Hey, Scott Austin here. This podcast episode is going to be highly visual. So if you're listening to an audio only version, feel free to go to the show notes and find the link to the video so that you can watch what I'm doing on the screen and follow along more easily.That said, I'll try to make it as informational as possible for those that are listening to the audio only version.

All right. On to our episode.

In this episode, I want to talk to you about marketing campaigns and specifically going into detail on how I set up marketing campaigns for my clients, because there's a lot of technical little details that you have to pull together to make a complete campaign. So I'm going to do that by showing you two campaigns that we're doing in August for our clients.

Now, it's important to start off by saying, you know, the purpose of a marketing campaign and everybody has their own, you know, reasons why they're doing marketing campaigns. For me, the reasons I branch by doing marketing campaigns is to build awareness and draw attention to something that they're doing and have a unique, probably time bound message to create a sense of urgency to draw people under their store.

Now, some people's marketing campaigns are very generic and I've, you know, done podcast episodes in the past where I show certain brands that do the same campaign every week or every other week. And I think that just becomes noise when I'm a big fan of. Is having culturally relevant to your specific vertical marketing campaigns? And I'm also a fan of having campaigns that don't just give a discount.

All right. A lot of brands are doing a here's a coupon code 20% off on this product or whole catalog. I like campaigns that help increase your average order value, and also increase your customers awareness of the breadth of your product offerings.

So let me illustrate all of what I've just said by actually showing you real examples that are going on in August.

Now the first one we're gonna start with is rep the chip in, rep the chip sales coconut substrate for reptiles.

what they're doing for one of their August campaigns is August 14th is World Lizard Day. And here you can see the landing page for World Lizard Day. And I start all of my campaigns by building out a landing page.

Once we define what the campaign is going to be. Now, in this one here, we've actually got a fairly complex definition of the campaign. And what I mean by that is the offer is the more you spend, the more you're going to get for free. So if you spend more than $100, you can pick any of their care items.

Now rep the chip is known for the coconut substrate. So what we're doing in this campaign is building awareness of their care items. But $100 or more. Or you can choose any product from their whole collection of care items. Now, if you do 50 to $99, you can get an angled or straight hemostat and that's a 12 inch hemostat.

They sell 12 and 20, and that'll become important a little bit as I show you some things we had to do there. and then if you, you know, purchase between 30 and $49, you get an angle or straight tweezers and then all purchases between 15 and $29. get a free blade scraper. So in the top, offer the, number of products that are in that set that you can choose from is probably like 6 or 7.

and then there's two, in the hemostat, there's a straight and the angle and there's two products for the tweezers, once again, the street in the angle. And there's just one blade scraper. And once again, you'll see in the future. You know why I'm calling that out now? Because we do different things based on the number of products that you're ordering.

And we also show the customers that, hey, of the substrates, there's like five different types of substrate that they sell. These three are the best for lizards. And of course, we end our, landing page with a detailed explanation of the time ness of the campaign. this campaign just started on Sunday, August 11th. That's the day I'm recording this, and it will go into all the actual World Lizard Day on August 14th.

So 3 or 4 days, to give the customers a chance to purchase the products that they're looking for. So we have a landing page that explains the details. Now we're going to draw people into that landing page for email marketing, social marketing and advertising and all the other methods that this brand is using to build awareness, but we draw them all in to the landing page.

So now let's dive into the products that are for sale. And that is the substrate. And even though we mentioned that, you know, there's three of these substrates that are best for lizards, we're allowing them to pick from any of the substrate in the product catalog. And I'm just going to pick one here randomly.

And I'm just going to add it to the cart. So this is a $2,295 purchase. And you see when we get into the cart we're showing right up here. Hey, you know, you're between that threshold.

Right.

So anything between 15 and $29 will be we'll get the free blade scraper. So we go back to the cart. My cart value is 2295. And you can see that we're promoting the free plastic scraper. So if I click on that right now because this product is the one we're promoting is just a single product with no SKUs.

