Using CrowdHandler in your holiday sales strategy

Photo: Black Friday by Powhusku on Flickr

Last year, we wrote about using CrowdHandler to prepare for Black Friday:

Having a waiting room set up in advance which can kick in whenever it's needed during the busy season
Using special-purpose waiting rooms for daily drops, which will provide build-up and add to the hype
Promotional waiting rooms to show off best offers to customers in the queue

We also talk a lot about the 'drop' as a marketing strategy. By running limited edition 'drop' sales rather than discounting across the board, you can build hype and generate plenty of pre-drop traffic.

So, this Black Friday ... why not both?

Discount AND drop

This year, rather than choosing between discounting all your stock and running 'drop' sales, why not use the best of both strategies?
Get people through the door with a seasonal drop sale – a generous discount on a limited number of products. Then, when time is up on your initial offer, encourage the remaining traffic to browse a range of attractive 'consolation prizes'.

Because the discount is on a small quantity of product, the cost to you, the retailer, is low. But the hype you create will drive a lot of traffic to the site and even the customers who don't manage to bag a limited-edition deal will still have a VIP experience.

The best thing about this strategy? If you have CrowdHandler running on your site, you are already way ahead of your competitors, because CrowdHandler is uniquely placed to make easy work of a "door crasher" sale like this.

Running a doorbuster sale with CrowdHandler

The first stage is to set up the discounted limited offer. For this, you will be running a flash sale using CrowdHandler with a 'drop' setup: a pre-scheduled waiting room, with a queue set to activate at the scheduled 'drop' time. Make sure your customers know that the discount is extremely limited, and tell them the time it will go ahead. With the right comms, you can create a big buzz.

When the deal drops, and your customers move to the queue, you can use CrowdHandler to not only communicate people's queue position, but to let them know stock availability throughout the sale.

The beauty of this strategy is that, once the initial offer is finished, you can add a dedicated ‘Sold Out’ message to let visitors down gently and encourage them to browse.

So this is also a great place to tell customers about your other products. What else might they be interested in once they move onto the site? If they aren't one of the lucky customers who get a discounted limited edition, they will still be able to look around the site and maybe even grab a bunch of other bargains before anyone else.

Why you need a waiting room for your holiday sale

Without a waiting room, and specifically a waiting room which utilises features like scheduling, stock availability and customisable “sold out” messaging, you're likely to run into problems running an event like this. Even if your site doesn't crash as everyone lands on it! When the drop has finished – which could be very quickly – visitors will see the site go from full to sold out in the blink of an eye. Many won't believe that any fair process existed around it.

Want to get ready for the holiday rush?

Got CrowdHandler? Then you’re way ahead already. Now, you just need to set up your limited discounts, prime a series of special purpose waiting rooms, and make sure your communication is on point with the Stock and Sold Out features.

If you’re on a Standard, Plus, Professional or Enterprise plan, you can use Stock Availability messaging by simply going to your room page and looking for the Stock field.