Wix eCommerce | How to Run a Valentine's Day Sale

Hi, everybody. Welcome to this week's E Commerce workshop. This week we're going to be talking Valentine's Day sales and how you start the first retail holiday of 2021 strong. My name is Liat. I lead E Commerce marketing at wix. I am excited to be your host for today's workshop. And joining me today, we have two other members of the WIX team. We have Asaf and Amit. So I'm going to ask each of you to please introduce yourselves. Asaf, go ahead.

Hi everyone. I'm Assaf, part of the E Commerce marketing and I'm super excited to be here. We have fresh features that will upgrade any storefront, especially since Valentine is just around the corner. It's a great time to revamp your store just a little bit and make the most of the holiday.

Amit.

Hi everyone. I'm Amit. I'm the product lead for the Facebook ads by WIX product. And today I'll talk about one of our newest features which is super relevant for Valentine's.

Awesome. So thank you both for joining me. I'm super excited to have both of you here today. And without further ado, we're going to get started. So on the agenda for today, we're going to be talking about, of course, how to run a Valentine's sale and how to get everything set up and promoted for your sale. And then we're going to touch on some additional great features that have come out recently that we want to point out that you can add to your store ahead of Valentine's. So gift cards, buy now, pay later options, and local delivery options. So let's kick off with setting up your Valentine's sale. So as always, when planning for a sale, you want to make sure that you're really thinking through what are your goals for the sale and how you're going to be promoting it. So of course, we want to be thinking about who your audience for the sale is going to be. So this holiday season, who is it that you're trying to reach? Are you targeting new shoppers? You want to bring in new people to your store? New customers who haven't shopped with you before? Or are you trying to get return customers? You also really want to be thinking about what exactly those customers are looking for this holiday season. So think about what is going to be the right offer for them. And that leads us directly into thinking about which products you're going to be promoting for this sale. So first of all, if you have run Valentine's sales in the past or you were already selling in previous years. We highly recommend that you go and review previous year's data for Valentine's, look at what your most popular products were, where your audiences were coming from, what really worked well for your store, and also what didn't work well for your store and use that information to, to help you choose the right products to promote this year. We also recommend that you research current shopping trends as related to your online store. So go and look which products are popular this season, what customers are searching for, what current shopping trends look like, and then see how you correlate that to what you're selling in your product offering and then come up with the set of products that you'd like to promote. So are you going to be offering a promotion across all of your products? Are you going to create a specific line for Valentine's or promote some specific products and then think about the discount that you're going to be offering there? Right, so do you want to give a percentage discount, a dollar discount? Do you want to encourage shoppers to buy a certain number of products and then get some additional products like a buy one, get one free kind of deal? So all of that stuff is things you should think about in advance and then finally think about which channels you're going to be using to promote your sale. You always want to match the channels, of course, to the audience you're trying to reach. So if we're thinking about bringing in new shoppers to the store this year, we're going to be thinking about using paid promotion on some of those channels out there, like Facebook promotion or other social media channel promotion or, or paid search ads, things like that, possibly using some micro influencers to drive awareness of your product and get your product out there to their audience. And if you want to reach your existing customer base, which if you have one, is always a really great idea, don't forget about your existing customers. They know your brand, they know your product. They are probably the most effective audience to try and reach. So, so you're going to think about different channels for reaching them. Things like email or SMS owned communities or social channels that you have and definitely retargeting, right? So make sure you're doing that retargeting on people who have already engaged with your brand. So let's talk about getting ready. Now that we have all of those decisions in place and we're ready to run our store, we're going to go ahead and make sure that we're setting up our store for success. So you want to make sure you're updating your website, make sure that you are prominently featuring your discount or coupon on the homepage and throughout your shopper journey on the website. We always recommend adding a lovely hello bar to the top of your website that follows your users around. Some people like to use a countdown timer if the sale is for a limited time only, so so think about adding those items to your website. I will remind everybody that we did a workshop around Thanksgiving about how to run your Thanksgiving sale. We did a really detailed demo back then on how you set all this stuff up, so the team will be sharing that link in the chat with you now if you want to go and see a really detailed demo on setting these pieces up. But ASAF is going to do a quick reminder for everybody about where you find all these pieces on the dashboard.

