Year: 2019

As summer ends and a new school year begins, businesses are greeted with a special chance to get creative and stimulate sales with back to school campaigns made to reach shoppers. For some, this sales period is a practice test before the holiday season; for others, it’s a playground to experiment with new products or offers crafted specifically for returning students and their parents.

To help ensure your next back to school campaign passes with flying colors, we spoke with four merchants about the lessons they learned planning and producing sales events for one of the busiest shopping periods of the year:

1. Introduce limited edition products (without discounts) 
2. Launch products to a new demographic
3. Partner with organizations to raise awareness and funds
4. Offer bundles and gifts with purchase

Introduce limited edition products without discounting

Ross Canter grew up immersed in food culture. As a member of the family behind the landmark Canter’s Deli in Los Angeles, Ross spent his childhood surrounded by the offerings of the delicatessen and later found himself fascinated with creating his own baked goods.

Ross’ lightbulb moment was brought on by having fun with his baking. “What if I made a Reese’s peanut butter cup brownie, a cheesecake brownie, or any kind of candy into a brownie?” Ross recalls. He first began testing his candy-inspired confections during the onset of his career, pursuing writing internships in Hollywood. “Every day, I would make five or six different kinds of brownies. As soon as my internship ended in the early afternoon, I’d wrap up all of these brownies and walk around the outside of office buildings for a couple of hours until I sold out,” he recalls.

Ross later landed himself roles as a writer and producer, but his newfound responsibilities forced him to put his jaunt into baking on hold. Then, in 2007, the Writers Guild of America unexpectedly went on strike, and Ross found himself out of work.

To get his mind off of things, Ross’ wife Melanie suggested turning his baking into a business and Cookie Good was born. Even though Ross returned to writing after the strike, fans of his baking kept on asking for more. In 2014, the couple took the plunge and got a commercial kitchen to turn Cookie Good into full time business.

Life and business partners Ross and Melanie Canter, the owners and creators behind the fun flavors at Cookie Good. Cookie Good

The Canters view the back to school season as a time of play. Each year, they launch a new eclectic set of cookies and brownies for a limited time during early September. With options ranging from apple fritters, Cheetos, cookie dough, cheesecake, and Oreos, no recipe is too unconventional, so long as it elicits what the team describes as the “Cookie Good” feeling—a rich, distinctive flavor able to recall an equally pleasant memory. Finding this elusive sweet spot, however, takes quite a bit of work. “We typically need a few months to experiment with flavors and get them exactly right,” Ross tells us.

The 2018 lunch box inspired back to school cookies created by Cookie Good. Cookie Good

“We try to make every flavor fun, nostalgic, and something that people want to send to kids, whether they’re still in grade school or heading off to college,” Ross says. “And, of course, for people like me, a grownup who eats like a kid, who just want to eat a Ding Dong like a cookie.”

Cookie Good’s boxes are an example of the Canters’ unique take on specials. In lieu of pricing discounts or bundling specials, the team’s fresh, offbeat flavors serve as their only available limited-time offer. Marketing solely on social channels and email, the unique, limited-time flavors have provided a natural way to generate hype, and they’ve built a following of fans and subscribers who want to get the inside scoop on when to dig into the fun flavors before they sell out.

Launch products to a new demographic

While dress shopping for her daughter, Rebecca Melsky found the majority of patterns and prints available to be thoroughly humdrum. Flowers and butterflies were in ample supply, but where, in this sea of garments, were the cute dresses with dinosaurs, trucks, and rockets? Inspired to provide options that more closely spoke to her daughter’s interests, and to encourage girls to decide what it means to be girly, she started Princess Awesome with her co-founder, Eva St. Clair.

A student wears Princess Awesome’s “I Spy Pi” super twirler dress. Princess Awesome

Rebeca and Eva originally made items by hand before switching over to a manufacturer and launching publicly on Kickstarter, which is also when they began making their first serious investments in marketing. Since those early days, the Princess Awesome team recognized the back to school season naturally created a heightened interest in their products, which is precisely why they use this period to litmus test more inventive marketing approaches.

The “Atomic Flurry” Twirly Play dress being modeled. Princess Awesome

The team often launches new patterns and even wholly new products in the lead up to back to school. To support these releases, they’ll also run campaigns in parallel through Instagram, Facebook, and email, to amplify word of mouth they receive organically. “We love to showcase how clothing is a form of expression, and we enjoy highlighting the different subjects that kids are interested in,” Rebecca says, a philosophy which has influenced their marketing strategy.

