You only get one chance to make a first impression, and building the hype and anticipation for your product or promotion is a necessary ingredient for success for scaling ecommerce brands.
In this guide, we’ll take you through how to schedule a product release in Shopify as well as everything else that goes into successfully launching a new product for your brand.
Why You Might Need To Schedule Product Releases in Shopify
There are several scenarios where you may benefit from publishing (or reverting) a product page at a future date rather than immediately, such as:
- Timed promotions: To promote a limited-time offer, you might use a small design element like a banner, or a complete redesign of the page — either way, you’ll need to publish this new design when the sale is available and revert back to the original design when it’s not.
- Holidays: There may be some products, such as Christmas trees or Halloween decorations, that you only display near certain holidays.
- Product availability: If inventory has run out but you know when you’ll have more, you could use a scheduled release to make the product available on your online storefront whenever it will be ready in your warehouse.
- Product drop: You may want to start marketing a product before it’s released in order to build up excitement and anticipation — a scheduled release allows you to design the perfect product page well before the product actually drops, helping you live up to the hype of your marketing campaign.
In these cases, it would just be inconvenient for you to wait around yourself for the exact moment you want to publish the page. This would also introduce the possibility of human error — you very well may get distracted by something else and miss the best opportunity for publishing.
Software doesn’t make such mistakes. Once you set up a scheduled product release, you can depend on the page to be published just as scheduled. And instead of worrying about publishing the page manually, this task will be taken care of for you, freeing up more time and mental energy for everything else that’s going on with your business.
Using Shogun To Schedule Product Pages To Go Live in Shopify
Scheduling product pages to publish at a later date and time is easy in Shogun. All you need to do is follow these three steps:
1. After creating or importing your product page in Shogun’s visual editor, open the dropdown menu located within the “Publish” button.
2. Select “Schedule publish”.
3. Select your publishing date and time. At this stage, you can also choose when to revert the page to a previous version.
That’s it! Once you’re done scheduling, just select “Save changes”.
10 Steps to a Successful Product Launch in Shopify
Of course, it takes much more than a scheduled post to successfully launch a product. Design, marketing, logistics, and customer support all need to come together to ensure everything goes well.
With so many moving parts, product launches can be quite hard to pull off. According to research conducted by the University of South Australia, 25% of new products fail within one year, and 40% don’t make it to the two-year mark.
To avoid this fate, follow the established best practices for launching a new product:
1. Review your previous product launches
Unless your store is brand new, you’ve probably launched a product before. How did it go? Were there any issues that popped up that you didn’t anticipate back then? What would you do differently now? Reflect on these questions before moving forward.
2. Test the product one last time
Given that you’re currently looking into how to release your product, you’ve likely already put the finishing touches on your product design and extensively tested it as well.
One more round of testing certainly wouldn’t hurt. At this point, your launch strategy won’t be affected if it turns out you need to go back and make a few fixes. But soon, it’ll be too late.
Indeed, once you set a launch date, it’s best to stick to it. If you start pushing dates back, your customers will get annoyed, lose track, and start tuning you out, deflating any hype that you had built up for the launch.
3. Choose your launch date carefully
Consult with your team before selecting your launch date. As mentioned above, there are many factors that go into launching a product:
- Marketing: Product descriptions, product photography, and ad copy will need to be produced to help explain and promote your product. You may also want to create videos that show how your product works, and long-form content such as blog posts and ebooks can be used to dig deeper into the benefits of the product and what sets it apart from other options.
- Logistics: Whether it’s in-house or through a third-party provider, you must make sure that you’re able to produce and distribute the product at scale by the launch date.
- Customer support: Through product testing and market research, you should be able to determine the most common questions customers are likely to have about the product — customer support staff must be prepared to answer these questions.
Get everyone who is responsible for these areas together for an in-person meeting or a Zoom call. Ask them what they will need to do on their end to help launch the product and how long it will realistically take them.
Once everyone is on the same page, you’ll know when you can set the launch date. Add a week or two of buffer to account for any unexpected delays.
4. Consider a soft launch
Before you even start promoting the new product, consider releasing it to a limited audience, such as your VIP customers, before anyone else.
This will allow you to collect valuable user feedback. Testing the product yourself is helpful, but there’s just no substitute for real customers — they may end up using the product in ways and settings that you never even thought of, which could then reveal previously unknown flaws.
It would have been ideal to catch such issues a couple steps ago, but it’s better to fix them now before you fully roll the product out.
5. Allow customers to preorder the product
In addition to locking in some revenue, another benefit to accepting preorders is that it helps you gauge interest for the product. If there’s more demand than expected, it may be necessary to ramp up production and increase warehouse stock.
6. Take full advantage of your marketing channels
There are many ways to let customers know you’re releasing a new product, such as:
- Banners and pop-ups on your Shopify store
- Email newsletter
- SMS alerts
- Push notifications
- Social media posts
- Remarketing ads
Start teasing the product launch at least a week in advance to help drum up excitement. Be sure to include links to your preorder page in these marketing messages in order to generate more immediate sales.
7. Work with influencers and other brands
You can use the channels listed above to leverage your own marketing data and reach people who are already familiar with your brand.
To reach people who are unfamiliar with your brand, you’ll need the help of others.
Influencer marketing is one of the best techniques for this purpose. By collaborating with a creator, you’ll be able to demonstrate the effectiveness of your product and reach a whole new audience at the same time. You should also consider working with another merchant to do a co-marketing push that advertises your product launch.
8. Test the purchasing process before launching
Just as you tested the product itself before launching, you should try out the purchasing process as well.
Act as if you’re a customer and go through all the steps required to order the product to ensure that everything looks and functions correctly. And many people won’t have the same technology setup as you, so test the process on different browsers and types of devices.
9. Launch with a limited-time offer
74% of consumers say that discounts are one of the top factors they consider when deciding where to shop and what to buy online. Going live with a promotional offer will encourage more customers to place an order on launch day.
10. Analyze the results
This likely won’t be the last product you ever launch, so try to learn as much as you can for next time. In addition to the sales figures, take a look at social media engagement, the open rate of your marketing emails, and everything else associated with your product launch that you can measure.
In fact, while all the details of the product launch are still fresh on your mind, this is an excellent time to download and organize analytical reports of how your launch performed for reference — you’ll thank yourself for it later.