And I'm going to show you how that works in the back end. Because by default it's not that way.

we are just dropping that into their cart automatically.

And then you'll see that promotion goes away once they add that product to the cart. And then we have an automatic discount showing up instead of, you know, a discount code they have to use.

And that actually says, hey, World Lizard Day free scraper. Now let's get rid of the products in our cart and show you another scenario. So let's go back to our substrate. And now we're going to add in above $30 in cost.

And now what you see happen is we change the promotion up here, and this promotion says, hey, get free 12 inch tweezers, and you get to choose your tweezers now, because there's two different types of tweezers to choose from. We click on that element and it takes you to a collection of your tweezers that are free. And it shows, you know, in the title we're saying free tweezers for your tweezers, even though it shows the full price that they see the savings that they're getting.

So now on this page, I get to choose between do I want the straight or the angle? Let's say I want to go for the straight tweezers and then we show them their color options. Black, green. Red. Orange, oil slick I'm just going to pick orange and add that product to my cart. So now when I go back to the cart, that promotion at the top once again is gone.

And here we have another automatic discount showing up for free. Tweezers. And the same thing happens for the two tiers above this with the hemostat and the knee care product. and then if you know, they go into the checkout, you know that automatic discount code is going to continue to show up here. They can see, you know, the world your day free tweezers is the discount they're getting.

And they see they're getting their product for free.

So that's how we set up that campaign for the customer experience is the front end look of it. Let's dive into the back end of the Shopify store and show you some details that we do to bring this all together, because this is actually, you know, it takes a bit of work to set this up, and we have to added some tools to our toolbox.

the, our theme, we had to do some theme customization to make this work and use a couple apps also to bring it all together. So first let's go into the discounts and show, you know, our active discounts here. You can see here. There we go there automatic discounts. So here's the one for the scraper which is going to the one for the tweezers.

Because that's a little more complex of one. So what we do is we you know, we put in the name that shows up in the cart and in the checkout world Lizard Day free tweezers. And we specify the minimum purchase amount. In this case it was $30. And we also show what products that have to be. So we define it to be a specific collection.

And then we say that they got to hit that $30 threshold in any product in the store. And you know, if it's any product, even though we say it's the substrate, we just made it easier for ourselves and for our customers. As long as you get over $30 in your cart. You get this free product and then we specify what the customer gets, and they get a quantity of one from a specific collection.

So we made a collection for tweezers free gift. Right. So we're showing that word free in the product. And we're showing it in the collection so that we're reinforcing for customers even though we're showing the price. It's going to be free for you when you make that purchase. And those products. By the way let's just actually search. So here we have free tweezers, 12 inch straight.

If I search on the front end for free tweezers. You see no results at all for the word free. And that's because on that product, we actually went and made it a hidden product. And I'll show you that here in a second. We get on to the product page. So we're showing the products here. We're specifying which products are for free.

And we we say it's for free. And how many times the customer can use it for order. We throttled to one. And we also don't allow it to combine with other discounts. And then the nice thing with the discounts and the automatic discounts is you can set the dates ahead of time for when it starts and ends. So last night when this campaign started, I didn't have to come in and turn on the discounts.

They were already scheduled and on the the 14th and actually the morning of the 15th to automatically turn off for us so that we had to do this four times for automatic discounts for the four different thresholds that we had.

So now let me show you what the free scraper looks like. Actually going to show you the tweezer.

Since we've shown that the most. So let's go in and show the tweezers

And you'll see we have the, tweezer straight, the free version and the straight version, not free. So let's walk into this one here and show you why we made a separate version. And that is that these tweezers come in two sizes, 12 inch and 20 inch. Obviously, the 20 inch is going to be more expensive. So what we wanted to do was make it easy for the customer.