With fans posting photos of what their kids are wearing to school on social channels, the team turned the tradition into giveaway campaigns during the period by encouraging more people to share their Princess Awesome outfits on social.

Princess Awesome’s newly released line of dresses for adults. Princess Awesome

This year’s back to school period will mark a new chapter for Princess Awesome as the team launches their first set of adult dresses. Expanding their horizons and customer base, Rebecca tells us that their back to school campaigns will expand to include the other crucial member of the classroom: teachers. Going beyond the typical campaigns, Princess Awesome is marking this back to school season with experimentation expanding their catalogue.

Free Reading List: Social Media Marketing Tactics

Want to learn more about how social media can help drive sales? Download our free, curated list of high-impact articles.

Partner with organizations to raise awareness and funds

The idea behind LunchSkins was cooked up at founder Kirsten Quigley’s kitchen table. One afternoon, after returning home, Kirsten’s children shared an alarming fact they’d learned at school: every day, millions of plastic baggies were thrown out thanks to packed lunches. In response, Kirsten immediately sought out alternatives to the single-use plastics that were prevalent in the family’s own household but found most available solutions came up short.

Determined to make a dishwasher-safe, grease- and moisture-proof, durable sandwich bag, Kirsten created her own product and the first edition of LunchSkins was born. Now in business for over a decade, LunchSkins was featured in O, The Oprah Magazine and can be found online and at major retailers like Target and Wholefoods.

With most customers being parents and students, the back to school season has always been a crucial time for LunchSkins. Shannon Peters, their Chief Financial Officer, told us, “Back to school is equivalent to the retail holiday shopping season for LunchSkins—our team processes thousands of orders during this period. The business commonly sees a 60% uptick in online sales during back to school season, aided in part by extensive marketing campaigns that are built nearly six months in advance.”
Even though back to school is unquestionably their busiest time of the year for sales, the LunchSkins team also makes time to fundraise alongside organizations that align with their objectives. This summer, Shannon shared, they “partnered with the Oceanic Preservation Society in July 2019 for two weeks, donating a dollar for every Sea Turtle Bag that was sold.” Due to the success of that campaign, LunchSkins will once again partner with Oceanic Preservation Society during back to school to reduce plastic use and bring more awareness to preserving oceanic life.

Offer bundling and gifts with purchase

Backpacks and back to school seem to go hand in hand, and that’s why the team at Parkland Design & Manufacturing, makers of sustainable accessories, refer to the shopping season as the “backpack Super Bowl.” As backpack makers who want to alleviate some of the environmental impacts with production, Parkland Design & Manufacturing turns plastic water bottles into a polyester fabric to make their product exteriors with 100% recycled plastic. Their fans proudly share their packs on social media with the hashtag #BagsFromBottles.

Breaking with standard benchmarks, Parkland Design & Manufacturing’s upswing in sales during the back to school season lasts longer than most businesses. “We see all areas of business activity increase drastically from July to September,” says marketing manager, Daryl Trinidad. Not keen to slack off during back to school, the team always looks to boost sales driven by this extended busy period with multiple timely marketing campaigns. “One of the most successful campaigns to date has been the Backpack Lunch Kit combo, where customers receive $10 off a backpack with a lunch kit purchase,” says Daryl. To get those bonus marks, the team also offers a gift with each purchase during back to school season, giving away free reusable water bottles last year and reusable straws this fall.
Leveraging the social media love from #BagsFromBottles, Parkland Design & Manufacturing usually place ads on Facebook and Instagram to be where most of their social engagements are. Daryl also sees these bundling and gift-with-purchase campaigns as a cost-effective way to build brand awareness, noting that their most recent ad, which features GIF animations of lifestyle imagery, was one of the best performing to date. The team has been planning this year’s campaign since the spring and is on track to meet their goal of a 30% growth over the same period last year.

Ensuring your next campaign makes the grade

Before class is back in session, it’s time to test out some new ideas for the back to school period. The varied approaches, sales periods, and products from our featured merchants are reminders that you can play around with many areas of your business to build a campaign that fits your needs.

About the author

Shuang Esther Shan

Shuang is a storyteller at Shopify, fascinated by how change is created through commerce. When she’s not obsessively researching or glued to hearing the stories of merchants, she’s discovering new places—with a camera in hand.

Starting a Shopify store for the first time is such a fun experience. It can also be a bit nerve-wracking if you don’t know all the Shopify tricks that allow you to create a better online store. One of the biggest mistakes new store owners make involves over-optimizing the wrong things while forgetting a few of the essentials. In this article, we’ll break down the Shopify tips that’ll help you master the basics while making sure you’re focusing on the right stuff.

