A pre-sale checklist for testing your Black Friday on-site campaigns

Black Friday is a bad day to find out that a campaign was set to the wrong hour, or that a free shipping message never fires on mobile. The fix is a test run a week or two before the sale, while there is still time to change things calmly.

This checklist walks you through that run. You will check that Atomato is switched on in the theme you will use for the sale, preview each campaign, test it on your live store the way a first-time shopper sees it, and confirm the schedule, signups and add-to-cart buttons work before traffic arrives.

Set aside an hour and work through the sections in order, fixing problems as you find them.

Check the theme your sale will run on

Atomato adds its bell, feed and messages through a theme app embed, and app embeds are saved per theme. If you plan to switch to a sale theme, the embed has to be on and saved in that theme too, or nothing from Atomato shows once it goes live.

• Open the sale theme in the theme editor, click the App embeds icon and confirm Atomato is switched on and saved.
• If you are switching themes with Theme Launcher, check this in the theme it will publish, not only your current one.
• After the switch, look for the yellow "Atomato is not activated" banner on Atomato's home page. It tells you when the live theme is missing the embed.

The help article Turn on the Atomato app embed shows both ways to do this.

Preview each campaign first

Every NotiFeed, NotiPop, NotiSell (Scale and Enterprise+) and NotiEmail (Enterprise+) campaign has Preview on desktop and Preview on mobile buttons. They open a copy of your home page with your unsaved changes, so you can check wording, images and buttons before anything is live. Signups and add to cart are simulated there, so nothing reaches your store or your analytics.

Keep two limits in mind. The preview always shows the campaign you are editing, whatever its audience or page rules, so it cannot tell you whether those rules work. The page is also locked and does not scroll, so a NotiPop set to appear after scrolling will not show. If your store is password protected while you prepare the sale, the preview cannot load it at all. Preview a campaign before it goes live covers the details.

Test on your live store as a new shopper

Atomato remembers what each browser has already seen. A NotiPop that you hovered over, clicked or closed will not show again in that browser, and feed messages you have seen no longer count on the bell. That is why your second look at your own store can seem broken when it is not.

• Open your store in a private or incognito window. Close every private window and open a new one before each round.
• Test signed out for campaigns aimed at Visitors (not signed in), and signed in with a test customer account for Customers (signed in), specific segments or specific customers. Segment changes can take a few minutes to apply.
• Atomato treats a window 740 pixels wide or narrower as mobile, and checks this when the page loads. Reload after resizing, or check on a real phone.

The full routine is in How to test Atomato on your store like a new shopper.

Recreate every targeting rule

Rules belong to each message, so open every message and recreate each rule under Target visitors based on:

• Page URL: visit a page whose path matches, such as /collections/black-friday.
• UTM: add the parameter to the address, for example ?utm_source=instagram, and reload. Capital letters count, and the message only shows while the parameter is in the address.
• Cart value: the amount is not converted, so a rule of 75 means 75 in the shopper's currency. Test each currency you sell in.
• Exit Intent: use a computer and move the pointer out through the top of the window. It does not fire on phones.

One rule worth checking twice: a NotiEmail or NotiSMS signup (Enterprise+) waiting on a cart or exit-intent rule does not currently appear. Use Page URL, UTM or Device rules for signups.

A worked example: one store's test run

Picture a store on Enterprise+ with four campaigns ready for the sale. Here is what its test log might look like, and what each check caught.

1. Early access signup (NotiEmail): it was built from a template with a Cart value rule, so it never appeared. The merchant swapped the rule for Page URL Contains /collections/, then signed up with a new test address and confirmed it reached their Klaviyo list.
2. Sale announcement (NotiFeed): it was scheduled for midnight, but the merchant was traveling and scheduling from a laptop in another time zone. Schedule times use the computer's time zone, not the store's, so they converted the start time and saved again.
3. Free shipping reminder (NotiPop): set to Cart value Is lower than 75. In a private window it showed on an empty cart, because an empty cart counts as 0. Adding Cart items Is greater than 0 with all conditions fixed it.
4. Gift picks (NotiSell): one product's button closed the feed without adding anything. That variant was sold out, and Atomato does not check stock before listing a variant, so the merchant unticked it under Eligible products.

Before the test run, all four campaigns looked fine in the preview. After it, all four work the way the merchant intended, and the signup reaches the right list.

Confirm the schedule and the reporting

On Scale and Enterprise+, you can give a campaign a start and end date. In Campaigns, a campaign waiting to start shows Scheduled in the Status column, and the Schedule column shows its start and end dates. It switches to Active by itself. Times are in whole hours. To get an email when a campaign goes live, tick Send an email when a campaign is live under Settings > Email notifications. Our post on scheduling on-site campaigns to start and stop on time goes further. On the free Starter plan, campaigns run continuously, so plan to start them by hand.

Testing on your live store leaves traces. Your views and clicks count in Atomato's analytics like any shopper's, test signups on Enterprise+ go to your email or SMS platform, and a test order placed after clicking a message can count as Atomato revenue. Note your test runs so you can read the numbers in context, and remove test addresses from your platform afterwards. Views inside the theme editor or the in-app preview are not recorded.

What this checklist does not cover

• Atomato does not show on Shopify checkout, the thank-you page, POS or headless stores, so test those parts of the sale in Shopify.
• It does not split traffic between versions. Any test of two messages runs as back-to-back campaigns, and the week before a sale is too late to start one.
• A schedule belongs to the whole campaign, not to each message. To change wording at a set time, use a separate campaign.
• It does not send emails or texts. Test the emails your platform sends to new signups in that platform.

Next step

Pick a date at least a week before your sale, block out an hour and run this checklist in a private window. Then use the BFCM planning page to fill any gaps in the season's plan, and compare plans on the pricing page if you need scheduling or NotiSell.

Install free on Shopify