41: The 5P Flash Sale Formula
Thinking about running a flash sale?
In this episode of ill communication, I’m sharing one of the best ways to get a little revenue boost or book a few more clients into your calendar. I’m talking about the 5P flash sale formula and why it’s the best way to make your flash sales faster, easier, and more profitable.
A flash sale is typically a surprise discount or promotion that's available for a very short amount of time. Following the steps in the 5P formula can help you pull it off successfully and profitably.
In this episode, I’m explaining each P of the formula and my best tips for using it to run a successful flash sale that you can easily replicate again and again.
Topics We Cover in This Episode:
What flash sales are and how they can help give your business a boost
Why you don’t need to discount your product or services to run a flash sale
The myths you shouldn’t believe about flash sales
What the 5P flash sale formula is and why it works
How to use the 5P flash sale formula to increase your sales quickly and easily
I hope you found this episode helpful! A flash sale can be a great way to generate a little revenue boost in your business, and it's also a great opportunity to put yourself out there and help more people get to know you and what you have to offer.
If you want to review some simple ways to gather your voice of customer, listen to episodes 40 and 25!
Want more writing tips? Make sure to check out Joy of Copy Club, a group copy coaching experience where you receive access to all my sales templates, writing prompts, and copy recipes. Join the Joy of Copy Club today!
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Welcome to Ill Communication, Copywriting, Tips and sales strategies for small Business. I'm your host, Kim Keel. I'm a copy coach, sales strategist and direct response copywriter. It's my mission to help women leaders and change makers amplify their voices through copy. It's why I'm dishing out all the juicy tips, writing prompts and sales formulas to help you generate more leads, book more calls, and get more high value clients on repeat. Sounds pretty good. It's time to ditch the overwhelm you might be feeling and find confidence in your copywriting so you can get your message out there and attract more soulmate clients. Let's get started. Hello. Hello and welcome to episode 41 of the Ill Communication Podcast. This episode is going to be one you want to bookmark or save to come back to again and again. It's going to be something you want to listen to. When you want a little revenue boost or you want to get a few more clients booked into your calendar. I'm talking about the £0.05 flash sale formula. But first, let's talk about flash sales. A flash sale is typically a surprise discount or promotion that's available for a very short amount of time. It could be a 24 hour flash sale or a five day flash sale. Think of the Black Friday Cyber Monday flash sales. You open your doors to an existing service or a product for a short window of time, and it's probably easiest to use a flash sale to sell an existing service or a proven offer.
Something you know people will buy and you can use a flash sale to promote or test a new offer or service instead of going crazy on a huge live challenge with 20 emails and a 2 to 3 week sales window. You can test the offer first with a small flash sale to gauge interest and get some beta users and testimonials. And now I want to bust a myth about flash sales. When you think of a flash sale, you're probably thinking of reducing the price for a short amount of time. But I really don't love discounting the price because then you're attracting price shoppers and people who only want to buy cheaper things instead of discounts. Think of what you could bonus instead. So during your short promo period, you could offer a bonus one on one call a bonus group hotseat call a free book, access to a free course or a resource you've already created. Or you could have a flash sale to promote your services just before you raise your rates. So you encourage people to join your programs and buy your products before the price increases. Now, I've just written sales copy for a client who's launching a new suite of low priced courses for parents of young children. These courses will be available evergreen, which means people can buy them anytime.
But to announce and launch these new courses. She's planned a five day flash sale. She's chosen to reduce the price slightly and include access to a free e-book after the five day flash sale. The courses go up to their normal price and the book will be offered as an order bump, meaning that when parents purchase the courses in the future, they'll get an invitation to add the book into their cart for an additional fee. And now I want to bust another myth about flash sales. There's a misconception that a flash sale is quick and easy. And I'm sorry to tell you, but it's not. To have a successful flash sale, you need to plan well in advance. You want a proven offer and you will need plenty of sales copy to help you with your flash sale. And that's why I'm breaking down the £0.05 flash sale formula. So the five P's are prep plan pre-launch promote and profit. When you follow these steps, you'll have the assets you need and all the pieces in place to ensure you have a successful flash sale. And once you follow the five P's and you've done the work on your first flash sale or promotion, you can then more easily and quickly rinse and repeat these steps on your next flash sale. So while it's a little bit of work in the beginning, your future flash sales will be faster and easier and hopefully more profitable too.
So let's start with the first of our £0.05 framework. It is prep Before you decide on your flash sale or promotion, you have to prepare. And it sounds so simple, but a lot of people actually forget this step. And first things first. Check in with your audience and make sure they're interested in the thing you want to sell. Hop on a call, pop into the DMS and ask your people if it's something they'd be interested in. You can also use social media polls or stickers to ask people which kind of course they'd rather buy or what kind of struggles they're having or what they're interested in learning about from you. And just a quick reminder, go back to episode 40, because I share a super easy way to gather a constant stream of customer feedback and ideas. You can also use customer surveys or customer focus groups to check in and ask what your people want. When you're clear and have confirmation on your promotion, then you want to gather some fresh voice of customer and voice of customer research is how you identify your core sales message. You ask your customers and talk to them and you hear in their specific language about how they talk about their problems, dreams and desires. So whenever I take on a new launch copy client or a website client, I always start with gathering the best voice of customer.
