Seasonal Campaign Automation

Seasonal Campaign Automation

Overview

Seasonal peaks — Black Friday/Cyber Monday, holiday gifting, Valentine's Day, Back-to-School — can account for 30–50% of annual ecommerce revenue for many categories. Automating seasonal campaigns means building reusable email flows and discount templates that activate on calendar triggers rather than requiring manual setup each time. Klaviyo's scheduled sends and Shopify's automated discounts handle most of this without custom code.

When to Use This Skill

• When planning Black Friday/Cyber Monday campaigns and needing a structured playbook
• When seasonal campaigns are built from scratch every year with no reusable templates
• When wanting to automate countdown email sequences for a sale event
• When needing to schedule promotional pricing changes in sync with email and ad campaigns

Core Instructions

Step 1: Define the seasonal campaign calendar

Plan your full campaign year in a single document. The most important ecommerce events by revenue impact:

Build email templates and discount codes for each event in September (for BFCM) or 8 weeks in advance for other events.

Step 2: Build your BFCM email sequence

---

Shopify with Klaviyo

1. Go to Klaviyo → Campaigns → Create Campaign and create a folder called "BFCM 2026" 2. Build the following scheduled campaigns (all as one-time sends):

3. Build each email template now, save as a reusable Klaviyo template — next year you update the discount value and dates only 4. Add a countdown timer image to launch day and Cyber Monday emails using Klaviyo's native countdown timer block (available under Content → Dynamic Content)

Segment non-purchasers for Cyber Monday: In Klaviyo, create a segment: "Has received BFCM Launch campaign AND has NOT placed an order since [T-0 date]" — send Cyber Monday email only to this group

---

WooCommerce with Klaviyo (or Mailchimp)

1. Connect Klaviyo to WooCommerce using the Klaviyo plugin or the Klaviyo for WooCommerce extension 2. Build the same campaign sequence as above in Klaviyo — the campaign structure is platform-agnostic 3. For customers using Mailchimp: build a Customer Journey map with scheduled email nodes at the same offsets

Alternative (simpler): Use AutomateWoo workflows triggered by dates — set up date-based triggers for each campaign step.

---

BigCommerce with Klaviyo

1. Klaviyo syncs all BigCommerce order history automatically 2. Follow the same Klaviyo campaign setup as the Shopify section above 3. For the VIP segment: use Klaviyo's Total Customer Value > $500 predicate to identify high-value customers

---

Step 3: Schedule promotional pricing

---

Shopify

1. Go to Shopify Admin → Discounts → Create Discount → Amount off products 2. Configure:

• Discount type: Percentage (e.g., 25%)
• Applies to: All products (or specific collections)
• Active dates: Set start = Black Friday 12:00am, End = Cyber Monday 11:59pm
• Shopify automatically activates and deactivates the discount at the set times

3. For automatic discount (applied at checkout without code): go to Shopify → Discounts → Create Automatic Discount 4. For a sitewide sale with original/sale price displayed on product pages: use Shopify → Products → Bulk Edit to set compare_at_price = original price and price = sale price; then revert after the sale

Important: If using a discount code approach (recommended for BFCM), announce the code in every email and across social — friction from requiring a code reduces conversion; automatic discounts convert better.

---

WooCommerce

1. Go to WooCommerce → Marketing → Coupons → Add Coupon 2. Configure:

• Coupon type: Percentage discount
• Coupon amount: 25
• Usage restriction: No minimum order (for BFCM)
• Usage limits: Leave blank (unlimited)
• Expiry date: Cyber Monday 11:59pm

3. For automatic pricing on all products: use WooCommerce → Products → Bulk Edit to set sale price, then bulk-remove it after the event

---

BigCommerce

1. Go to BigCommerce → Marketing → Promotions → Create Promotion 2. Configure the percentage off, start date, and end date 3. BigCommerce applies and removes promotions automatically based on the schedule

---

Step 4: Set up SMS for seasonal events

Send 1–2 SMS per event maximum. More than 2 SMS in a 4-day period causes significant unsubscribe spikes.

In Klaviyo SMS: 1. Create an SMS campaign alongside the email campaigns 2. Best send times: Launch day at 9am (first SMS), Cyber Monday morning (second SMS if not purchased) 3. Subject for launch day: "BFCM is live — 25% off everything: [store link] — Reply STOP to opt out"

In Postscript (Shopify): 1. Go to Postscript → Campaigns → Create Campaign 2. Set the audience to "All subscribed" minus "Has purchased in last 3 days" 3. Schedule for launch day at 9am local time

Step 5: Warm up your email domain before BFCM

Sending a sudden volume spike on Black Friday damages your domain reputation. Start 4 weeks before:

1. In Klaviyo, increase sends by 10% per week starting in October 2. Go to Klaviyo → Account → Sending Infrastructure and check your sending domain health 3. Suppress unengaged contacts (no opens in 90+ days) before BFCM — sending to cold contacts tanks deliverability

