How to Create Successful Marketing Campaigns in OpenCart

If you are reading this tutorial, you have probably already setup your OpenCart site. Now it’s time to start making some sales, right? Let’s see what the platform has to offer with the built-in marketing campaigns.

You can create and manage marketing campaigns from your admin panel in OpenCart.

This is possible since OpenCart 2.0.x introduced the Marketing Tracking section, which we will review in this post.

What’s a Marketing Campaign?

A marketing campaign is an organized effort to promote and sell a product or service.

In other words - advertising your products via different media channels to acquire more customers. In our case, we’ll focus on creating an image advertisement on your OpenCart store’s home page.

We’ll give a simple example, but you can use any marketing banners and materials you can come up with.

Q: What’s the difference with any other ordinary banner?

A: With the marketing campaigns in OpenCart, you can track the traffic, views and orders that came from clicking on the banner you have set.

How to Create a Marketing Campaign

Open your OpenCart admin panel and click on the Marketing menu. You will see a Marketing sub-menu, which leads you to the Marketing Tracking section.

Hit the Add New button to create your first campaign.

After entering a name and description for the campaign, you will see the auto-generated Tracking Code and examples how you should apply it to your links.

After you click Save, your tracking code is ready to be put to work. You will see the campaign appearing in the Marketing Tracking List where you will be able to follow the number of clicks and orders each campaign is generating.

But to get those numbers going, you need to show something on the storefront. Let’s explain how to do that.

Displaying the Campaign on the Storefront

First of all, you need to create a new HTML Content module. This is where you will add the image and links to the products you want to promote.

Find the HTML Content module in the Extensions > Extensions > Modules. Click on Add New to create and modify it.

The creation process of a custom HTML content module is fairly straightforward. Give it a Module Name and Heading Title (the one that will appear in the storefront) and enable its Status.

Our example campaign will be called Summer Sale!

In the description, open the code view and use the template below for the product and image you have selected for your campaign.

Pay attention to the highlighted part where you need to paste the tracking code from the marketing campaign you just created.

When your HTML content module is created, it’s time to assign it to the layout you want to display the banner.

In our case, we’ll show it on the homepage. Go to Design > Layouts > Choose layout and assign the module to your preferred position.

Here’s how it looks on our end:

Don’t forget to click Save again and go to your storefront to view how things look.

Our example looks fairly simple, but you can imagine how beautiful the banner you create for your campaign will look.

Now, whenever a customer clicks or purchases the iPhone from this banner, you will notice it in the Marketing Tracking section.

Marketing Campaign Statistics

Here is how our current campaign is performing.

When you create multiple campaigns and assign them to different layouts, you can track and compare their effectiveness.

This will help you optimize the banners and the way you run your campaigns.

Summary

So, these are the basics of setting up and running marketing campaigns in OpenCart. It’s quite simple and can be a flexible way to start promoting your products not only on your site, but also on social media and other channels. Got questions? Leave them in the comments below.
 

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