As has been mentioned above, it's energy that counts.
Low and fast, you can briefly freeze the collective and cyclic climb until the tail is far enough from the ground/obstacles to then allow you to dump the collective whilst flaring pretty hard to rebuild rotor rpm.
When you are slow enough, or you start to sink in the flare and don't have enough left to keep the tail off the ground, level it and cushion on.
For a low level auto you can either do this 'zoom' method, which trades speed for height and therefore reduces your distance before reaching the ground, or do a progressive long flare which will take you further over the ground. Either way it's a tradeoff between lowering the collective (preserving rpm but dropping you towards the ground) and cyclic flare (building rpm and holding you up, at least until you run out of speed).
The key for me is get rid of the forward speed, unless there's a nice flat football field dead ahead.