Get A Sales Boost: See How Examine Automates Running Expiring Offers on Its Website

But not for Examine, whose marketing team automates promoting timed-offers and campaigns across their site, without developers or coding.

Note: If you’re running a special offer during the Holidays, including Black Friday and Cyber Monday, then you don’t want to miss this conversion strategy.

Examine.com is an independent and unbiased encyclopedia on supplementation and nutrition that’s trusted by over 1.5 million visitors every month.

With a team of expert marketers, Examine is actively using their website as a marketing channel to engage their visitors and guide them to relevant content and helpful products.

We had the pleasure of speaking with Martin Wong, the Director of Marketing at Examine, about how they run their limited-time promotions, and what they did to quickly launch a campaign that drove thousands of conversions during a 24-hour flash sale they ran.

Of course, we asked if we could give the inside scoop to the ConvertFlow community, and they were kind enough to let us share the details with you

So let’s dive in…

It was early November, and the team at Examine were preparing to celebrate their 3 year anniversary of the launch of their Examine Research Digest – the go-to source for health professionals who want to receive a breakdown of recent nutrition studies.

To celebrate with their audience and millions of monthly visitors, they planned a 24-hour flash sale to give their audience a 40% discount when they sign up as a subscriber to their research digest.

Like most marketing teams, these types of campaigns would usually require their marketing team to coordinate with developers to get their website updated for their limited-time promotion. This could easily take days or weeks, depending on the number of projects their dev team has on their plate.

Fortunately for Examine, not this time.

Since adopting ConvertFlow, Examine’s marketing team, who has been highly focused on improving conversions and team productivity, has been able to manage creating, launching and tracking promotions on their site, all from one platform, without getting developers involved.

With over 120 CTAs created in ConvertFlow, their marketing team tapped into more conversion opportunities and experimented with new ways to improve their conversions at a faster rate than they could before with their previous workflow.

Side note: See how Examine.com captured 29,934 new leads in less than 3 months using ConvertFlow

For this special offer, their marketing team was able to single-handedly execute the promotion of this campaign on their site, and set their expiring offers to run and engage visitors, completely on autopilot.

Their campaign resulted in thousands of conversions during their 24-hour flash sale.

Here’s a detailed breakdown of how they did it (and tips on how you can to)…

1. Schedule your website promotion using a Broadcast campaign

If you use ConvertFlow, you might have discovered Broadcast campaigns, a useful feature we have for broadcasting conversion campaigns to your website visitors, the same way you would send an email broadcast to your email subscribers.

Examine took advantage of using a Broadcast campaign during their 24-hour flash sale, and saved their developers many hours or possibly days of work. They crafted their CTAs, and automated running the whole promotion on their website, without coding.

ConvertFlow’s “Broadcast” campaign type allowed them to group, manage and promote all of their calls-to-action for their 24-hour flash sale through one campaign dashboard, plus get conversion stats on how this timed promotion was performing.

Here’s a behind-the-scenes look at their broadcast in ConvertFlow.

By using a Broadcast campaign, they were able to…

• Schedule their promotion to run during a specific time period (from November 8 at 10AM EST, to November 9th at 12 PM EST)
• Manage the targeting conditions to determine where each of these CTAs displayed on their website
• Override all of their existing calls-to-action and email subscribe forms across their website, with CTAs that promoted their flash sale during the time of their promotion (broadcast campaigns get higher priority)
• Run automations on any email subscriber that engaged with one of their CTAs
• Track conversion rates on the entire campaign, as well as on each CTA
• Automatically turn off their Broadcast at the end of their campaign, and switch back to displaying their website’s original calls-to-action, without manually having to update their ConvertFlow implementation.

And the best part? Once they set this up, Examine’s marketing team was free to work on other activities that ensured their flash sale was a success, rather than dedicating their team’s resources to updating their website during the promotion.

If you’ve managed any big marketing campaigns for your company before, and were directly involved the execution, then you know how much is involved in successfully rolling out a campaign.

From developing the strategy, to organizing the marketing calendar, to updating the website, writing content and emails, and designing the ad creative….woo! It’s a lot, especially if you’re a small team.

Without the right tools and prioritization, key components of your campaign can slip through the cracks. This could include the components that require a developer’s attention, like updating the website in time.

You can probably imagine the sense of relief Examine’s team felt when they were able to prepare their website CTAs ahead of time to promote their flash sale and schedule their Broadcast in advance. This allowed them to confidently move on to the next task, knowing their website would return to normal once the campaign has ended.

2. Target where on your website you’ll promote your campaign

After Examine’s team crafted their beautiful CTAs for their flash sale, and added them to their Broadcast campaign, their next step was to set targeting conditions for where on their website they wanted their calls-to-action to display.

As you can see, they promoted their flash sale through a variety ways on their website, with both embedded CTAs that appear native in their site’s content, and CTAs that were delivered by their team members.

Using ConvertFlow, they were able to inject CTAs into their website content to promote their flash sale in their blog posts, in their sidebar, on search result pages, and even with CTAs that engage their audience when visitors scrolled down their pages, or tried to exit their site.

Examine’s marketing team fully taps into their website audience, making their website an effective marketing channel for their business.

When planning your next marketing campaign, think about how you too can use your website like a marketing channel, as well as think about what opportunities exist in your site’s layout to engage visitors and get them to take action during your campaigns.

To give you some ideas, here are some common locations on a website where many brands include calls-to-action that drive visitors to take the next step…

• In the homepage’s hero section
• In the blog’s sidebar
• In the content of a blog post
• At the end of a blog post
• In the footer
• In slideup hooks that engage visitors as they scroll down the page
• Above the navbar

3. Promote your campaign across your marketing channels

With their Broadcast scheduled to go live on their site at the designated launch time for their 24-hour flash sale, the next step for Examine’s team was to coordinate the promotion of their flash sale across the rest of their marketing channels.

As Examine kicked off the celebration for the 3 year anniversary of their Examine Research Digest, they promoted their flash sale by email, through dedicated blog posts, social media and via other channels they use.

Taking this multi-channel approach (and ensuring their materials are displayed nicely in each platform) allowed Examine to reach their audience where they were, and drive them to the website where they would see the special offer to get a 40% discount when they subscribed to Examine’s Research Digest.

The result of their campaign led to thousands of visitors taking action to get the 40% discount offer during the 24-hour period.

If you’re preparing any campaigns for Black Friday, Cyber Monday or for any other holidays or events, think about using a Broadcast to automate the promotion of your campaign on your website, and to get direct conversion stats on your campaign as a whole, as well as on each call-to-action you launch on your site.

Aside from streamlining your workflow and gaining control of launching your campaigns without help from developers, you’ll save yourself and your team lots of time. This way, everyone can focus on what they do best.

If you haven’t seen it already, check out Examine’s story to see how Examine.com captured 29,934 new leads in less than 3 months using ConvertFlow.

‍