So as you can see, I'm at the WIX dashboard. Here you have everything. I'm already at the coupons, but it's easy to get here. For example, this is where you typically land on the regular dashboard and for marketing and SEO and click here on coupons. As Liat said, this is probably the first step in running any Flash sale or any sale in general. Make sure you know which coupon you want to provide. Make sure the discount isn't too much and that customers appreciate it and do not expect it on a regular basis. For this one, I've already invested the time in doing a discount Coupon. I thought 20% liar is, you know, a great way to incentivize shoppers to do it today and create some fomo. Fear of missing out. I've limited it to one use per customer. Again, know your audience, talk to them and understand which of those coupons best motivate them. And I also applied an end date. I think it's very important for every sale that you run to have an end date. Again, enticing them to do it now as opposed to later. And once you save the coupon, the coupon code showthelove will be in place and we can show it a little bit later on as we go and run through some of the checkout flows. From here we can go directly to the editor and see the store. We're using a different store than the toy store we're typically using. As you can see, this one is even better than the one we had before. And here we added a Valentine sale so you can definitely see it clearly. Added here. This store is for fast fashion so we don't want it to be too overwhelming. Again, some people can go With a more striking hello bar. A lot has to do with what you're selling and how you're used to communicating with your audience on your storefront. We went with something that is, I think, visible, but a bit more subtle. And we'll show some more things later on. This is how the store looks when you click. And obviously if you went to shop now, you can use the coupon code as you go in the checkout and we'll show it a little bit later.

Awesome. Thank you, Assaf. I really love this design that you've done on the website here. I think that, you know, sometimes when you want to do seasonal updates to your website, it's nice to go with the seasonal theme. So for some businesses, adding lots of hearts and regular Valentine's themes works, but sometimes it's enough to just stick with your regular design and have a really prominent update on the website. So I think this is great. I get Valentine's, I see the discount, it's going to follow me all the way through the shopping journey. So this is a really great and as you said, subtle way to get that sale up there. And as Asaf mentioned, once you've set up that coupon and you have it on your website, you're going to keep using that same discount and showing it throughout all of your assets and all of your promotions for your holiday sale. So from here we will move on to the next piece and we're going to start with our existing customer base. So we're going to think about how we're promoting our sale to our existing customers. And we really want to make sure that we are reaching out on all of our own channels. So when you have existing customers, you want to make sure that you're letting them know what your offer is, potentially even giving them an offer, especially for them. Email marketing is a really great way to reach those customers. Definitely. If you own social channels, then you want to be putting up posts on all of those channels to let people know about your sale. Social posts are also a really great way to do reminders all the way up to the last minute of the sale. So again, if you watch that previous workshop that we mentioned, the Halloween Flash sale, you'll get all of the tips and tricks on how to do that, but make sure that you're making the best utilization possible of your own social channels. And we always recommend creating videos if you have where to promote them. So you can do that either by placing them on your website itself or using them in your social posts. And here again, Asaf is going to do a reminder for all of you just where you can set all of this up in the WIX dashboard.

