So you may have noticed that we’re midway through our SUMMER SALE (you should totally check it out) which implements some fun features like tiered discounts as well as a raffle where we are giving away some awesome prizes. Running a Sale with Divi and WooCommerce did not come without its hiccups, however, even after careful planning, so we thought we’d share our journey so you can get insight into how something like this comes together.

The good, the bad, and the ugly, unfiltered.

Why Running a Sale with Divi and WooCommerce makes sense.

Running a Sale or Promotion on your Divi WooCommerce site is a great way to engage prospective buyers during slower months. Many successful companies do this because it not only boosts the bottom line, it also increases customer satisfaction and brand awareness. Not only this, it gives you the opportunity to stand out among your competitors and even possibly grow non-sales metrics like subscribers or word-of-mouth marketing.

If Running Sales or Promotions are not yet part of your marketing strategy for your Divi WooCommerce store, no stress, you are in the right spot. We are going to give you a quick overview of our experience running our SUMMER SALE, as well as arm you with a checklist to follow which will help you plan effectively, and execute flawlessly.

First, let’s break down the phases of a Sale or Promotion.

Our Experience Running a Sale with Divi and WooCommerce.

Ok, so here it is, an unfiltered look into what we experienced during each of the phases outlined above. Some things went great, others threw some nasty curve balls. 

Let’s take a look!

Planning

The whole planning stage started for us at the beginning of June where we decided to do something creative to kick off the summer which will benefit of course us, but also our awesome current and prospective clients. We knew we wanted to include our existing client base in the party, so we started discussing how to do that. We also wanted to reward those new customers who purchased multiple plugins with steeper discounts. Let the research begin.

We split the tasks among 3 employees, one for top-level decision making, one for social media activities, and one for researching the tools we’d use for this sale.

We got together and decided what our goals for this sale will be, which were:

• Grow the Subscriber base for our Annual Membership
• Grow our Socials
• Reach New Customers

With our goals outlined, we started researching which tools to use for this. We knew we wanted a tiered solution for the discounts, and after checking out a few we decided on a plugin.

We also decided to reward anybody that wants to participate, that we would create a raffle, and again after checking out a few options, we landed on Rafflepress to run the raffle.

After deciding the other details like discount amounts, timing, raffle prizes etc, we were ready to move into the building phase.

Building

Now for the fun! We cloned our production site into a staging area and started installing and configuring the plugins we purchased.

First up was the tiered discount plugin (which shall not be named, you’ll see why a little later), so we built out our tiers and conditional logic for the various discount levels. It worked great!

Next up, we configured Rafflepress with various actions like visiting our Youtube channel (where you will find some helpful content) or referring friends to enter the raffle. We set up 9 different ways to get more entries in total. This plugin is pretty awesome and very easy to set up.

On to creating some assets like a promo landing page (diviengine.com/summer21 😉) that is easy to remember and share some sales banners, and a video introducing the wholesale. The landing page was quick as we just used a branded layout and added in things like the video and our Rafflepress shortcode. For the video, we used a template from Envato Elements and edited it in Adobe Premiere. Assets locked in!

We also linked up to our Active Campaign account along with our Google Analytics so we can track progress and build some lists! And what is a sale without some Ad Spend? Our marketing Guru jumped in and set up some sweet Facebook ads targeting WordPress and Divi communities where we felt our target customer lives.

Ok, our big brains think it is all working according to plan, time to test it until it breaks (or hopefully NOT).

Testing

Welcome to maybe the single most important step.

TEST! TEST! TEST!

And when you are done testing, TEST AGAIN!

It is too easy to lose the confidence of your customer if something goes wrong when you’ve got them to the cart. We set up a testing routine which we had various team members follow from all corners of the earth to make sure that things worked.

Some important things we tested were different combinations of products and memberships, making sure they all display correctly. Making sure the discounts are applied correctly. We tested things on multiple devices and browsers. All to make sure that no matter how curious visitors work things, that they worked correctly as we intended.

Part of this testing and Quality Assurance phase is also to double and triple-check your spelling and grammar. For this, we love Grammarly because as much as I have the gift of gab, grammar and spelling were not included in the package.

Everything looked good, we are ready to roll!

Go Live

Ok, time to launch this bad boy. 48 hours before the sale was supposed to kick off, we implemented all the plugins and changes on our production site ready for the show. The night before, about 1 hour before kick-off, we manually started the sale with all the discounts so that we can test our add-to-cart process one more time just to be extra sure our customers will only have a great experience.

Everything looked exactly as it did in testing, so some key team members went to bed after a long day.

Then Boom 💥

How could this be? We tested and tested some more, this should not have happened. Two of our employees were still diligently at work trying to figure out what is happening, but due to not having direct access to the server could not effectively troubleshoot the scenario. Our engineers with access were not able to be reached because it was super late for them already, and all we could do was wait as we started experiencing intermitted outages of our site where our promo was now in full swing.

As a precaution, we are able to hold off on our kickoff emails and social media posts announcing the sale was now life, in an attempt to suppress the traffic, and really just the eyeballs that will see our downed soldier. Nobody slept well that night.

The next morning everybody sprung into actions, and the rogue slacks were seen, it was all hands on deck. Peter, our founder, and certified coding genius sprung into action to investigate the issue. He quickly determined that the plugin we used for the tiered pricing of our SUMMER SALE went rogue and maxed out our server resources (which are generous). He flew in and disabled that plugin, but then we were left with a sale for which we had tons of marketing created, ads ready to roll…it was too late to change it.

Answer? Code a custom solution of course. It was too late in the game to troubleshoot or deal with the plugin support team, so Peter within a matter of 45 minutes coded a custom solution that handled our different discount tiers as well as the separate discounts on our memberships.

Once our jaws were picked up off the ground, we let roll with our marketing and excitedly started watching the traffic pick up.

Disaster averted.

Now that things were live, the marketing team meets weekly to review the results of our efforts and so far so good. Currently, we have around 800 raffle entries and we are seeing good ROI for our ad spend. Now that we are in the middle of the sale, we are focussing our drip campaign and getting our content ready for the close of the sale at the end of the month.

Post Sale

Now we are not here yet, but we have a debriefing plan set out so that we can assess how we did, and what we will do differently next time. I can already tell you that we will very likely ensure the entire team is on high alert for the first hour or so before we communicate the sale is live.

Of course, we will take a look at our analytics data and ad performance to see what we can do to improve those. For this sale, we only went with Facebook ads, but we are actively working on getting Google Ads into that loop.
A fun thing we noticed with this new iOS policy where users can opt out of ads, is that we don’t get very accurate analytics for our Facebook ads and that our Google Analytics paints a more accurate picture of what our results actually look like.

So, we will continue our weekly meetings and celebrate our success, and always look for ways we can improve the experience for both our team and our customers. When we have success doing this, we have more resources available to keep improving our products and services so that you, our customers, can get the best value for your money.

Conclusion

So there it is our unfiltered experience with pulling this SUMMER SALE together by Running a Sale with Divi and WooCommerce. There were highs, there were lows, but we pulled through and we are not even done yet! I know I said the most important part in this process is testing, but honestly, it really just is having a great team and awesome customers.

We put a checklist together below for you guys so that you can do the things we did right, but also avoid some of the things we did wrong with Running a Sale with Divi and WooCommerce. Check it out, and maybe try using it for your next Divi WooCommerce sale.

Divi WooCommerce Sale Checklist