How To Schedule a Sale on Shopify

Promotions have always been an effective way to grow revenue for ecommmerce brands. So much so that customers have come to expect that brands will be participants in big season sales events like Cyber Monday and Black Friday.

A survey commissioned by RetailMeNot found that:

• 44% of consumers now look for discounts more often than they used to
• 78% believe that discounts add value to their purchase
• 66% say using discounts makes them feel smarter

For growing brands that rely on promotions–coordinating multiple sales along with the day to day duties of operating a scaling brand can be a challenge.

This guide will show you how to schedule a sale on Shopify, and we’ll go over the best practices for designing a successful product promotion as well. 

Scheduling Recurring Sales for Your Store

With Shogun’s Personalization feature, you can design and publish multiple versions of the same page that changes based on the time and day of the site visitor.

Among many other potential uses, this allows you to set up a custom version of a page promoting a recurring sale that is only visible when the sale is actually available. You can use design elements such as banners and sliders to promote the sale when customers can access it, and then you can hide these elements when the sale is unavailable.

For example, an online sporting goods store might have a sale on every day of the week for a certain type of item, such as free shipping for all camping gear on Mondays, 30% off hiking boots on Tuesdays, etc. Personalization saves you from the stress of needing to manually publish each custom page design every time the sale rolls around. Promotions can be set up in advanced and automatically roll over as the days of the week come and go. 

To use Shogun’s Personalization feature to schedule recurring sales, simply follow these steps:

Step 1. Open the Shogun app and select the “Personalization” option in the left sidebar of the main dashboard. 

Step 2. Select “Segments”. 

Step 3. Select “Create segment”. 

Step 4. Here, you can set the conditions for when visitors will be shown the personalized version of the page. There are several options to choose from, including the referring URL, the visitor’s geolocation, and previous purchasing behavior — as well as the day of the week and the time of day. 

Step 5. Once your new audience segment has been created and saved, go back to the main Shogun dashboard and select the page you would like to customize.

Step 6. This will open the page in Shogun’s visual editor. Now, select the “Personalization” icon located in the top-right corner of your screen. 

Step 7. Select “Turn on personalization”. 

Step 8. Use the “Your saved segments” option to connect the new page variant to the audience segment you created earlier.

Step 9. Select “Add variant”.

Step 10. Once a new page variant has been added, you can use the tabs located near the top of your screen to switch between which variant you’re editing. 

Step 11. Whenever you’re done making edits, save your changes and select “Publish experience”. The custom page variant will then be displayed on the days and times that you’ve designated, while the default version will be shown at all other times. 

Scheduling One-Off Promotions in the Future

Do you want to schedule a sale or product page launch some time in the distant future? Shogun has a feature for that as well. 

As with personalized experiences, you can use Shogun’s page scheduling tool to show a custom version of a page only at certain times. What sets this method apart is that it allows you to create a page variant that’s shown for longer than a week before it reverts back to normal. This makes it a particularly helpful tool for long-term promotional campaigns, such as the weeks leading up to major holidays like Halloween, Thanksgiving/Black Friday, Christmas, etc.

To use this feature in Shogun:

Step 1. After opening the page you want to customize in Shogun’s visual editor and making all the changes that you would like to publish later, click on the arrow next to the “Publish” button. 

Step 2. Select “Schedule publish”. 

Step 3. Use the “Schedule this page” settings to select when the update will be published. This is also where you can decide when the page will revert back to the original version. 

Once everything is set up, select “Save changes”. 

You’ll receive a notification to let you know that the scheduled post has been saved successfully. 

The Keys to a Successful Sale or Product Promotion

With the right discounting strategy, you’ll be able to increase sales, reduce your abandoned cart rate, and persuade people who are unfamiliar with your brand to go ahead and try it out. 

But it should be noted that there’s a wrong way to do this. If your particular approach to discounts is misaligned with your customer preferences or business goals, you’ll end up wasting time on a marketing campaign that doesn’t generate much value. 

Figuring out the answers to the following questions will help guide your strategy in the right direction:

1. What are your goals? The best type of discount to offer will depend on what kind of goal you’re targeting. For example, merchants trying to grow their customer base should try offering an exclusive discount to first-time buyers, while those concerned about retention could offer a loyalty-based discount to their biggest customers to help convince them to stick around. And if your average order value is low (for reference, the average AOV globally is $137), you could improve that figure by requiring customers to reach a certain order total threshold to access your discount.
2. How are you going to make people aware of your discount? A discount isn’t going to do your store any good if people don’t even know that it exists. Use eye-catching design elements such as banners and popups to alert visitors about your discount. Reaching out to your email list will also help you attract attention. 
3. How long will your discount last? Offering discounts for only a limited time will entice visitors to act on it, but you don’t want to make the duration so short that it’s over before most of your customers are aware of it. The optimal length varies for each business and type of campaign, so you’ll need to experiment to see what works best for you. To give you a benchmark to work with, a recent analysis of thousands of software companies found that five weeks is the most effective length for discount campaigns. 
4. Will your discounts be product-specific, collection-specific, or site-wide? Your discounts could be available for everything on your site or only for certain products or collections. It’s usually best to be specific, as this will keep the customer focused on making a purchase. Giving customers too many discounted options may make it difficult for them to decide on what to buy.
5. Will you use coupon codes or apply discounts automatically? There are two ways to implement a discount — you can provide your customers with a coupon code, or you can apply the discount automatically. Coupon codes feel more intentional and exclusive, but they add an extra step to the checkout process, which could end up increasing your abandoned cart rate. On the other hand, automatic discounts are more efficient, but also more likely to go unnoticed. In general, coupon codes are best used for loyalty programs as they heighten the exclusivity effect, while the pros of automatic discounts outweigh the cons for most other types of discount campaigns. 

Finally, it’s important to note that what works for one brand may not work for another. In addition to the visual editor and personalized experiences, Shogun also offers an A/B testing tool that you can use to try out different techniques, objectively determine what works best, and develop the perfect strategy for your specific brand.