How To Deploy Evergreen Flash Sales

Your prospects and customers LOVE bonuses and discounts.

Even better if you can sneak in the offer “just in time”, when they’ve been thinking about what you offer and you can bump them over into converting.

A properly run promotion not only offers a bonus or discount, but it relies on the scarcity of that offer going away to get people to act NOW.

It’s rare that someone desperately needs what you offer right now, so this added incentive is critical in getting a much larger percentage to convert.

I’m thrilled to show you how you can setup these offers to deploy to your audience on autopilot, dramatically boosting your conversions and revenue without having to invent a new promotion all the time.

This process is made possible by the killer features available in Campaign Refinery, and this just scratches the surface of what we offer (start your free 14-day trial here).

NOTE: Other products charge $97 or more per month for what’s described in this blog post alone. You’ll find that Campaign Refinery is a much better-integrated solution, at an insane value with unlimited contacts.

We’re stacking a few of our features together in this example which allows you to make these evergreen offers seem “just in time” for your prospect.

#1: Phases 2 and 3 of Campaign Links

A while back, we announced the first iteration of our Campaign Links feature, which made link management a whole lot easier.

This initial phase meant you could create a merge variable for use within your emails that linked to a defined URL.

In the event that this URL changed in the future, you would only need to edit it in one place, and every message in your entire campaign using that variable would be updated in one shot.

No more going into each and every email, trying to make sure that you right link on every email. Reducing frustration and chance for human error.

Phase 2 of Campaign Links – iFrames

Expanding Link Stages To Include iFrame Options

In the first stage of Campaign Links, we added the idea of link stages. This meant that after a set amount of time, the stage of the link to could point to a new URL.

When this first launched, it would simply change where the Campaign Link dumped off to after a redirect. Which was helpful, but only a start.

In this initial model, it would change where the user goes after a click. But if they had the page up and loaded, nothing would change on its own.

Now, we’ve taken it several steps further, which will give you a lot more control over the user experience and which page contacts should see.

Key iFrame Feature #1

Campaign Links no longer dump off to the URL defined in the Campaign Link settings. Instead, Campaign Links load the defined URL in an iFrame.

So instead of… Click > Hitting Campaign Link > Redirect to URL

Now, it is… Click > Hit Campaign Link that loads URL under it

Fundamentally, this means contacts are hitting a URL that checks with Campaign Refinery about what web page they should be viewing.

And, if the sequence dictates that it should be a different page than what they saw when they first opened the URL, Campaign Refinery can force reload the new page without any interaction from the contact.

Key iFrame Feature #2

Adding additional context with a visible “Frame” that include any (or all) of the following: Headline, Countdown Timer, Call To Action.

The frame itself can be loaded at the top of bottom of the page, and the user can close the frame if they so choose with the X on the side.

Headline

Choose whatever wording you want to be here, and the font to use from several options.

Call To Action

Want a quick way for the user to get to the shopping cart? Using the Call To Action feature is helpful in this regard.

You can have multiple emails, multiple timers and other events before a stage change. Campaign Refinery is smart enough to total the timers and that’s what it will use for the countdown.

You can choose what you want the button to say, it can link to anything you want, and you can choose the branded color you need or prefer.

The color options are available using a color picker, or by pasting in the HEX code of your brand colors for a pixel perfect match.

Countdown

This is only useful if there’s going to be a stage change to a new URL in the future. We automatically calculate the timer based on when the stage of the Campaign Link changes next.

Phase 3 of Campaign Links – Countdowns

Make Adding Email Countdowns Dead Simple

While phase 3 of 3 wasn’t nearly as hard to do as the other phases, it’s equally critical for driving conversions and scarcity.

This countdown is calculated the exact same way as the countdown for the iFrame, so there’s no configuration needed for it to be correct.

Simply set the Campaign Link stage to change when it should, and it should all just work like you want it to.

Go to your merge variables, and select the Countdown variable of your Campaign Link and you’re good to go.

We create an animated GIF on the fly to accomplish this and to support as many email clients as possible.

When a contact opens their email, it will load 60 seconds worth of animations (industry standard), to keep the file size down.

In the event that a user leaves the email and then opens it again, it will reload a fresh 60 seconds of the real-time left.

This makes it drop dead simple to add instant scarcity to the email itself before the user even clicks any links.

#2: Leveraging Engagement Tagging

Recently, we announced a big improvement to how our tagging system works. This was not only helpful by itself, but we saw the clear advantage of making “just in time” campaigns really clean and easy.

By having the ability to tag individual links when they are clicked, you can automatically segment your engaged users based on the content they are viewing and sending them a related flash promotion.

No need to wait for a specific point in time like Black Friday, New Years or any other holiday that us marketers have co-opted as an excuse to sell stuff 🙂

All that is needed in order to pull this off, is to apply a tag for a link to some specific content, and then use an automation to queue up your evergreen campaign once that tag is applied to a contact.

Conclusion

I’ve been very impatiently waiting for these past few features to finally hit production and be available for you to start using.

These open up insanely powerful workflows, from on-demand sales all the ay to really polished, pseudo evergreen webinar funnels.

What do you think of these new features?

How do you see yourself using them in your business?

I’d love to hear from you in the Marketing Automation Facebook Group.

And if you haven’t had a chance to check these features out yourself, I’d encourage you to log-in and kick the tires or start your risk free 14-day trial here to start deploying these campaigns in your business.