How to Push School Supplies

Online shoppers are getting ready to buy supplies for the upcoming school year. Online sales of school supplies generated more than $58.1 billion in 2018, making this one of the most popular shopping periods of the year. It would be wise to have a good strategy in place if you plan to sell during this period. Prepare for back-to-school shoppers by learning about some effective eCommerce strategies. 

Create a Dedicated Back-to-School Page 

The first action you should take is to create a seasonal landing page for the products you want to sell. You can use this page to promote the items students need at the start of the school year, such as binders, pens, and pencils. Organize products by type and grade level so shoppers can find exactly what they need without any issues. 

From there, promote this landing page in your social media advertisements and emails. Keep this page up during the back-to-school period. Once the period ends you should redesign the page into a traditional school supplies page. If the back-to-school page performed well, a redirect will allow the strong results to carry over to the new landing page. 

Use Email Marketing 

An email marketing campaign can help you re-engage with back-to-school shoppers who visited your website years ago. With emails, you can directly promote sales and products you are offering during your back-to-school sale. Keep emails short and simple, and offer discount codes to parents who are looking to save money. 

Once you have a strategy in place, review your email list and see who you can send these promotions to. To get new customers for your email list, include an opt-in form on your back-to-school landing page. You can also ask for addresses during checkout, and you can build an opt-in form on the footer of your website too. 

You can also use emails to re-target customers who abandoned their shopping carts. Sometimes all it takes is a simple reminder to get someone to come back to your store.  

Advertise Products to Appeal to Kids & Adults 

Promoting your products on social media is essential if you want to get back-to-school shoppers to visit your website.  

One of the smartest decisions you can make is designing advertisements that appeal to children. While children do not make any purchases, they can influence their parents’ shopping decisions. If you sell clothes for back-to-school, create posts with students wearing them to entice kids who are browsing social media.  

Of course, you should also be tailoring posts for parents. Parents will be looking for supplies that will help their kids, so display images of kids using your products. This will show parents that their kids will enjoy using your school supplies. Be sure to put down a link to your back-to-school page so they can see more of your products. 

Host a Back-to-School Contest 

You can also generate interest during the back-to-school shopping season by hosting giveaways. People like winning free stuff, and back-to-school shoppers will not turn down the opportunity to win free school supplies. Create an enticing prize package with a good variety of items, such as a backpack, binders, pens, and art supplies. 

Get creative with advertisements for your giveaway, and give them a fun vibe to entice people to sign up. On the giveaway form, ask for email addresses so participants can sign up for your email list. 

Promote your giveaway on all your social media platforms, and focus most of your efforts on your most popular channel. Also, try partnering with major social media influencers to extend the reach of your contest. 

Focus on Teachers Too 

You need to focus most of your marketing efforts on students and parents, but you should not forget about teachers. Teachers need supplies for the classroom, and they usually need to shop in bulk to accommodate for a large number of students. When developing your back-to-school marketing strategies, try appealing to teachers and staff members. 

Dedicate part of your back-to-school landing page to teaching supplies so teachers can find just what they need. Since teachers have to spend a lot on teaching supplies, it might be smart to offer a few discount codes on this page. Build a form so teachers can give you their email addresses, and send them promotional codes from there.  

Teachers get to save money while they shop, and you get new additions for your email list. 

Logicblock’s 7cart system gives you all the tools you need to sell during the back-to-school season. Want to learn more?