We didn't want to give away the 20 inch tweezers. We only wanted to give away the 12 inch tweezers. So what we did is we made a separate product for the just the 12 inch. And, you know, this is, something I figured out recently that I absolutely love. So this store uses Shopify for, inventory management. So it's not like when you go to a separate inventory management tool and make a bundle or, you know, somehow fork the inventory, right.

So what we did instead is we use the bundle app to make the new product. So if we look at that free 12 inch tweezer straight, we click on that. You'll see that this is a bundle product from the bundle app.

what we did is we went into the bundle app.

So here you can see we have the product for the free 12 inch tweezer straight. So we're going to click on that in the bundle app. And what we did was I've always used a bundle that before before was combining two products together to make a bundle. And then what I realized in playing with it one day was, wait a second, what if I just put in one product and then restrict the number of options that that product has?

Because when you put together a bundle, you can say, I want product A, which has five choices, but I only want one of those choices available in the bundle. Let's just say it's a small t shirt, right? And then product B, you can do the same thing, a small hat only even though that hat may have five sizes.

Awesome. So I didn't know if this was actually going to work when I when I did it the first time. So I made a one product bundle and then just restricted it to be the variance that I wanted to be the free tweezer. So I just turned off the 20 inch tweezers in this. And that's how we get the, you know, that free product shows up when they go to the free 12 inch tweezers on the front end.

Let's go into the free 12 inch tweezers on the front end. They only see the color options because we've restricted it to one size option, which is the 12 inch tweezers. So figuring out that little, use of the bundle app has been really useful for me lately. And more easily putting together marketing campaigns like this. We had to do a bunch of work in the past, like we'd make a separate product, and then that separate product, we'd have to give it its own inventory where now this inventory is tied to the parent's product inventory, so we don't have to divide that kind of stuff up, which makes it a lot easier for the store

staff to manage this type of experience.

So we went into the bundle app and made and made the one product bundle, restricting it to the variants that we wanted. So now let's go back to that product that we were on.

Which was the free 12 inch tweezers straight. And then also show you the other thing we did is we down at the bottom here under Meta fields, if we view all we turned on the hide from search Menifield. And this is built in to Shopify. If you create a matter for this matter if it doesn't exist by default.

But if you create it, you notice this is unpinned but it is a define meta fields. We we made the Medfield definition, but if you click on the Medfield definition you'll see what it is is it's namespace is SEO and its key is hidden. And it takes a value of 0 or 1. And if you set it to one, it'll hide that product from search.

And that's built into Shopify. If that Medfield exists, it's just going to hide the product from search, and it hides it from site search and from Google search. So this product is not getting indexed in Google, and this product is not searchable on the site.

So then what I had to do for this campaign is make all of the free products that we wanted for the campaign, by restricting the different variants for them. Now, you know, another one was the scraper, right? The free blade scraper, you know, remember I said, there's only one choice. So just drops it into the cart automatically?

Well, that we also made from a bundle because the parent product had two variants. One was the blade scraper and the other variant was 15 reseal blades. So we made that bundled product that didn't have the refillable blades, so it was easier to drop that product into the cart automatically. Instead of making the customer go to the product page and have to choose between the variants and then add it to the cart.

That way.

And then we had to also add to this experience was we made the free products, that we made our free collections.

the scraper didn't need a collection, but the tweezers needed a collection and the hemostats needed a collection. So I just made a collection, gave it a, you know, a manual, setting of the two products that we wanted in that collection.

And that way on our promotion in the cart when I said, choose your tweezers or choose your hemostat, we would take them to that collection where they made the choice. Now, because we had free products that had, you know, specific variants restricted from them, from the parent products. That's why we needed the free collections. Also, for the oral care collection, we weren't restricting any of the variants, so we didn't we could use an existing collection for that top level $100 and over offer that we were making.

So now let's walk into scene customization and show you that element on the cart that we made. And this was a custom theme that we've made, and we've been evolving this over time based on the campaign. Now, this campaign was the first time we had had so many different variations for different levels, and this set of products or that set of products could be in the selection set, and we're promoting a collection or a product as the free item.

