Everything you need to know to crush your next sale/promo. Includes playbook of best practices, execution and tools to manage success.

1. BLOW OUT
PROMO
YOUR NEXT

2. About Us
HostGator Chris

3. Room Calibration
?
B2B
?
B2C
?
Ecom
?
Services
?
Products
?
Non-profit

4. Overview
Why we are doing this
The Playbook
How to execute

5. It’s the end of a quarter
and you get a call…
● We are behind…..
● The market is hot….

6. What are we trying to do here?
Move the most units possible
Maximize awareness
Drive incremental units
Generate more leads
Note: Be aware of your margins

7. Marketing Life Tips:
Keep your friends close, keep your finance people closer.
Greet them in the morning when you wake up.
Go into this talking to finance.
Discuss margins
Discuss goals and what winning looks like

8. Imagine your funnel
as a water bucket.
Prospects come in at a certain rate
They convert at a certain rate
Running a sale is speeding up that conversion cycle.
You are emptying the funnel, converting as much as you can.

9. Will this work?
We used these tactics for
Black Friday & Cyber Monday
the last 3 years.
Every year setting new
records.
We airdropped this playbook
into another well known
national hosting brand, and
broke their single day sales
record.

10. You are about to see a lot of our creative.
All of this has been tested.
Learn from our mistakes.

11. The Promo Playbook

12. Playbook
Creative

13. High Level Goal:
Create a distinct visual difference
from “normal” so your shoppers know
something special is happening.
Here is how…..

14. Theme Your Sale
Engage your customers
Reinforce your brand

15. Theme Your Sale
Leverage holidays

16. Theme Your Sale
Make up stuff if needed

17. Make it Relevant
This idea
sucked.

18. B2B?
What are the calls to action?

19. Passionate Creatives will Make Engaging Art
Make sure your creative team is into it.
Let them lead the ideation.
Run creative that reinforces the brand.
Keep them on the rails when needed
Happy creative team Bored creative team

20. Playbook
Build the Offer

21. High Discounts
/Special Offers
● If you are doing a sale, you
want to make the numbers
move. So give customers
something special.
● Will it move them from
shopper to buyer?
● Is it better than competitors?

22. Playbook
Create Urgency

23. Limited Time
● Tell them when the sale
is over.
● Can you create scarcity?
● Countdown timers
● Get the customer’s
competitive instincts
going. - limited inventory.

24. Flash Sales
● A sale within a sale
● Or a very short
duration sale
How fast can your email deliver?

25. Playbook
Pick Your Time Wisely

26. Leverage Your Traffic
Run the sale on your best days, not on your worst.

27. Generally there are two types of promos
Those you have time to plan
Black Friday
Birthday Sales
Semi-Annual
Those you don’t
“OH @#%^ WE NEED
MORE”

28. Playbook
Integrate Across Channels

29. Email your customer base
Might be a good
time to remind
them about your
referral program.
Your customers
are most likely to
come back and
buy more.
They are also the
most likely to tell
others. Make it
easy to share.

30. Email your partners
● Open the promotion up to your partners,
so it will help them close business.
● Give them early warning, so they can
email their lists and update their sites.
● Negotiate even better deals for the
partners if needed.

31. What is your sales team doing?
● Give them special sales only offers.
● Make sure they are working during sale hours
● Plan on hitting your pipeline
○ Make all the right arrangement, conversation guides,
assets, enablement.
B2B!!!!

32. Integrate across all channels
You want this to blow up.
So you need to hit every channel you can.
Social, Content, PPC, Affiliate, Video, etc...
Every channel pushes
the button
at the same time

33. If the sale goes live at midnight,
everyone that needs to push a button is awake.

34. A sale without an influx of traffic
Is just giving away margin to close more people
Use the sale to drive people in
that might not have been customers.

35. Pulling It Off Perfectly
1. Let your creatives go wild
2. Write your requirements with the whole team
3. [Do the work]
4. Win!

36. Picture the Ocean’s Eleven guys
Looking at a model of
the bank and doing a
walkthrough.
Before you go live, do a dress rehearsal, where your
entire team steps though the promo so everyone knows
who does what when.

37. Track your sales
Hour by hour
Keep all the performance in one doc
So you can refer to it later

38. We talked about the funnel
After a promo, it may be depleted.
We call that “hangover”
It will take a while (depending on your sales cycle)
for the buckets to fill back up.

39. Bonus:
Managing Your Success

40. Allegory of the
Successful Marketing Manager…..
Who, through good intentions,
kills their brand.

41. [Ring]

42. You: Hello?

43. Exec: We need you.

44. You: PUT ME IN!!!!

45. (Picture of sale up and to the right)

46. Short time Later:
[Ring]

47. Exec:
“Hey can you do that thing again?”

48. You
PUT ME IN!!!!!!!
Addiction!
(Restraint)
Preserved Brand Equity

49. Don’t Get Addicted
● Customers will start to expect your sales and
make buying decisions accordingly.
● Your leaders might get addicted.
● Eventually this will change your brand to
something that speaks to price buyers.
● Don’t become JCPenney, Kohls, J. Crew

50. If you do...
You have to go cold turkey, and it will suck.

51. You
PUT ME IN!!!!!!!
Addiction!
(Restraint)
Preserved Brand Equity

52. Preserve Your Brand Equity
● Use sales to enhance the brand
● Use sales sparingly
● Use sales at unpredictable times
● Or use sales in a way that gets people excited
○ Nordstroms - Semi-Annual Sale
○ REI - Anniversary Sale
○ Best Buy / Target / Walmart - Black Friday Sale

53. Questions?
LinkedIn Chris Whitling
Twitter cw360
Instagram cw360
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