I interview 3 to 5 best fit clients. I review their testimonials, their podcast reviews, their customer surveys. I look at what testimonials are on competitor sites. I go into sites like Amazon, Udemy or answer the public to dive even deeper into the questions, concerns, dreams and wishes that their ideal audience has. Then I copy and paste all of that information into a Google doc or a spreadsheet, and I search for common themes. What are they struggling with? What are their challenges? What are their wishes and dreams and desires? And this becomes the foundation for all the great sales copy. So that is the first P of our £0.05 framework. It is to prepare. Do people want the thing you're selling and how do they describe it and talk about it? The next P is plan and I hate to break it to you, but you need a little bit more time than you expect to plan a flash sale. Give yourself at least 6 to 8 weeks ahead of time. So create your launch plan and timeline. Open a fresh Google doc, grab a journal, open your calendar and ask yourself these questions. What will you sell? And for how much? When will you have your flash sale and how will you sell it? Will you use a cheap and cheerful Google docs or a PDF to sell your offer? Or do you need a web based sales page? Will you just send emails? Will people book a call to make this sale? Will you need some kind of a checkout system? Will you run paid ads? Do you need social copy to promote your flash sale? List it all down and then assign due dates for yourself or your team.
Reverse engineer the dates you need to deliver on all of the assets that you need to write. And believe me, writing the copy takes way more time than you think it will. So get this done early on. If you're using a sales page or a sales document, write or update that first. Once you've written your sales page, then you can pull out some of that copy to help you write your emails, your ads and your social content. Make sure you block the time in your calendar for your flash sale and reverse engineer the dates you need to have your sales page, sales, emails and social copy written. And when you're writing your sales copy, pull out your voice of customer research and combine it with the proven copywriting, formula or framework to write compelling and high converting sales copy. When I teach the £0.05 formula to the members of the Joy of Copy Club, they get access to frameworks and templates for all the sales documents and sales pages, all the email sequences and ad copy.
But the point here is please don't start from scratch. The third P in our formula is pre-launch and you want to give yourself a few weeks to pre-launch and seed the offer you're going to be selling. Create a content plan based on your prep, based on the research, based on what your customer has told you. And then you want to deliver content that helps to dispel some myths, that helps them fall in love with you and delivers value. You want to aim for at least one email per week, maybe 2 to 3, depending on your list. So choose email and content prompts to help you educate, inspire and entertain. You can deliver a free checklist. Share a story of customer transformation or share something that's bringing you a little surprise and delight. The point here is you are warming your readers up, building more, know like and trust, reminding them of your authority and building a little reciprocity. When you mention casually mention your offer or service, you're just being offhand. You're not being salesy. You're just sharing little comments. Like the students in my accounting program asked me this question the other day, or when people are in the joy of Copy Club and I teach the £0.05 formula, they get access to all my copywriting templates and frameworks. Now, after you've written all of your copy, you've sent your pre-launch, you're in the pre-launch phase, you've delivered that over two to 3 to 4 weeks in advance.
Now we're on the next p promote for a short 4 to 5 day flash sale. I recommend you send about 6 to 8 emails. One is a teaser email leading up to the flash sale, which is kind of like, Oh, pay attention, check your inbox tomorrow because something super exciting is coming for you. Then over the sales window, send maybe 4 to 5 promotional emails and then at the end of the promotion, the day after, send one follow up email asking why your list didn't buy from you. Pay attention to which email subject lines are getting opened and which emails and links are getting clicked. Pay attention to which social content people are engaging with. Pay attention and follow up in your DMS. Engage with people and then the final P in our formula is profit and profit. I'm taking a very generous look at It's not just about money, it's all of the ways we grow, all of the insights we gain. And the first step to profit is celebrate. You just pulled off a flash sale. It was a lot of work. So regardless of what the results were, give yourself a little moment of celebration. Do something nice for yourself because you pulled it off. Now you want to take a look at what did you learn? What did you learn about your audience? What did you learn about yourself? What did you gain? Did you gain sales? Did you gain followers? Did you gain any insights into your audience? Of course, you want to assess the number of sales you had for your promotion, but I suspect when you were putting yourself out there, you might have attracted some clients for other offers or inquiries about other services you have.
So make sure you track those non promo sales and bookings as well. Ask yourself what you would do again, what you would do differently and what would you would never do again. Assess How much time did you spend on certain tasks and how much money did you spend on certain things? Of course, you're going to look at and calculate the revenue generated and don't just think about for this specific launch. Think about the lifetime value of those customers. There's a good chance that if people enrolled in this flash sale and they fall in love with you in your process, they may upgrade into a mid-tier offer. They may then begin to work with you one on one. So really think about the lifetime value of that customer. It's not just about the immediate profit. This debrief or profit step is important because what you learn from this flash sale will help you with the next one.
So, my friend, that is the £0.05 flash sale formula prep plan pre-launch promote and profit. A flash sale can be a great way to generate a little revenue boost in your business, and it's also a great opportunity to put yourself out there, help more people get to know you and your services and your products. So tune in next week when I'll share some of the other things I do to have successful and profitable, lazy, low key launches in my own business. I'll see you then. Hey, would you like to hang out with me and other women business owners doing rad things in the world just like you? Then you should join the Joy of Copy Club. It's a group copy coaching experience where you receive access to all my sales templates, writing prompts and copy recipes. So you're never wondering what or how to write once a week. You can pop into my open office hours where we'll live, review and edit any kind of copy you've written. Seriously, you can bring a social post, an email or even some edits to your home page and I'll help you optimize it before you send it out into the world. The Joy of Copy Club gives you the tools and the confidence to get your message out there so you can grow your impact and your revenue. Find out more at Kim Kilcommon Copy Club. I'll see you next week.
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