So we had to evolve the theme customization section that we had before for our car to be much more involved than it had been previously.

But this section here, the gift with purchase, is this custom code that we built for, the flex theme, because we use the flex theme with all of our clients. and you'll see if we click on it, we have the ability here in the header to say, you know, claim your free world as a gift.

We can specify some colors, some background colors and border colors. And then what we have we have four possible tiers. And if you don't use it tier you can turn it off. Right. Remember in this one we had four price tiers that we're doing. And we started at the highest price tier. And we say you know, is the free gift going to be a product or a collection.

So if it's just a single product you can specify that it's going to be multiple products. You have to specify the collection because what that is, it's deciding what the choose product button is going to point to in this case, it's going to go to the collection that you specify here. If you added a product here, what it would do.

It was a look at that product, and if it only had one variant, it would automatically add that product to the cart. If it had more than one variant, it would go to that product where the customer can make the choice of what they what choices they want in that product. Right? What variants they want to select. And then you get to, define what the text is above the button, what the button text is and what the text is below the button.

And then you get to do that for each. Cheers. You can see here we have a second tier, a third tier and a fourth tier. And you're setting the price levels for each of those as we go. So you can see in the first year we set the price level at $100. On the second tier, we set the price level at $50.

Third tier is at $30, and the bottom tier was at $15 and above. So this custom section allows us to promote these items, you know, in the car when the cart value is over the threshold. And that way customers are aware of that free promotion.

what happens a lot of times, you know, when you promote things on your landing page or in your emails, you make customers aware, hey, buy this and get this for free.

But when they buy that product, they forget which is the free one and they have to go find it. And it's just a hard experience. So we like simplifying that as much as possible. Go choose your paid products. And once you do that here in the cart, we're going to tell you now that the paid threshold that you're at, you've now earned these free products.

And go ahead and select from the free products. Add that to your cart. Remember, there's that automatic discount that kicks in and automatically gives them that free product. You know, as free isn't there? They're often checking out. So we try to make that as easy as possible for customers. So that's what we did for Rapid Ships World Lizard Day promotion.

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Now let's get back to the show. And.

Okay, let's move on to our second campaign, which is for the custom windsock and the custom windsock company. As their name says, makes custom wind socks. And those wind socks are used for different, you know, industries like aviation, industrial, marine, oil and gas and agriculture. Now, in August, there's two aviation specific holidays. The first one of those is National Model Aviation Day, which is on August 17th.

I think it's like the third Saturday of August. And then two days later on August 19th, there's National Aviation Day and National Aviation Day is on Orville Wright's birthday. So we combine the two of those into one campaign, and we're going to send out model aviation emails early in the campaign, and then aviation emails later in the campaign.

We combine the two of them into one campaign, although we do have two different landing pages. So the model aviation ones are specific. The landing page is specific to model aviation, and the aviation one is specific to, you know, bigger airplanes. So if we look at this campaign, what we're doing is there's three different types of custom aviation wind socks that the store sells.

And you can get one with just some text on it, one with fricken logos and some text and another one will you upload, you know, your whole logo and the completed design is is, you know, manageable by you. So there's three different types of wind socks that customers can order for aviation. And interestingly enough, in model aviation they use the same wind socks as they do in in big airports.

So what we wanted to do was do a buy one, get one promotion, buy one custom aviation windsock and get a free lightweight windsock. Now the aviation ones are heavy duty. They're bigger, they're thicker, they're stronger, and the lightweight ones are obviously, you know, lightweight and can be used in more informal or temporary types of situations. Or you could have it at your house and things like that.

So a buy one, get one promotion is what we're doing. If you buy any one of the three aviation wind socks, you will get a custom lightweight windsock. And that custom means you can upload a file and make the design completely your own.

let's walk through that experience. And in this one here, each of these products is customizable.