Thanks, Liat. So back at the WIX Dashboard, we're gonna go and we're gonna do most of the things that now we're doing on the marketing home. Let's go with email marketing. Elliot, as you mentioned, I think Valentine's is a great way to engage existing shoppers and turning them into repeat shoppers. You can see here right from the get go new templates that are ready to be used on Valentine's. Or you can always start from scratch and browse more templates. Since I've had a few minutes before this workshop, I took the liberty and to create a template, I'm sorry, to use a template and create our email. So here is what I do. And again, everything here is edit, remove. The editor is right here. It's pretty straightforward and simple. We did a more in depth step by step at the previous workshop. Here is just a quick reminder. I like that the template says show the love and then I just wrote it for use code and then when you browse down it sticks in your memory. And of course you have a reminder on your online store as well. Once you've done this, you can preview and test, add the list and eventually send it. It can be done literally within minutes. Again, we always recommend spending more time making sure the design and the content is there. Have someone from your team as a reviewer to make sure no typos and no other things that shoppers do not appreciate very much. So that's it for email marketing. Again, can be done really quick. It's best always to invest the time. You know your customers best and you know they're worth the effort. In terms of social posts, again here in the marketing tools, just click on it and you'll be able to see new templates here as well. And so we have today's pics and more way more templates here below. Check it out. Really cool ideas here, down. However, since I had three more minutes more than I expected to have, I also took the liberty to have my first social post. Let's edit it for a second. Again, everything here is editable. You can do it. Change text size, go through it all and then obviously you will need to connect your Facebook account to your store in order to post it right here from the WIX dashboard. And otherwise you can download it and use it. So here, since we, you know, we haven't connected the pages just yet, you'll have the call to Action to connect. And then you go and connect the platforms. One more thing before and obviously by the way, you can download it. So you can use it in many other ways. And Amit will expand on that in a second. And one more thing, never forget a very good caption here. Something that is enticing, that reminds users or shoppers why they like your store. You can be a little bit with humor and things that will add to the stopping power of your visuals. Last but not least, and I'll leave for now. When we go here, there's the video maker. Videos. Obviously an excellent way to generate engagement and drive tons of visitors to your site here. I didn't prepare anything in advance and if you ask me, it's always best to test things out with static posts, which are much easier and quicker to generate. And once you see that you've hit some goal there, then you go and double down on making a video in that angle. With that messaging could be on the coupon, it could be on the sale, or on every other angle that you think you can incentivize them and drive them back to your store. Same process you go in, you use existing templates and there are very cool ones here. You can see it. So make sure to use them or generate one of your own. And ace this Valentine's sale.

Awesome. So first of all, for those of you who did not watch our Thanksgiving flash sale workshop, I highly recommend you watch it because Asaf did a full demo on how to create your sale video. You'll also get to enjoy his amazing design skills and video skills there. So I recommend that you don't miss out on that. And as I said, you can download all of the social posts and videos. You can embed the video anywhere that you plan to use it. So you could embed it on your website, you could share it on your social channels. It's a really great tool to generate beautiful content for your business and brand. So once you've done all the work and making sure that you have updated your customer base, you have updated your own social channels, you've created your beautiful content that you're planning to use to promote your sales, we can talk about now reaching some new shoppers. So one of the tools that we always recommend using is our Facebook Ads by Wix platform. So we actually have a solution that will use our smart algorithm to run your Facebook ads for you. So joining us today, we have Amit, who's going to help us talk about this. And Amit too has actually visited us on previous workshops we did a full workshop with him on our Facebook Ads by Wix, where he actually explained the amazing algorithm to us and how it works, how it learns your audience, how it optimizes your ads. So that is a full session on its own. So I recommend that if you don't know our product yet, that you go and watch that session with Amit where he'll really do a deep dive, but at a high level, WIX will run your Facebook ads for you. Our smart algorithm will do that. There are multiple options of ads that Amit is going to show you in a minute. And here, teaser alert, he's coming to show you some new features. So even those of you already using the product, you definitely want to see this session. And as a marketer, I always, always recommend this product because we already have hundreds of online stores who've earned over 1000% return on their ad spend using this product. And I want to say as a marketer, that is an unheard of return on ad spend. It's really phenomenal results. And the most amazing part is that the platform is going to do all the work for you. So other than the initial setup, and then whenever you want to come and do some ongoing tweaks to whatever rules you've set up, you can do that, but it will keep working and optimizing for you. So without further ado, Amit, please, I want to hand over to you so you can share your product news with us.

