Mystery campaigns to boost your online store openings

Written by Raúl Carrión

If you are thinking of setting up an online store, your to-do list before publishing your new e-commerce site may look something like this:

• Product sourcing
• Install e-commerce platform
• Register products
• Configure payment methods
• Contract and configure shipping modes
• Publish

In these pre-publication to-do lists it is rare to find the task “Get visitors for the first day”, something that can help us a lot to get off to a good start in our e-commerce journey. This is the reason why I decided to write this article.

Starting to work on online marketing once the store is operational can waste precious time. And this aspect is even more critical if our product is seasonal. Therefore, in the previous months you should work hard to hard so that your online store has as much initial visibility as possible and start generating business from the first minute.

A mystery campaign is a fun and effective way to nurture your social profiles and subscriber list before opening your online store. This way you will generate an audience interested in your product long before it is available.

The success of a mystery campaign lies in being able to capture the attention of potential customers with minimal information.

Your audience should feel the need to visit the store the same day it opens so they don’t miss out on a historic moment.

To achieve this, you will use the full potential of the various Online Marketing channels.

Online marketing actions for a mystery campaign

Let’s see what actions you should carry out in the various online marketing channels and in what order. Depending on the sector to which your online store belongs, these recommendations may be more or less accurate. In writing this guide, I have put myself in the shoes of an online retailer of an impulse purchase product for individuals, sunglasses, for example.

24-hour promotion: the heart of the strategy

Your entire mystery campaign will orbit around the promotion you design at this point. That is why it is important that you take your time to decide what you want to focus on: what is the message to communicate and what the promotion is going to consist of.

Message to communicate

In your mystery campaign you must be able to generate your audience’s interest by providing as little information as possible. To make this work you can help yourself with phrases like:

• Do you want to be part of a historic moment?
• On day X a new way of seeing the world is born…
• Etc.

Type of promotion

The promotion can be a percentage discount on the product, a fixed discount per order, a 3×2… Whatever you want, as long as it is an incentive to buy. In some cases, customers value more, and therefore convert better, when the promotion consists of offering free shipping. The important thing is that the promotion is attractive.

Duration and scope of the promotion

The promotion must have a very limited duration, 24 hours is a good time frame for a promotion of this type. This data must be present in all social media and email marketing communications in order to concentrate the highest number of orders in the shortest possible time.

Access to the promotion must be controlled by means of a promotional code that customers will obtain when they subscribe to your newsletter, prior publication, so that you can anticipate demand and increase your subscriber database.

Page under construction in your online store: objective to attract subscribers

It is essential to have a good page under construction where it is included:

• Brand information: Brand philosophy, products they will find, added value, etc.
• Countdown: clock counting down to the date of publication. If it can be dynamic and updated in real time, so much the better.
• Newsletter subscription form: fundamental to start capturing the first subscribers to our newsletters and offers.
• Call to action message: Inviting visitors to subscribe on the form to get an opening promotional code in their email.

In addition, if we want to start working on search engine positioning, it is advisable that the domain where our page under construction is located incorporates a blog.

Social networks: spreading the word about the promotion

The first step we will take in social media will be to register the social profiles of all those social networks that we think that in the future, however remote it may be, may be of interest to us. This ensures that we will have them available when we need them and that no other company will make use of them.

Next you must choose which social networks you will actually work with on a day-to-day basis. If your product is an impulse buy and is aimed at individual customers, you will probably opt for Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.

Once the social networks have been created and customized, the work of generating and publishing content will begin. These contents must combine different typologies so as not to bore or insist too much to our fans:

• Industry news: information on market developments, new products, news from specialized media, etc.
• Creativities: images, compositions or infographics, ambiguous and emotional. They should highlight the brand’s philosophy or values.
• Calls to action: posts inviting fans to visit the under construction page and sign up as subscribers.

If you have a budget I advise you to invest a minimum in Facebook Ads, your visibility will grow considerably and with 3 or 4 euros a day you will notice the difference.

Search engine optimization: mystery and content marketing support

Even if your online store is not operational, you can start working on improving the relevance level of your domain. The first SEO task is to start generating and publishing SEO content, if possible, for searches related to your products. You can publish these contents in your online store’s blog, even if it is not published yet.

By publishing articles on the blog you are creating new search engine rankable pages for related terms and also making it easier for other websites to start linking to your content.

Additionally you can send press releases and do guest blogging
guest blogging
announcing the imminent opening of your online store, thus gaining links to your domain, while gaining visibility in the media where your content is published.

As you can see these actions fit perfectly with your mystery campaign, on the one hand you can create content about the brand’s philosophy and on the other hand you can publish articles in blogs and media related to the sector informing about the imminent opening of your online store.

Google AdWords: extra visibility for the first 24 hours

It is not profitable to activate your first Google AdWords campaign until the online store is published. However, you can leave it fully configured so that activating it is a matter of one click. In the first 24 hours it is advisable to have at least one remarketing campaign and one branded search campaign active, since initially we will not be positioned even by our own brand.

Email marketing: generating impulse sales

If the work done has paid off, before the publication of the online store you should have a database of subscribers waiting to be informed of the imminent opening of the doors of your ecommerce.

Send an email informing them that in 24 hours your brand new online store will open its virtual doors and remind them that they will only have 24 hours to redeem their exclusive discount code.

Repeat the shipment at the same time of publication of the online store so that your customers start buying at that precise moment.

Tips for designing a mystery campaign

The bonus track of this article is a list of tips that will help you increase the results of your first mystery campaign:

• Open your store on a memorable date and time: first day of the month, some historical date, etc.
• Do not mention the price of the productsRemember, we are talking about mystery!
• Incorporate a countdown clock on the page under construction: Will increase the interest of your potential customers.
• In each of the social networks, we must adapt the message to each of themIf we always publish the same thing on all of them, it will not work.
• Track the newsletter links: to be able to measure the impact of the first and second mailing.

By successfully adapting the methodology presented above to your industry or product philosophy, you will achieve first sales that will motivate you and your team to work hard every day to improve visibility, sales and profits.