So you know there's gonna be some product options where we can select a lot of things. and that makes it a little more complex. Or we have to go to the product page every time. We just can't add the free product in the cart like we did sometimes for Rapid Ship. So here you can see on our custom logo aviation heavy duty windsock.

There's lots of sizes that we can pick from. We can also pick background colors. We can ask for it to be solid or striped. And we can also upload a file to have the logo that gets custom printed onto that windsock. I'm not gonna upload the logo and it's going to let me, you know, move forward from this.

And now what I'm gonna do is going to add to cart. Now see here we have a pop up that shows up on the product page. When we add our buy one product to the cart, we get the pop up that says, hey, do you want to go to your free product? Right? So do you want to add your free lightweight windsock to your order?

And we say yes, please as an option or no thanks. So let's go to the yes please.

And here what we have is now our lightweight windsock. You notice it says free right on it. Even though the full price is $79. And they get to select the color and upload a file and then add it to their cart.

So we're going to add it to the cart. And you'll see we have the automated discount kicking in that hey, National Aviation Day, you're getting a free lightweight windsock, for the purchase of a custom aviation windsock.

similar to what we're doing in rep the chip, and that you have to buy some products and get some free products, but different in that in rep the chip, what we were doing is we were judging the threshold of the free product.

There's multiple thresholds, four of them judged by the cart dollar value. In this situation it is product specific by this specific product. Get this other specific product for free. And that's why we had that pop up show up on the product page to say, hey, you've added one product that qualifies for free. Do you want to add your free product?

Now where we had to do in rep to ship, we had to wait till a cart to make an evaluation of. Have they spent enough money to qualify for a free product? And then there were choices on the free product. So

we need that cart section to allow the logic of what level of gift do they qualify for and allow for the logic to say, well, that's a product, or they sell a product and send them to the right place to do it.

the CART promotion that we built, that we're using a rep chip only works for cart values. We didn't have a tool already built for, specific products being in the cart, and I don't want to go build that custom section for this campaign because it would take a lot of time and money to do that. So I instead did was use an app that we have in the App Store called Linear Shopping Experiences.

And I've talked about linear shopping experiences, not the app, just a concept of them. In a past podcast episode. So we built an app around that, you know, linear shopping experiences. And we made that a free app and we're using that in this store. So let's go into the back end and show you how we built this whole campaign.

So we're going to start off with the discounts. and we're going to go into the discounts and you'll see that we have

National Aviation Day. So we didn't make a separate discount for National Model Aviation Day and National Aviation Day. That was just a design decision. but if we look at that, discount, you know, it allows, you know, from, you know, the customer buys from any one of these collections, and it's one collection of the aviation custom wind socks, which is the three products that we talked about.

and if they buy, you know, a quantity. So there's no dollar value on this one. It's a quantity. If they buy a quantity then they get one, you know. And here we specify a product and that is the free custom lightweight windsock. And they get that for free. And then we have the, you know, start and end dates for the campaign.

So then if we look at on the product side let's look at our free windsock. We didn't have to make a collection for the free because there's only one product that we're giving away for free. Let's look at that product.

And here we go the free custom lightweight windsock. And just like we didn't rep the chip, the way we made this was by making a bundle.

So this is a product that was made by the free Shopify Bundles app. And we did that because this product also has multiple variants. There's three different sizes that you can select from on the paid version. On the free version, we only wanted to give you one size option. So we use the bundle app to restrict the number of options that we had.

So before we go to the bundle app, let me just show you. The last thing we did here also is just like we did in rep, the chip. We hide this product from search by having the midfield SEO hidden value set to one. So this product doesn't show up when we search because it's the same price, the product that also exists in the store, but we put the word free on it, right?

Even though this product isn't free, if you just bought this product, you would have to pay for it. We put the word free on it, so that when customers are walking through that linear shopping experience, when they get on to that second step of, you know, customizing your free product, the word free shows up in that product title to reinforce for them that it's going to be free when they add it to the cart.