1. Remove logos with the draw tool

Using Shopify, you can now draw on your product photos. A handy way to use this feature would be to remove logos from your photos. As you can see in the photo below, I drew a red line. You can see that the line is broken and this was done by using the white brush to remove part of the red line. If you have a logo on your white background photo, using the white brush can be a handy way to easily remove the logo.

However, not all photos will have the logo on a plain white background. Sometimes, the logo will be placed on a photo. Fortunately, the color picker allows you to add any color code so you can match and draw on the exact color.

The easiest way to know the exact color code is to use a Chrome extension like ColorZilla (this is the one I’ve been using for over a year). It allows you to hover over color in a picture and capture the exact color code. You can then use this color code to place in the “Color picker” box where you see the letters “#ffffff.” This lets you remove logos on photos with colored backgrounds.

2. Change pricing from 26.99 to solid 27

Most online retailers who are looking to seem affordable add cents to all their prices. Walmart tends to end their prices with .97, while the average online retailer prices its products with .99 at the end. If you’re trying to position your brand as a bargain, adding cents might help make your brand seem more affordable.

However, not all dropshipping brands need to play the budget game. You can position your brand to appear more reputable by adding solid prices as Nike does.

Fortunately, you don’t need to manually create the ending of prices for your products on Shopify. If you want all your the to end in .97 like Walmart, .99 like the average budget brand or a solid number to seem more professional; you can use a Shopify setting to make it happen automatically.

You can do this in Settings > General > Store Currency > Change Formatting. I’ve set my store with no decimals, but you can set it with a decimal if you prefer.

3. Add all your policies to the footer

One of the biggest things new store owners forget to do is add policies to their website. Often, when customers browse websites, they want to look at the return policies to ensure that they can get a refund in case products are defective. Policies also add an element of legitimacy to your website. It helps build trust.

Fortunately, you don’t need to manually create your policies from scratch. You can take or modify the ones in your Shopify admin. However, keep in mind that you’ll be required to follow the policies on your website. If you accept refunds in your policies, then you also need to accept refunds when a customer asks for it.

You can find the policies in your Settings under Legal.

4. Update your product inventory monthly

With Oberlo’s one-click product import, people often get a bit eager and add hundreds of products in one go. Heck, even I’ve made the mistake of adding 423 products to my store only to be overwhelmed by the process.

So, let’s slow down a bit.

Focus on adding less than 25 products to your online store on your first day. I know how tempting it is to add them all, but you’ll be more likely to succeed if you focus on a smaller batch first.

Then, every week or every month, depending on how much time you have to work on your store, add a bunch of new products.

What you want to signal to Google (powerhouse of organic traffic) is that you update your website regularly. If you post all your products on day one and never post another product again, Google sees that you get traffic, but they don’t see the need to crawl your website. When you add new products, blog posts, or pages regularly, Google’s crawlers are aware of it.

The more you update your website, the more active your website appears and so the more organic traffic you’ll get back to your website.

So as an online retailer, create a schedule for how often you can manage to add new products. If you can do one new product a day – great. If you can only do 25 products a month – also great. But try to maintain a schedule that you can keep over the long-term to benefit from organic search traffic.

5. Promote on free channels if you don’t have the budget

Most people who run an online store for the first time want to make money as fast as possible. And so they turn to Facebook Ads so that they can hear their first cha-ching. I love that ambition you have. But if you’ve never created a Facebook Ad in your life, your first ad is more likely to result in an oh no!

To make your bank account grow, you need to be careful with how you spend your money. 

First, add your Facebook Pixel to your website. Then, create a retargeting ad on your website. This could be an add to cart retargeting ad which tends to convert the best (at least it does for me).

Now, to avoid spending too much money, focus all your efforts on driving free traffic to your website. Go on Pinterest and post a ton of products on your account. Be sure to pin other images as well so you don’t trigger your account as spam. You want to promote hard but still follow the terms of service.

Then, go on Instagram and post your products on there as well. If you’ve already built a following on Instagram, share links to your products in Instagram Stories. If you don’t have an audience, reach out to niche fan pages like “fashion lovers” and ask them if they can share a sponsored story on their account. In my experience, fan pages have lower ad rates than models.

If you’ve created blog content for your website, you can share those on Twitter. I like to run retargeting ads targeting blog content exclusively in case people didn’t realize I also had a store attached to my website. This is my second best retargeting ad.