Thanks, Liat. Hi, everyone. So definitely like our product. Facebook Ads by Wix does all the work for you, but we still want to provide you with some control and some customization, obviously. So we have a new feature which is really exciting and it allows much more control over the ad creative. So it's called Classic Ads and it means that you can basically upload your own image from your media manager and have something that's really specific and tailored for Valentine's. So I'm going to share my screen and give you a short demo of how it looks in the product. So you can see here, this is the wizard where I can create my ad. And we have now a new ad format called Classic. You can see here in the preview, it's one image that I've just selected. I can also change the image and choose one of my other product images or whatever graphics you've created that's more personalized for Valentine's. And then just a reminder, but before that, I'll show you some more options that you have. So you can, of course, edit your caption Like Asaf said, you want to make it as enticing and calling to action as possible. And for classic ads, you can also choose the headline that appears on the ad, the link that you want to direct people to, and then the button, the CTA that appears on the ad itself. You can choose out of three options and customize it.

Wow. So, Amit, before you go and show the other option, I just want to hang out here for a second and make sure that everybody is catching this news, because I know that our users have been waiting for this for quite a while. And one of the biggest requests we've had for Facebook ads by Wix is the ability to create whatever campaign you'd like and link to a specific website or link. So you showed that now I can put whatever link I like, I can put whatever image I like, and then I'll still get that great service by Wix where you do all of the algorithm and optimizing on my campaign.

Correct. I just want to show you guys the dynamic option, which is still obviously available. So in the dynamic case, it's more of a carousel ad where you can feature many of your products. And just a reminder, our algorithm basically

will

show different products to different people based on their interests and interaction with the ad to make sure that they see the product that's suitable for them. So this option is still legit and I think can still work also for Valentine's, but now you have the option to choose out of these ad formats.

Awesome. So I made a couple of questions here about the campaign. So one is if I created a new Valentine sale campaign. So I made that great image that ASAF showed us how to create and I've uploaded it here. I'm doing my static post, running my Valentine sale. One of the great advantages of using the WIX solution is that I don't need to touch it. Right. My campaign keeps running and optimizing itself and learning. So what happens when Valentine's is over?

Great question. So you can always go back and edit your campaign. You don't have to stop and restart it. You can just go ahead, edit the creative, choose a different caption or messaging that suits the time of year and just continue from there.

Very cool. And then if you could also answer us a little bit, because I know we've been speaking here about Facebook ads by Wix in the context of bringing new shoppers to your site, but you do also do retargeting, so could you talk a little bit about that?

Yes. So the AI algorithm, once the campaign starts running, it creates different types of audiences that are potential to become customers. So it can be a totally new audience that you've just defined, and it can also be people who've already showed interest on your store. So based on the Facebook pixel, which we make sure is implemented on your site, we can track those people who've already showed interest, view the product page, or added an item to cart, and then we can retarget, meaning we can show them the ad again on Facebook and Instagram with the most relevant product for them. And that way we usually can encourage them to complete the purchase. So it's super relevant and super efficient way to get more customers.

Awesome. Thank you. So I have a couple of questions actually for both of you from the audience, so I'll start with you. People want to know how to adapt their content for the different social channels.

So each social channel attracts a different breed of people who spend their time there. And I think you should. When we talk a lot about knowing your audience, one of the thing is knowing what they do and where. For example, people would engage differently with YouTube as they will with Facebook or on TikTok or wherever you want to promote your products. And the messaging has to be different. For example, you know, LinkedIn is a more professional on Twitter. They have their own kind of breed of messaging that works there. And Facebook has to be super visual with a lot of stopping power. YouTube obviously is videos only, so you need to say a lot in the first five seconds to grab people's attention. And you need to tailor not only the messaging, but also like the medium itself. Right. Whether it's video or social posts. And there's no better way to do it than continuously to test your ideas and your creatives. And once you did it on a consistent basis for, let's say, three months, you would know a lot on how to engage them with which medium and on each channel.

Awesome. Thank you. So, Amit, to you. We're already getting some requests here, so people want to know, now that you've given them this amazing static post, what about video ads?

I knew this was coming. So definitely video is in the pipeline. We're working on it, and I'll definitely come back once we start rolling it out to show you guys how it works.

Great. We're excited to bring you back for that. So.