Step 6: Measure seasonal lift

Best Practices

• Build templates in September, send in November — last-minute BFCM campaigns have poor creative and poor deliverability; email templates must be ready 8 weeks out
• Cap at 4–5 emails total across BFCM week — sending 7+ emails causes significant unsubscribe spikes; 4 is the comfortable maximum per customer
• Give VIPs 24-hour early access — loyalty Gold and Platinum customers get the same discount 24 hours before the public launch; this is the most cost-effective way to make your best customers feel valued
• Use automatic discounts for conversion rate — removing the friction of entering a coupon code typically increases conversion rate 10–15% compared to code-based discounts
• Schedule the pricing rollback before launch — setting the end date in Shopify's discount scheduler before BFCM starts prevents the most common post-sale mistake (forgetting to turn off the discount)

Common Pitfalls

Related Skills

• @email-marketing-automation
• @product-launch-campaigns
• @sms-marketing
• @meta-ads-integration
• @loyalty-program-optimization

Valentine's Day Campaign Setup

Problem/Feature Description

Botanica & Bloom, an online florist and gifting brand, runs Valentine's Day as their biggest revenue event of the year — often accounting for 40% of Q1 sales. For the past three years the marketing team has built the campaign from scratch each February: writing briefs, manually scheduling emails, and negotiating discount levels at the last minute. Last year, a key email went out a day late because a team member was ill, and a promotional code continued to work for two weeks after the sale ended because no one remembered to deactivate it.

The CTO has asked for a TypeScript-based campaign configuration system that can be reused each year. You have been brought in to implement the initial campaign definition and email sequence for Valentine's Day 2027 (the sale runs February 12–16, 2027). The company wants a 20% sitewide discount, a multi-step email warm-up starting three weeks out, and targeting rules that differentiate between their VIP loyalty members, lapsed customers who haven't ordered in 12 months, and general subscribers.

Output Specification

Produce a TypeScript file named campaign.ts that contains:

• The type/interface definitions needed to represent the campaign and its email steps
• A fully populated Valentine's Day 2027 campaign object using those types
• The email cadence should include at least 5 steps spanning from 3 weeks before to the last day of the sale
• A brief planning-notes.md explaining key decisions around audience segmentation strategy and campaign timeline

The TypeScript file should be self-contained (no external imports needed beyond type definitions) and should compile without errors if types are used correctly.

BFCM Campaign Infrastructure: Safety Controls and Analytics

Problem/Feature Description

Northfield Outdoors ran their Black Friday / Cyber Monday campaign last year and encountered three problems. During the sale, their email sender reputation tanked because they sent too many emails too quickly and their complaint rate spiked — ISPs started routing their messages to spam. They also discovered after the fact that some customers received both a win-back campaign and the general BFCM broadcast on the same day, which drove unsubscribes. Finally, their post-sale reporting only showed total revenue for the campaign week — the board questioned whether the sale cannibalized December sales or generated truly new revenue, and the marketing team had no way to answer.

You have been asked to address all three issues by building the safety and analytics layer for their email platform. Specifically: implement the logic that determines whether it is safe to send an email to a given customer on a given day, implement the API endpoint for the countdown timer image that is embedded in sale emails, and design the post-campaign performance report. All work should be in TypeScript.

Output Specification

Produce the following files:

• email-safety.ts — Logic that checks whether a customer can receive an email today (contact frequency enforcement) and monitors sender health
• countdown-timer.ts — The Express route handler for GET /api/countdown-timer that generates a countdown image for use in emails
• campaign-report.ts — The function that calculates and returns post-campaign performance metrics
• analytics-notes.md — A short explanation of how you chose to measure whether the campaign generated incremental revenue vs. pulled forward demand from a later period

Each file should include inline comments explaining the key safety/correctness decisions.

Summer Sale Pricing Engine

Problem/Feature Description

Coastal Surf Co. runs a major Summer Sale every July — 15% off all surfboards and accessories for one week. Last year's sale was a commercial success, but it created two operational headaches. First, when the sale ended, three products were left at sale price for an additional 11 days because the engineer who was supposed to revert prices was on vacation and the task fell through the cracks. Second, a 15% discount code that was created for the sale was still being redeemed in September because it had no expiry — this went unnoticed until a finance review.

You have been asked to build the pricing automation module in TypeScript. It should: activate sale pricing across all eligible products at the start of the campaign, persist enough information to restore original prices afterwards, and ensure the price reversion happens automatically at campaign end without any manual intervention. You also need to implement the discount calculation logic for at least three discount types. Finally, document how discount codes created for the sale should be configured to prevent the September problem from happening again.

Output Specification

Produce the following files:

• pricing.ts — TypeScript implementation of the pricing activation function, discount calculation function, and the rollback scheduling approach
• discount-codes.md — A short document describing the required fields and configuration for sale discount codes, including how expiry is handled and how codes are deactivated after the sale

The code in pricing.ts should clearly show: how original prices are preserved, how the rollback is scheduled, and the discount calculation for percent_off, fixed_amount, and free_shipping types. Add inline comments where the approach differs from the naive implementation.