The holiday promotions are the part of any e-commerce businesses. To get more sales, there are a lot of small things to care about from the content, design and configuration part of your Shopify store. Some things might be missed during the preparation & execution part of the promotion campaign. Based on SellerSmith experience plus deep research, the Shopify promotion holiday checklist has been born. The main goal of this checklist helps you as the Shopify merchant to be prepared, run and do after promotion stages. Whether you are running the Christmas, BFCM, Eastern or other holidays this checklist will help you to increase sales with promotion campaign.

To follow with holidays events visit this website https://www.timeanddate.com/holidays/

 

Choose the country and year then you’ll find the list of holidays events. A quite convenient for searching promotion events.

 

Preparation - Website

Make the shipping policy clear

The Blankie Tails brand provide the very clear policy with the shipping and return. They have the free shipping USA for orders $50+, and international shipping starts with $19+. More information you provide better the conversion rate and the return items rate can be decreased significantly. On the product page of their product, the shipping information is mentioned in two places: (1) as the menu icon in the header area and (2) as the part of product page content.

Check yourself Shark Blanket for Adults and Teens product page to see how it looks in reality.

 

Clicking on the menu item icon in the header area, you’ll be redirected to the page with Shipping and Returns policy. The information on that page is precise and short organized in the form of question and answer. What we like on this page is that there is the clear Call To Action (CTA) with guidance to the customer if they need support. 

 

Double check the website customer’s flow

The user’s behavior is an entirely different when there is the promotion and without it. You have friends around, find at least a few one and ask for a favor to test your Shopify store by assigning the specific task. For example, ask him to buy your product and execute the short usability testing. When he finishes the purchase process, ask for a feedback and improve your store.

 

The full usability test flow takes the time, resource, and money to organize. However, just asking friends might be the best budget option. At least some obvious “usability navigation bugs” might be discovered then you’ll improve the store conversion rate.

As the alternative way, ask the help from the Shopify Community forum. On the forum, you can find the section “Feedback On My Store” where people ask for help. The forum is a quite crowded place, so people also exchange feedback with each other.

 

Cross browser checking your Shopify store

Your Shopify store might look a little bit different on Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Safari, Edge or other browsers. There is no necessary to optimize and test on all browser, but just keep in mind to test the store appearance on the most popular browsers. Before execution, the cross-browser checking you can check the browser's usage of your existing users via Google Analytics.

You can find the report in the Audience - Technology -  Browser. In our example, we have about 72% users using Google Chrome browser, the second place after that browser is Safari with 16%. Just making sure that our website looks on Google Chrome and Safari already affect on almost 90% of visitors.

There are more valuable tips with website preparation in the Shopify Promotion holiday checklist pdf file. You can download it via the box below. 

As for now, let's move forward with further things to do with the checklist during the promotion period.

 

During the Promotion period

Keep your eyes on Google Analytics metrics

Selling in the retail store, you can apparently see how many customers come and leave the store. The same picture happens with your Shopify store, and Google Analytics can show you how many visitors take a look at your store. Keep your attention closely to the visitor's data daily during the promotion campaign.

 

 

Also, GA can show you where visitors come from and which promotion landing page they visited. Setting up correctly GA, you can see the conversion rate by channels and estimate the ROI from the overall promotion campaign.

 

Monitor Shopify server status

Shopify has the live status system update at status.shopify.com During the promotion if you experience any issues inside the store, the first place need to check is the website above. Just a few days ago there was the issue with accessing the Shopify Partners dashboard. The system reported back, and the resolution status has been updated on the page.

 

Install & Monitor your store with Shopify mobile app

Manage and monitor your store from the mobile application and Shopify has the native iPhone app. This app allows you to track daily sales and quickly edit content for the urgent cases. Also, with the recent Shopify update release, you can create the sharable discount coupon code.

 

Post promotion activities

Change the notification bar message

During the promotion period, you might be installed Quick Announcement Bar by Hextom or similar solutions from the App marketplace. When the promotion is over, don’t forget to disable the announcement. Alternatively, you can replace the message with “notify me about the new promotion deal”. In that way, you can collect future email subscribers.

There are other tips mentioned in the Shopify Checklist holiday promotion guide. You can discover more tips to boost your sales via the guide below. We hope that you found useful the content for your Shopify store.