By doing retargeting ads and focusing on driving free traffic, you keep your ad costs low in those early months as you learn how to promote your online store. It’ll prevent you from overspending money you don’t have. It’s about making sure you develop the foundational marketing skills you’ll need to succeed long-term but without going into debt.

This can be a bit of a long-term slow play. However, by doing this, you’ll be less likely to break-even on your acquisition costs and you could build a profitable online store.

6. Always test your store’s mobile settings

Before you run your first ad campaign, you need to double-check to see what your website looks like on mobile. For example, when you create an ad, not everyone will view the website on their laptop. Some might see the ad on their phone or tablet.

Sometimes, when looking over your website on a different device, you might notice that images aren’t resized properly. By knowing that the model’s face in the picture is cut off, you might choose to crop the picture differently so that it appears in the same format as the desktop version.

Mobile testing is especially important if your main sources of traffic are from ads, influencer marketing, or if traffic comes from an app like Instagram or Pinterest.

To test on mobile, all you need to do is visit your website on your phone or tablet. Browse every page of your website and look for cut-off pictures, hidden calls to action, and monitor how much scrolling you need to do on each page.

7. Install ready-made products on your store

If you’ve just signed up for Shopify or are thinking of signing up for Shopify, you might not know what to sell. Some Shopify store owners sell unique products that they create themselves. Other online retailers purchase bulk inventory at wholesale prices. You can also create print on demand products which allow you to customize your own products. And with Oberlo (that’s us) you can browse millions of products that you can start selling the same day without having to buy inventory.

The fastest way to start an online store is to sell proven products. Using Oberlo, you can browse products by viewing the order volume to determine the product’s popularity. You can also view trending products to find the best-selling products right now. By selling proven products instead of trying to create your own, you give yourself a head start to success.

The cool thing about selling products found on Oberlo is that you don’t need to buy inventory up front. You only pay for the product once the product is sold to a real, paying customer. This helps keep your startup costs low making it a bit more affordable for the average person to start a business.

8. Customize the theme as little as possible

Shopify allows you to customize your theme any way you want. Amazing! But just because you can customize in any way, doesn’t always mean you should. So, if you’re a new entrepreneur, one of the Shopify tips, I highly recommend you follow is to customize your store as little as possible.

A professional designer created the theme you installed on your store. If it worked well enough for you to install it, it could work great at converting customers too.

When it comes to theme design, focus on changing the images so they’re relevant to your brand. If your theme works best for up to a certain number of products, optimize your store for that number or change your theme.

The biggest lesson I want you to take away with this is if you lack the design skills, it’s okay to rely on your theme’s designer. My best-converting store kept most of its theme design intact with slight changes on images and a couple of modifications on the homepage layout. However, the Google fonts, color palette, and general look of the store stayed the same.

Companies hire professional designers to modify the look of their website. If it’s not broken, don’t fix it. Save your energy for promoting your business.

9. Create a text logo

Every article, including some of mine, recommend creating logos. And by all means, you do want a logo. However, most of the time, when I look at a new store’s logo, it’s always painfully obvious that the store owner lacks design skills. It’s true; you can use a logo maker to create a logo for you. It helps you design a logo without needing design skills.

However, one of the biggest mistakes is when people have a colored store background, and they’ve downloaded their logo as a .jpg instead of .png you end up with this awkward white box around your logo. And this makes you a dead giveaway for being a total newb.

I know you’ve put a lot of work into choosing your name and designing a logo that looks great. However, the one thing I want to stress more than anything is that it’s okay to have a text-based logo. Your logo doesn’t need an image on it at all.

Brands like Lulus or MVMT Watches have very minimalist logos. They may add a small graphic beside their name, but overall the emphasis is on the name rather than on the design.

As a store owner, you’ll be wearing a lot of hats. And if you’re building a print on demand store, design skills are one of those hats. However, if you’re dropshipping with Oberlo, you don’t necessarily need to be a great graphic designer. Keep it simple.

You also want to watch out for image resolution. Many stores will have pixelated logos because they didn’t create a logo of the right size for the platform. Each theme will have its dimensions that you’ll need to optimize your logo for. You can contact your theme creator so you can get the logo dimensions right.

Conclusion

These Shopify tips will help you simplify the process of running your online store. By trying out some of these tips on your Shopify store, you’ll be able to build the right foundation to help set you up for success. Your online store doesn’t need to be as big as your competitors on day one. You can build up to become a bigger brand over time. It’s okay to keep your store simple at the beginning with fewer products, ready-made templates, and text-based logos. Ultimately, your success will boil down to your determination to succeed. So get your products in front of as many eyeballs as you can to help your online store’s sales will grow.