Who should get Black Friday early access, and how do you show it on-site?

Early access is one of the simplest ways to thank your best customers before Black Friday. They get first pick of the sale, and you spread some of the rush across a few extra days instead of one.

This guide shows you how to decide who gets early access, how to show the offer on-site only to those customers, what everyone else should see in the meantime, and how to hand over to the public sale on time.

You will need a Shopify customer segment for your early access group and an Atomato NotiFeed campaign. Scheduling the handover needs Scale or Enterprise+, and there is a manual route on Starter.

Decide who gets early access

Pick a group you can describe with a rule, so you can build it once in Shopify and reuse it. When you install Atomato, it adds five segments to your store, and two of them suit early access:

• Atomato - Customers who have the tag 'VIP': customers you have tagged VIP in Shopify. This gives you full control over who is in.
• Atomato - Customers who have spent more than $100: total spent above 100 in your store currency, whatever that currency is.

You can change their conditions, or build your own segment, such as repeat buyers, under Customers > Segments in Shopify. Keep the Atomato names on the built-in ones, because Atomato looks them up by name. For a wider look at segments, see How to use Shopify customer segments for on-site messages.

One rule shapes everything else: segments only match shoppers who are signed in to a customer account. A VIP who browses signed out is treated like any other visitor.

Set up the access itself in Shopify

Atomato shows the message. The early access itself, whether that is a discount code or a collection you have not linked anywhere else yet, lives in Shopify. Atomato does not create discount codes for NotiFeed or NotiPop messages, so create the discount in Shopify first and check its eligibility settings there, then put your own code and dates in the message.

Point the message at the early access collection, not your home page. A click to a collection or product page gives the shopper six hours to add products to cart and still count toward the campaign, compared with three hours for other pages on your store.

Build the early access message

1. Click Create campaign, open Promote a sale or launch and start from the Member-Only Offer template. It comes with Customer Segments set to Atomato - Customers who have the tag 'VIP'.
2. Write your own title and description, with the code and the dates the early access runs.
3. Set Button link to the early access collection. The template links to your home page until you change it.
4. Open Customer Segments and confirm the segment is selected. If the VIP segment was renamed or deleted, the template opens with Customer Segments off and the offer would show to every shopper. An empty segment list also shows to everyone.

Customer Segments works on every plan. The help article Show a campaign to specific customers or segments covers each audience option.

Give everyone else a message too

Signed-out shoppers never match the segment, and that includes VIPs who have not signed in. Pair the early access message with one for shoppers who are not signed in, so they still see something useful.

On Scale and Enterprise+, add it as a second message in the same campaign under Multi notifications and set its Customer Segments to Visitors (not signed in). Each message has its own audience. On Starter, a campaign shows only its first message, so use a NotiPop campaign for one group and a NotiFeed campaign for the other.

Here is a sample pair for the same week:

Signed-in VIPs: Your Black Friday early access is open. Use code EARLY20 on the sale collection until Thursday night, before anyone else.

Visitors (not signed in): Black Friday starts Friday. Already a VIP customer? Sign in to see your early access.

The second message only works if your VIPs know they have an account, so mention signing in when you tell them about early access by email.

A worked example: three days of early access

Say Black Friday is Friday 27 November and you want VIPs to shop from Tuesday 24 November.

• Campaign 1, VIP early access: the VIP message and the signed-out "sign in" message. Schedule it to start Tuesday 24 November at 9:00 and end Friday 27 November at 0:00.
• Campaign 2, public sale: your Black Friday message for all customers, linked to the sale collection. Schedule it to start Friday 27 November at 0:00 and end when the sale closes.

The two campaigns are separate because a schedule belongs to a whole campaign, not to each message. Times are in whole hours and follow the time zone of the computer you schedule from, so convert them if that differs from your store's. On Starter, scheduling is locked, and Atomato won't save a second NotiFeed or NotiPop campaign while one of that type is active, even as a draft. Save the VIP campaigns as Active on Tuesday, then on Friday pause them before you save the public sale campaign, or edit the messages in place. The help article Schedule a campaign to start and end has the details.

On Scale and Enterprise+, you can also add a NotiSell campaign set to the same segment, so VIPs can add early access products straight from the feed. Each NotiSell button adds one unit of the chosen variant and opens the cart.

Check it as soon as it goes live

The store preview always shows the message you are editing, whatever its audience, so it cannot tell you who will see it. A scheduled campaign stays hidden until its start time, so test on your live store right after Tuesday at 9:00:

• Open a private window signed out, and check you see only the signed-out message.
• Sign in as a customer tagged VIP, and check the early access message and its link.
• After tagging a customer or changing a segment, allow a few minutes, because Atomato remembers segment membership briefly.

A pre-sale checklist for testing your Black Friday on-site campaigns covers the rest of your sale setup.

What this does not do

• It does not recognize signed-out shoppers. Segments match signed-in customers only, and Atomato cannot target by location, browsing history, or new versus returning visitors.
• It does not lock the sale. Anyone with your code or collection link can use it unless you restrict it in Shopify.
• It does not send the early access email or text. Send those from your email or SMS platform, alongside the on-site messages.
• It does not show on checkout, the thank-you page, POS or headless stores.

Next step

Tag your early access customers in Shopify this week, then build and schedule the VIP campaign, and test it signed in and signed out once it starts. For the rest of your sale plan, see the Black Friday Cyber Monday guide.

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