MARKETING THE DO’S AND DON’TS OF FLASH SALES
How to create urgency and FOMO, drive volume and revenue, and make your customers pay more attention.
high-demand items like season passes and multi-visit cards, especially when launching new or seasonal offerings. To maximize impact, we promote the release in advance with countdowns via email and social media, building antici- pation to create a ‘feeding frenzy’ effect.” For limited-time sales, often for prod- ucts with lower organic demand, Snow Partners keeps the windows tight (48-72 hours). It supports the offers with count- downs and messaging to create urgency. “By limiting the time, we can better con- trol when purchases and revenue occur, which is helpful for specific financial tar- gets or pacing needs,” says Reynolds. DON’T: Condition Your Customers Too much of a good thing will train your customers to wait for the deal or, perhaps worse, ignore your communications entirely. “If you have a flash sale every week, it loses its effectiveness, and peo- ple start to tune it out,” notes Lambert. Of course, Boyne aims to train its customers, just in the right ways. “We urge them to buy their season pass in the spring to get the best rate, or book their lift tickets days or weeks in advance for a better deal,” says Lambert. “It works, but when adding too many offerings, it can become confusing at best, and detrimen- tal at worst.” DO: Experiment with Sale Products Since every resort has different prod- ucts and offerings, experiment to learn which products are best suited to flash sales. Don’t be afraid to throw things at the wall to see what sticks. “Flash sales can be as complicated as you want them to be, but I’d err on the side of simplicity if you haven’t done them very often,” advises Blanchard. “Choose one product that needs a boost, create one promo code that only applies to that product, set it to expire in a cou- ple of days, whip up a quick email tem- plate and social graphic, and hit send. As
By Marsha Hovey
There are a couple of universal truths we know about most skiers and snow- boarders: 1) They love a deal, and 2) They get FOMO very easily. Savvy sales and marketing teams can cap- italize on this combination by oc- casionally pulling one tried and true trick from their bag of tactics: the flash sale. Behind the scenes, these short-lived opportunities give us a chance to get cre- ative with everything from pricing and messaging to strategy and content. They can be wildly spontaneous, like low- risk gambling from the convenience of your office chair. Or, they can be highly planned, with months of preparation for a coveted offering. Flash sales can appeal to a variety of customer types—from those who mark their calendar for sea- son-pass price breaks to those who can be persuaded by a good deal to book a last-minute room with 48 hours’ notice. Flash sales are a good thing to have in your overall marketing mix. “You have to do your audience some favors, you can’t just hard sell all the time,” says Inn- topia vice president of marketing Gregg Blanchard. Offer some great deals with the occasional flash sale, and “be useful, be entertaining, be interesting,” he says, to keep people’s attention. While successful flash sales can maximize ticket sales on a slow day or fill beds during a need period, they should be deployed judiciously, lest you train customers to hold out for those deals. “Flash sales are a tactical tool,” says Boyne Resorts chief marketing officer
Countdowns, like this one for a Big Snow sum- mer sale, help create a feeding-frenzy effect.
Nick Lambert. “They’re just one part of a larger sales strategy.”
FLASH SALE DO’S & DON’TS
DO: Create Urgency & Scarcity If there’s one big takeaway, it’s that FOMO is your best friend. “A good flash sale should be short enough that folks will ‘act now’ instead of waiting, but long enough that it gives everyone a fair chance,” says Blanchard. The aim is to find the right combination of buttons to press to create that can’t-miss, short- lived opportunity that folks will lose sleep over. “We’ve found that scarcity drives urgency, so we run flash sales in two primary formats,” limited-quantity and limited-time, says Snow Partners chief marketing officer Hugh Reynolds. “Limited quantity sales mean we release a set number of products at a discounted rate, and sell until they’re gone. This works extremely well for
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