That's why we hide it from search. Let's go into the bundle app and look at the bundle we made there. Once again, this is one product in a bundle, just like we did for ripped a chip. And you can see that that product has three different size variants. And we only selected the one size that we wanted to allow for free the eight inch by 24 inch.

So when the customer goes to that product they don't have to make a size selection. It's already made for them. But one of the other things we had to do, let's show you that product in the front end again, just to remind you what that experience look like, because you are picking some options like colors and such. So let's go into the product.

And you see here you're picking a background color and a logo file. Now those aren't done with product variants. Those were done with the app that we have for product options, which is the whole product options app. So we had to go into the product and just, you know, make sure that the right product options were showing up because we had that new product made from the bundle app.

And then lastly we have this linear shopping experience. This is an app that we make. this is the free level of the app. And there's this product cross-sell here. And what we do there is we have meta fields at the product level so that when this is enabled and right now it is activated in the store,

if the meta fields are filled in, all it does is it pops up that modal that you saw.

So there's global app settings here for the modal which specifies the colors. And we put some CSS classes behind the buttons. So the colors of the buttons show up. And the other CSS styling shows up. so what happens is if the parent product has these meta fields assigned, then this modal pops up and goes to the URL, specify in that matter field.

So we could have gone to a product like we did, or we could have specified a collection or a landing page or anything we wanted. So what we did on those parent products, the ones that you have to buy, right, like this airport windsock, heavy duty, FAA compliant,

If I look at this products, meta fields.

And view all, you'll see that we have this cross-sell message and cross-sell. So the cross-sell message is what content content shows up when they add it to the cart and in the modal.

Want to add your free lightweight windsock and then the destination that goes to if they click on the yes button, right?

And that is in this case that free custom lightweight windsock that we made. So to remind you what that looks like, go back to that product that we purchased. We're just going to add it to the cart again. And it's just going to have the same modal pop up again. So if we pick our size pick a color, make sure all our options are selected and then add to cart.

This model is popping up because we set that midfield to say, you know, this text right here. And then in the second matter field it defines the destination for the yes please button which is the free product. That and you can see we have it said free right there that they get to choose and add to their cart.

So that's how we set up the campaign for our custom windsock. So notice in rep to chip and in custom windsock, the campaigns had some similarities. Like you know it was buy one get one. They're giving away free items if you were buying enough value in the cart. But they also operated differently. In rep ship, we had multiple tiers and the chairs were done by prices.

You know, the total value of the cart in custom windsock. They were just a select few products that would get a free product if you purchase them. And that free product was also defined on what it is in both those products, the paid and the free had customization options behind them, so we couldn't just automatically add them to the cart for the customers.

We had to take them to the product page to make those choices.

what we did is we defined those campaigns up front. And then I worked with my my clients and said, all right, what tools do we have in our toolbox to make these things work? Right? I had already added certain sections and certain apps to both of these stores, and then we looked at which ones existed to make the best experience for the customer, given the tools we had in our toolbox.

So that's how we go about making campaigns all the time for our clients. The nice thing about it is, once you make a campaign like this, it's a bunch of work to set it up the first time. But notice both of our campaigns are annual recurring events in rep to ship. It's it's World Lizard Day and on custom windsock International Aviation Day.

Those happen every year. So now this is the first year we're setting up those campaigns for those brands. But next year, all they have to do is, you know, repeat the same campaign over again and may be updated. It's things have changed or, you know, keep it fresh kind of stuff. But we do make these campaigns. We do create what we call a recipe.

And that recipe is for who's ever managing it. Next year opens up the recipe and we specify for them. Here's, you know, the steps you got to go through to make this campaign happen. And that way, you know, it takes a lot of time to make one of these campaigns the first year, but then the second, third, fourth and fifth years, it's much, much easier.

And you start getting a lot more return on that initial investment over subsequent years.

So that is the technical details of making campaigns in Shopify stores.

thanks for listening.