Why discount when you can drop?
Over the last few years, the concept of the retail “drop” – a time-limited or quantity-limited flash sale – has moved into the public realm.
What started as a niche idea to sell sportswear and sneakers has taken hold in the imagination of consumers and marketeers, with all kinds of products being given the drop treatment.
Some of the products that CrowdHandler has seen hold wildly successful drops recently include:
rare whisky
NFTs and DeFi assets
cult clothing
hobby items, from card games to knitting kits
Of course, the "drop" strategy continues to create waves in the ticketing industry, too. As I write this, hundreds of thousands of Beyonce fans are queuing to secure tickets for her latest tour, with demand far exceeding availability.
The concept may span retail sectors, but all these examples have the same thing in common: the product is limited, but the hype around it has built up very high demand.
Create your own hype
For retailers that need to shift stock, the drop can be a great alternative to discounting. If you can generate the hype, you can constrain your stock release instead of constraining your pricing.
What we see from people who are successfully using this strategy is that they're very active in cultivating communities. They spend time creating build-up, and remain very communicative throughout the process.
They go to the places where their customers are – the specialist Discord channels, niche Twitter hashtags and hobbyist Facebook groups – to develop hype around the product and the exclusive offer that is about to drop. They are very clear about dates, times and how the mechanics of the queue are going to work. And they take bot protection seriously, ensuring that the process is as fair as possible to their loyal fans.
Once you have a product in which you know people are interested, and have engineered a situation where demand will exceed supply, you can set up the waiting room.
Using CrowdHandler to manage a drop
If you have a time or quantity-limited product, you're building hype in your customers' communities, and you're looking to hold regular, exclusive product launches, then you'll be pleased to hear that CrowdHandler has a selection of tools to help you with all the key elements of a drop:
Creating build-up
Pre-schedule your waiting room to go live before the drop, set your queue to activate at the scheduled drop time, and tailor your customer-facing UI with branded messaging. Your users will see a countdown screen, building the anticipation and adding to the sense of excitement.
Protecting your site against bots
At the point of launch, all visitors in the pre-scheduled waiting room are automatically assigned a random place in the queue, ensuring that bots can't dominate positions in the front of the queue.
Communicating live stock availability
When there are more users than products, you can communicate stock availability to the queue in real time, allowing you to manage users' expectations during the on-sale. You'll have fewer hangers-on once you're out of stock, and they'll have a better user experience all round.
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Building hype and managing a great drop isn't just a niche strategy any more. It's a key marketing asset and we're helping hundreds of companies, just like yours, to do it. Sign up for free to try us out.
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