How using Launchpad will help drive conversions on your next flash sale

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If you’re running a Black Friday-Cyber Monday campaign this month, read this first.

Many of the Shopify merchants we talk to use flash sales and launch events as an important part of their business model. Creating hype over new product and timing sales to coincide with particular holidays and seasons is crucial for businesses trying to win over new customers and increase customer lifetime value.

But any eCommerce merchant will have experienced a huge challenge in smoothly and successfully running a flash sale campaign. There’s just a tonne of work that needs to go into it. You need to set special pricing and design your offers, update your inventory, change the way your website looks, update every channel you sell on - the list never ends. And the problem is, it’s usually pretty hard to get everything done all at the same time without a giant team working through the night.

Shopify Plus’s Launchpad tool changes that.

Launchpad shows up for all the big events

Launchpad is a tool that’s built for planning and executing events that happen within a specific time frame, such Black Friday-Cyber Monday and other flash sales.

Schedule manual tasks to happen automatically

You can use Launchpad to schedule everything that needs to happen in advance, rather than trying to do it all manually at the same time.

This not only lets you do all your prep during normal working hours, but it means you can double-check that you’ve ticked all the boxes and haven’t missed a crucial step that affects conversions.

With Launchpad, you set the dates and times your campaign will be active. After that, schedule complex events to automatically happen when they should, such as:

  • Publish new products and descriptions
  • Change product prices during the campaign
  • Adjust your theme so your images and creative content are event-related
  • Increase inventory levels across your channels, taking effect at the start of the campaign
  • Lock your store before a sale for a few hours to build anticipation

By automating these kinds of tasks in advance, you’re able to spread out prep over time and amongst staff. This means better management, more time to optimize and a better result for your customers.

Create complex scripts that drive sales

You can also use Launchpad to create Shopify Scripts to run specifically during your campaign. For example:

  • Automatically offer a gift with purchase
  • Offer free shipping, with variations based on order value or type
  • Enable Captcha during the event, to prevent non-human internet bots from buying up all your stock 
  • Create offers on specific product bundles (perfect for holiday shopping)
  • Give special additional discounts to first-time buyers or those that sign up for your newsletter during the sale

Using Scripts for events means you can automatically turn them off. This helps you build up hype and a sense of urgency, prompting your customers to buy today rather than tomorrow.

Get a campaign checklist from the pros

If this is your first time running a major sale, it’s helpful to have someone who’s done it before make sure you’ve got all the pieces in play. Launchpad’s easy interface will give you helpful reminders and recommendations to make sure you’re covering your bases.

Watch it all unfold

Launchpad becomes an event dashboard, showing you the details that matter while your campaign is in full swing. You can use Launchpad to monitor sales, average order value and inventory levels - all in real time.

This feature helps you out, because you can use it to make adjustments to your campaign’s pricing, creative content and inventory as the sale is in motion, rather than waiting until the end to learn.

Getting ready for Black Friday-Cyber Monday?

BFCM isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, which is why we’ve written about how to decide whether or not it’s worth it to run a BFCM campaign.

If you do decide to go ahead, Launchpad can massively help you out. In fact, it’s part of Shopify’s BFCM Toolkit.

Launchpad is only available to Shopify Plus users, so get started by upgrading to Plus. After that, install Launchpad to your Shopify Admin here.

Elkfox can help you get more out of your Shopify store, and increase conversions through tools like Launchpad and more. Talk to us.