Behind the Scenes of AppSumo Marketing (3/13/26)

Here’s what’s happening in marketing at AppSumo this week:

1. Transactions Up 17%

Good week. Transactions up 17% week-over-week. Solid start to March.

Brand sentiment is trending the right direction too: positive mentions roughly doubled over the last 3 months while negative mentions stayed flat. Love seeing that.

2. Partner Playbook

Every month we go deep with a few partners. Not just list their deal, but help them promote across X, YouTube, LinkedIn, Meta ads, everything.

SendPilot has been awesome. They’re game to try every channel. We built them a Reddit plan, connected their socials for partnership ads, and that meme-style ad? One of their top performers. They even put AppSumo right on their homepage. Love partners who go all-in.

VoiceDash just dropped their first LinkedIn post through the playbook and timed it with their Android app launch. We published a “this feature just dropped” video for their deal page.

3. Affiliates: +142% After AI Week

Our AI Week affiliate playbook worked. The affiliates we activated drove $136K in the two weeks after, up 142% vs the previous period. Now we’re running the same playbook for Build Different with a bigger outreach list.

If you’re an affiliate, keep an eye out.

4. Ambassadors Growing

Our ambassador program grew 32% this month. Big shoutout to Robert Leitinger, our German ambassador. We’re building him a German-native landing page with a video and activating a German subnetwork. First real test of growing ambassadors into the EU.

5. Email Wins

Our revamped redemption reminders are crushing it: 36% open rate vs 23% before. And “back in stock” notifications for sold-out deals? 49% open rate, 37% CTR. Those are wild numbers for email.

6. Build Different Launches March 16

Our next big event. Full ad suite is done, light/dark variants, all shipped and scheduled. Also testing social proof ads for Emailit and Reap using real reviews from Product Hunt, Trustpilot, and G2.

7. What’s Working in Ads

The LinkedIn-to-Meta pipeline is becoming a thing. We screenshot top-performing organic LinkedIn posts from partners and run them as Meta ads. Here’s an actual example, a SendPilot founder’s LinkedIn post turned straight into a Meta ad:

We also validated the “us vs. them” comparison format. URNetwork at $29 vs NordVPN, Surfshark, ExpressVPN. The side-by-side pricing makes the deal obvious:

8. New Deals Coming

Reached out to 100 more founders this week. Early yeses from Taskade, Yess.ai, and AssistLoop AI. More coming.

9. AI in Our Workflow

Using Claude for Google Ads to start actually automating the ads, creatives, targeting around the clock. The hype on X is fake as it’s not as easy or good as others seem but super promising.

Written by our CMO Ilona Abramova.

Originally published as an article on X on 2026-03-16.