Launch a sales campaign for a group of products

There are many types of content, such as articles, landing pages, images in Optimizely Content Management System (CMS), and products from a catalog if you have Optimizely Commerce Connect. For example, a marketer working on a campaign can drag and drop products onto CMS landing pages. Then, merchandisers can enrich the product content in Optimizely Commerce Connect.

Large ecommerce sites are often integrated with external systems for managing product information (Optimizely Product Information Management (PIM)), warehouses and inventories (enterprise resource planning (ERP)), and digital assets (Optimizely Content Marketing Platform DAM). This information is regularly imported to Optimizely Commerce Connect. Depending on the integration setup, editing options from the Optimizely Commerce Connect user interface may be limited. You might update product information, work with markets and pricing, or manage discounts.

The following steps describe how to prepare and launch a sales campaign for a group of products with content in Optimizely Commerce Connect and CMS. In this scenario, you can update product information and create discounts in Optimizely Commerce Connect; pricing and warehouse information are imported from an external system.

You can use projects and content approval sequences to manage the review and publishing of content items in your campaign. With projects activated in CMS edit view, the active project automatically includes content items (pages, blocks, media, and products). Use commenting and email notifications to collaborate with marketing and merchandiser colleagues.

After items are approved, you can publish everything simultaneously or schedule publishing for a later time. This lets you coordinate with the availability of campaigns and associated discounts in Optimizely Commerce Connect, so everything becomes available on the website simultaneously.

When you import the catalog into Optimizely Commerce Connect, products become available in the Catalog user interface. If your solution set up lets you, you can add images (assets) and update display texts for products and variants (SKUs) in the catalog. You can also create relations between products and product categories.

You can create a campaign with associated discounts using the Marketing features in Optimizely Commerce Connect. You can set a date range for when the campaign and its discounts are available, matching the publishing of other content in your sales campaign.

You can use built-in discount types to create discounts for the sales campaign. You can base discounts on individual items, an entire order, or shipping costs. A developer can create discount (promotion) types for customized discount needs. You can also associate coupons (promotion codes) with discounts.

When adding content to CMS landing pages, you can use blocks, which can be reused in multiple places. So, while the same content can be displayed on a start page and in an article, you only need to update the content in one place.

You can add items from the product catalog to pages and blocks using drag-and-drop. The same blocks and media structure are available when editing CMS and Optimizely Commerce Connect content.

Use preview to see what the result looks like in different display channels.

Optimizely Commerce Connect discounts are also visible in the CMS edit view, so you can see which discounts are part of a campaign. You can drag and drop discounts into, for example, a block to display them on the website as long as a developer creates rendering for discounts.

You can also automatically display active discounts on the website's start page. This can be done through code and with the proper rendering support added.

When a campaign is running, A/B testing compares which variants of page elements (like blocks or images) perform best. The metrics can help you optimize the message.

If your implementation includes Optimizely Campaign, you can create automated mailings for a sales campaign.