Blogs

Flash sales are getting a lot of media and retailer attention. Limited-time campaigns are an effective tool in the social commerce arsenal. Hard deadlines compel users to take action. Combined with a sense of unique opportunity and exclusivity, they drive campaign results. Companies such as HauteLook, Gilt, Rue La La, ideeli, and One Kings Lane built their entire business model around members only, limited-time offers.

Email marketing is a great way to make customers aware of limited-time offers. Time sensitivity, however, creates a unique challenge for this type of campaign. The best way to run these campaigns is to deliver email to the entire, large target list within a short time span measured in minutes. Many email marketing platforms work with large lists. However, it is common for larger campaigns to be sent out over a number of hours or even days - not minutes. In many cases, companies have limited control over when precisely their emails will be sent. In multi-tenant ESP environments, clients compete for the same computing resources, making precise scheduling highly challenging. The bottom line – email marketing platforms have not been the most effective in supporting time-sensitive offers. 

This has changed with StrongMail’s addition of email burst capabilities to the Message Studio email marketing system. With these new capabilities, Message Studio has been speed-tested to deliver 2MM+ emails in less than 5 minutes. Just to be clear, we are writing here about permission-based emails received by consumers who registered to gain access to compelling offers.

Customers such as HauteLook are very effectively using StrongMail technology. You can find more details about how HauteLook uses email to drive flash sales on the following industry publications: MediaPost, Internet Retailer and DIRECT.