How Outdoor Retail Leaders Use Promotions to Drive Sales

Key Takeaways

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Messaging —  Clearance Sales Drives the Most Site Traffic: For both Atmosphere and Sport Chek, the Clearance sales event drove the highest number of site visits while the Friends & Family Event drove the least number of site visits.‍

Cadence —  Sport Chek is Running 8 Sale Promos per Month: Sport Chek is aggressively advertising their sale events with the highest number of promotional ad campaigns amongst the competitive set. In addition to 8 unique sale events per month, Sport Chek also has a weekly deals campaign that features new discounts every week. ‍

Tactic —  45% of Sale Events were Category-Specific Sales: Category-specific sales feature one type of product such as running shoe promos or camping equipment promos. The second most popular sales event was flash sales, followed by Friends & Family, Seasonal Events (i.e: Easter, Back to School) and Clearance. ‍

Tactic —  Audience Interest Targeting: For Decathlon’s free shipping promo, they used three different creatives, all targeting a different audience from young parents to fishermen. Consider pairing interest targeting with unique creatives that are personalized for each audience group to generate a higher click through rate. 

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Amongst the competitive set, the most popular type of promotional messaging is sale events, followed by membership discounts. In particular, 45% of Sale Events were category-specific sales (i.e: running shoe or camping equipment promos).

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Sport Chek and Atmosphere both focus their efforts on major sale events and are the only brands that offer weekly deals. Altitude-Sports focuses on membership discounts while Decathlon only runs free shipping campaigns.

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Sport Chek has the highest number of promotional ad campaigns with an average of 8 promos per month, followed by Atmosphere with 5 promos per month.

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For their Free Shipping campaign, Decathlon is targeting a wide variety of audiences from young parents to fishermen. However, the main promotion (free shipping over $49) remains the same for each target audience.

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Altitude Sports is testing two types of promos for their membership program: a membership discount and a limited time promotion (15% off) for members only.

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Both Sport Chek and Atmosphere offer 50% off as part of their “Weekly Deals” program. Sport Chek creatives are tailored to different athlete groups as they feature different equipment while Atmosphere creatives are generic.

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For Atmosphere, the Clearance Sales Event generated the highest number of site visits (101K), followed by the Flash Sale (20K) while the Easter Event had the lowest CPM at $3.64.

For Sport Chek, the Clearance Sales Event generated the highest number of site visits (2.2M), followed by the Back to School Flash Sale (27K) which also had the lowest CPM at $2.77