A checklist for building better campaigns

When you're starting a new campaign, email or otherwise, there's a checklist of things you need to think about.

1. What's the purpose of this campaign, for the subscribers? What are they going to get out of it?
2. What's the purpose of this campaign, for your Shopify store?
3. Who should get the campaign? Either a specific list of specific people or a general segmenting statement (e.g. active subscribers who joined in the last 3 months).
4. How will you know if the campaign was successful? What do you want to improve or change with the campaign? (hint: actual sales is usually best for many campaigns)
5. How will you measure the success? The actual measurements and data method (e.g. using custom UTM codes).
6. How long the campaign be active for? Forever is a valid answer for on-going campaigns.
7. What content do you need? Text, images, video, etc
8. What tone will that content to take?

Planning out your campaigns by answering these questions can give you guidance for making later decisions.

For example, does it make sense to add an SMS component? That'll depend on what the purpose of the campaign is, for an abandoned cart probably yes but for a holiday hours campaign maybe not.

Some questions might be the same for many campaigns and you might reuse past campaigns that have similar answers. These are the template campaigns you see and hear about all over the place.

Of all the questions, the purposes (#1, #2) and the who (#3) are areas that cause a lot of problems when they are under-planned. The purposes should connect to your business goals and will be unique for you. For the who, segmenting with Repeat Customer Insights can make it easier to answer especially with the Automatic Segments.

That's why the app suggests multiple campaign ideas for the different segments. It can't know what your purposes and business goals are, but there are some common ones that can relate directly to specific segments.

Eric Davis