. It's gotta be a really good deal. It's gotta be like an unbelievable deal. We do a lot of sales for my digital products and sometimes it'll be 80 or 90% off. That makes people wanna buy if it's 80 or 90% off. Now a digital product is much easier to do that with because it's not physical, right? I can say a course is worth 997 and I can sell it for $197. That's a flash sale right there. But if you don't have a product like that, if you have a physical product, it's a little bit different. So you gotta also consider what kind of product you're selling. Lastly, I'm gonna tell you to be prepared. If you have physical products, you need to ship them out and you expect a lot of sales, make sure you have the staff to ship them out, okay? Make sure you have the boxes you need to ship them out. I've run into that before where we ran out of boxes. We had boxes to put products in. So make sure you're prepared for the sale so that it goes smoothly. You don't wanna have a great big sale and then have a whole bunch of refunds or charge backs because you didn't deliver the product. So make sure you're prepared for that. I hope this explains flash sales. I hope this lets you know ways you can make money on flash sales. You can and you will. If you follow the steps that I showed you in this video. Don't forget if you haven't done so already, make sure you subscribe, make sure you ring the bell, turn on all bell notifications so you're notified each and every time I go live or if I upload a video, check out my $97 course in the description. It's absolutely free right now if you click but it's for a limited time that you get it for free. So you wanna do that as quickly as possible. Thank you so much for watching this video. Don't forget to give me a thumbs up. Don't forget to comment below. Let me know what you thought of the video. Do you have ideas for more videos? Have you done flash sales? How have they worked out for you? What is working for you? Let me hear from you in the comments or if you just need some help, feel free to put a comment down there about that. Thanks so much for watching this video and I'll see you in the next one. Hey, thanks for watching my video. 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