Engagement Strategies to Make Your Sale a Success
The holiday season is approaching — a critical time for anyone running a store on Shopify. Shopify itself has put together a Toolbox to support Shopify merchants (Shopify BFCM ToolBox).
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In this article, I want to talk about why pre-sale engagement is essential for driving results during a sale.
The reason I'm writing this is that I see a lot of sales campaigns fall flat. A failed sale is one that leaves you unable to sell outside of sale periods.
I hear from many e-commerce business owners, and I often sense that they believe simply building a Shopify store, running ads, posting on social media, and sending sale announcement emails is enough to drive sales.
There was a time when that approach worked, but today, it only tends to work for well-known brands or stores with exceptionally strong products.
Pre-Sale Engagement Is Key to a Successful Sale
So, what does it take to run a successful sale?
To get straight to the point: building engagement before the sale is essential. Simply pushing hard during the sale period alone makes success very difficult.
For most stores — those without the name recognition of a major brand or an exceptionally compelling product — consistently investing in the time-consuming work of building engagement is a necessity.
On a side note, for major sale events like Black Friday Cyber Monday (BFCM), securing inventory, preparing logistics, and locking in sales channels are also critical — but for now, I'd like to focus specifically on engagement.
Who Buys During a Sale
A sale can convert customers who wouldn't buy at regular price. The types of customers who buy specifically because of a sale generally fall into two categories:
- Customers who buy because of the low price
- Customers who buy because of the buzz and excitement around the sale
I place much greater importance on the second type of customer.
A sale that only attracts price-driven shoppers isn't worth running, in my opinion. Those customers will only buy from you when you're discounting.
On the other hand, customers who buy because a sale campaign has generated genuine buzz have the potential to become repeat buyers even after the sale ends.
In other words, the key to a successful sale is whether your campaign goes viral and reaches people beyond just bargain hunters.
Why Pre-Sale Engagement Matters
Reaching people beyond bargain hunters requires a compelling campaign concept.
On the internet, content and campaigns that go viral tend to follow recognizable patterns. Tools like Buzzsumo can help you understand what topics and types of campaigns are gaining traction.
In e-commerce, special sales, unique products, and celebrity collaborations tend to be the most viral-friendly themes. Use data like this as a reference when planning your sale campaigns.
That said, getting a campaign to go viral on concept alone is incredibly difficult.
To support virality, it's essential to build up a community of close followers and fans in advance — people who will actively share your sale campaign.
Incidentally, when it comes to social media virality, many ordinary people sharing content tends to be more effective than a single influencer post. Rather than relying on influencers, focus on growing a loyal base of engaged fans and followers.
Run Your Sale After Building Engagement
When you run a sale after genuinely building engagement, post-sale revenue can sustain a higher baseline than before the sale.
This is because you've converted customers beyond just bargain hunters — customers who continue to come back and make repeat purchases.
On the other hand, running a sale without building engagement first often results in post-sale revenue dropping back to pre-sale levels — or even lower. Repeat this pattern and you'll end up in a situation where sales only happen during promotions.
Be intentional about building strong engagement first, and then use sales as a strategic lever for sustainable growth.
Examples of Engagement Initiatives
Now that we've established why building engagement before a sale is so important, let's look at some practical examples of how to do it.
Social Media Interaction
The foundation of building engagement is consistent, daily interaction on social media.
Glossier's social media approach is worth studying. Their team actively searches for posts mentioning Glossier and regularly leaves comments. When they find particularly great posts, they repost them. And when they spot complaints, they address them promptly.
Creating a private group for ambassadors and loyal customers via Slack or Facebook Groups — and communicating with them regularly — is also an effective way to build a tight-knit community.
Live Streaming
Live streaming is another powerful tool for deepening engagement.
Because viewers can directly experience the host's face and voice in real time, live streams can rapidly strengthen the connection between a brand and its audience.
Many stores give up on live streaming because of low viewership or poor sales during broadcasts — but even if products aren't selling immediately, the key is to keep going in order to build engagement over time.
Feature Customers on Your Website
Featuring the customers you want to build relationships with directly on your store can also be very effective.
Customer interview articles are especially easy to produce, so I highly recommend trying them.
By going beyond product reviews to explore a customer's perspective and values, you can deepen the relationship meaningfully. These interviews can be published as blog posts on Shopify.
Beyond interviews, creating collection pages featuring a customer's favorite products is another effective approach.
Using Shopify's collection feature to create a curated collection of a customer's favorite products is a great tactic. It brings that customer's followers to your store, and these visitors tend to convert at a higher rate than traffic driven by paid ads.
Events
Hosting member-exclusive events or meetups is another effective strategy. You can also sponsor existing events as a way to connect with audiences.
Men's apparel brand Zanerobe built strong customer relationships by hosting DJ events.
Pop-up stores are also becoming an increasingly popular way to connect directly with customers in person.
Retail concepts like b8ta, which curate trending products, can be a great venue to utilize. b8ta even tracks metrics like the number of customer interactions, making it possible to measure engagement directly.
The most important thing at events and pop-up stores is genuine communication with customers.
For example, even when sponsoring an event, simply providing products isn't enough. What matters is actively engaging with attendees at the event, and sharing event highlights on social media to spark online interaction as well.
Gifting
Another approach is to find potential influencers or ideal customers on Instagram or YouTube and send them products as gifts (gifting) to build a relationship.
Once you've sent a gift, put genuine effort into the communication that follows to build a real relationship. When you truly connect, incredible things can happen.
I've experienced this myself — someone I gifted introduced me to their network of celebrities and musicians, and a well-known public figure ended up promoting my product to their audience.
Driving Offer Execution with StoreHero
StoreHero supports merchants on Shopify who are looking to grow sales through the thorough execution of growth initiatives.
When it comes to in-store offer management, we leverage the StoreHero growth platform to automatically optimize cross-sell and upsell products and offers using per-product and per-SKU performance and inventory data — delivering the kind of granular, large-scale execution that manual operations simply can't achieve.
We are currently offering free store diagnostics. If you have challenges with offer strategy or growth initiatives in general, please don't hesitate to reach out. Learn more about our free store diagnosis here
Summary
This article covered why building pre-sale engagement is essential for running a successful sale.
Beyond sales events, a lack of engagement is often the root cause of poor store performance overall.
Building engagement honestly takes effort and persistence — but Shopify is a platform that makes it easier to focus on that work.
Stay persistent and keep at it. And if you're not sure where to start, feel free to reach out!