296. How to Simplify Your Q4 Marketing Strategy Without Sacrificing Success

Every year, when the holiday season rolls around, eCommerce business owners ask me how they can simplify their Q4 marketing plan while remaining as impactful as possible. 

I am a firm believer that you should go as all out in your marketing strategy as you possibly can during this time, even if it means you have to spend a bit of extra time working to get things prepared… because it is the biggest shopping season of the year. 

Some things I wouldn’t necessarily skip are running a pre-launch campaign and building an early access list, creating an omnichannel marketing campaign, and sending a whole bunch of emails. 

But I am also a big believer in doing less to make more. 

Prefer to listen to the episode? Click here.

In the case of your Q4 marketing campaign, I see it as not necessarily cutting things from your list or strategy, but optimizing how you execute them so it takes less effort and causes less stress

So today, I wanted to share a few tips and tricks and things to consider so that you can simplify your marketing strategy without sacrificing its success.

Keep Your Promotion Simple

For your Black Friday promotion, I encourage you to keep it as simple as possible. While I’ve talked about the different promotions you can run and how the typical outcomes they have

The majority of the time I would recommend either running a straight percentage off discount across your entire store or across a select number of items. For example, if you wanted to exclude your best sellers. 

The main reason for this is that it’s easy to execute, it’s easy to market, and it’s easy for your customers to understand. 

While I love a good buy more save more because it encourages people to spend more and can cushion your margin, it can be confusing and lead to more customer service issues. 

That’s not to say any discount that isn’t a straight discount is inherently bad and you shouldn’t do them, but they can be a better choice if your goal is to keep things simple. 

The other thing I recommend when it comes to promotions is carrying the same promotion through to Cyber Monday. 

While there is an argument to be made for offering something different to reignite your customer base and get them to pay attention again or potentially bring them back for another purchase it too can potentially cause customer service issues, or just be confusing. Plus you have to worry about updating your website, maybe you have to change out a banner, for example, you can the confusion of time zone, etc. 

It’s also why I don’t generally recommend 12 days of Christmas sale or anything like that. 

Again, not inherently bad, but often more work than it’s worth. 

Automate the Updates to Your Website

When it comes to marketing these promotions, one of the most important things you’ll need to do is make sure you update your website so that it reflects your current promotions. 

This might look like updating the banner on your home page, putting a banner across your collection pages, or maybe even using a pop-up from your email service provider. 

However you decide to promote your sale on your site, I recommend automating that so you don’t have to worry about making changes at random times of the night or causing confusion by taking it down too late. 

There are a few different ways you can go about this. 

Using Launchpad on Shopify Plus for Black Friday Promotions

If you’re on Shopify Plus, you can use Launchpad to publish a new version of your theme. So you’d set one up to publish when the promo goes live and another one when the promo is over. 

Show/Hide Timed Banners on Shopify for Promotions

Some apps will let you show/hide a banner section by setting a start and end time. This is one of my favorite features of the Design Packs app.*

For example, on your holiday home page, if you want to show a different hero banner. You’d set up one to appear before the sale goes into effect, one during your sale, and then one after the sale expires. 

If you just wanted to have a banner across your entire website, or your Black Friday collection, you would just have to schedule it during your active sale times. 

If you’re so inclined, you could also hire a developer to create a section like this for you. I had someone do it for me at my previous day job. Check out Store Tasker or Hey Carson for one-off small development jobs. 

Creating Custom Shopify Site Banners with Metafields

You could do this as well with a combination of metaobjects, metafields, and Shopify flow. I hadn’t really thought about that until now. It’s definitely a bit cumbersome initially, but could be a pretty cool setup overall and potentially allow you to eliminate paid apps if you’re using them. 

Of course, I can’t explain every last detail of how to set that up here, you’ll have to do a little research on the tech side of it if you’re interested. I do plan on updating my Shopify Course with some Shopify Flow how-tos, and potentially releasing that as a separate product too, but it’s gonna be a bit before I can get that done. 

In the meantime, let me give you a rundown of how that could work. 

Quick note about this – using the strategy for the home page might prove difficult. You can access Market metafields on the home page, but it doesn’t look like you can update them with Shopify flow. I tried to do a quick and dirty set up to see if you could do it with company metafields, but the implementation with flow is a little more advanced and for the purposes of this episode, I just couldn’t get that deep into the research of it. 

First, you’d create a metaobject with your promo offer. This could be just an image field where you upload an entire finished banner as an image, or you could create the fields to match an existing section you have in your theme. For example a background image, a heading, text, etc. Either way, you want it to match some specific section that already exists for simplicities sake. 

Then you’d create a metafield that references that metaobject where you want it to appear, whether it’s collections, products, etc That metafiled would then reference the metaobject that you created which essentially lets you assign an entry from the metaobject to the metafield.

In your theme customizer, you add a section that references the metafield. You’ll need to make sure your theme is set to only show a section if that metafield has a value so it doesn’t show a blank section. 

Then, the magic happens when you use Shopify Flow, the free automation app by Shopify, to assign and then remove a value to the metafield. You set the flow at a scheduled time to add the value, then set a scheduled time to remove the value. 

Unfortunately, it’s not quite as straightforward for home page updates, but paired with a standard timed banner, that you either use the design packs app for or get custom coded would give you a lot of flexibility. 

I especially like this strategy because it essentially lets you time almost any section layout.

If you go with the Design Packs app or a custom-coded section, you’re limited to that one section. For example a banner with text over it. Using the metaobject, metafield, and flow option, you can create the metaobject definition to match the section or sections you want because the metaobject allows you to use multiple different types of fields. So if you have a section with side by side images, you could create two file fields on that metaobject definition. 

As I said, I literally came up with this idea as I was preparing this episode and just did a few quick tests to confirm my theory. Ultimately, if you’re already comfortable with metaobjects, metafields, Shopify flow, this could be a really cool way to automate some more items on your website. 

Using Forms to Promote Your Black Friday Sales

If you’re on Klaviyo*, you can also schedule forms and use them for promo purposes by removing the fields and just putting the promo content on them. I would have this appear as a slide-out vs. a pop-up. 

Other form apps can likely do this as well. Unfortunately, Shopify forms don’t let you remove the email field so it wouldn’t work for this purpose. 

Be Repetitive on Social Media by Repurposing Content

When it comes to social media one of the biggest struggles people have is staying consistent. Myself included. But in most cases, the root cause of this is overthinking the content, feeling like you have to reinvent the wheel every time, and that if you said something once you can’t say it again. 

The truth is, repetition is your friend in marketing and because social posts have such a short shelf life, you can absolutely stick to a few key messages that you repeat over and over throughout the season and just change the format you use to convey those ideas. 

There’s a workshop on content repurposing in Content Badassery, a mini-course I offer. But here’s a general way to apply this. 

Let’s say you have a gift guide with 5 categories and each has 5 products in it. You can use that same gift guide to generate multiple different posts for social. 

• Single static post that promotes the gift guide as a whole – 1 post
• A carousel post that shares all the categories included in the gift guide – 1 post with 5 slides
• A carousel post for each individual gift guide – 5 posts each with 5 slides
• A video where you feature the best seller from each category – 5 posts
• A video where you share all the items for each gift guide – 5 posts

You get the idea, right?

You just want to take the general focus of your marketing campaign and present it in different ways so it feels fresh. 

Reuse Your Emails

Speaking of repurposing, the next way to simplify your marketing strategy this year is to reuse your emails from previous years. 

Yes, literally reuse your emails. 

One of our Lounge members is really short on time this year due to some conflicting obligations. She’s essentially running the same promo as she did last year and for the most part promoting the same products. She has a handful of things that she only brings in during this time and they’re always a big hit for her. 

She asked how it would look if she reused her emails. My answer, it’s been a year and it’s unlikely anyone will notice. 

Sure, go in and update some subject lines, maybe change out the products you’re featuring if you need to, or make any other minor adjustments based on what the data is telling you – but otherwise… just reuse them; no need to start from scratch. 

Schedule Everything in Advance

While it might initially feel like a lot of work upfront, to create all the banners, create all the emails, create all the social posts ahead of time… well because it is. Having that all created and scheduled means during the actual selling season you can just focus on getting the orders out the door and spending time with your family. 

Sure, you might have to go in and tweak something later, but it’s still easier than trying to keep up with getting everything out as you go. 

Of course, every email platform allows you to schedule campaign emails in advance. You’ll want to make sure recipients are determined at send time so the segment you send to is as updated as possible. 

When it comes to emails during big promotions, someone always asks if it’s possible to do this through automation. And while in some limited circumstances, the answer is yes, the truth is, the general workarounds you need to make it work, isn’t worth the effort. It’s just as easy, if not easier to set everything up as an individual campaign and use inclusion and exclusion segments to make sure you’re hitting the right people. 

For social, there are a ton of schedulers out there but you can use the Meta Business Manager planner for free. It allows you to adjust content for Facebook and Instagram so it matches the platform. You can also schedule reels, stories, etc. It’s super flexible and free.