As the world continues to transition live events to virtual ones, people are craving conversations and experiences that bring value to their everyday lives.
Virtual or not, Shopify has been operating under this mindset for some time. Since 2015, they’ve been supporting community-building user groups for Shopify merchants who want to do everything from improve their Shopify platform skills to discuss business operations trends — and everything in between.
Working with their top Shopify Partners (those who build apps and offer custom services for Shopify merchants), they host these events with the end goal of not just building a community, but building a resilient ecosystem of successful merchants.
The driving force behind this program: Shopify’s Experiential Marketing Manager, Caitlin Teed. From the earliest days to today, Caitlin tells us how they went from hosting a handful of live events to building an agile program that supports hundreds of live and virtual events every year.
Shopify is a leading global commerce company, providing trusted tools to start, grow, market, and manage a retail business of any size. Shopify makes commerce better for everyone with a platform and services that are engineered for reliability, while delivering a better shopping experience for consumers everywhere.
Shopify hosted its inaugural partner and developer conference in 2015. A venue to showcase new product features and talk about the future of commerce, Shopify’s partners were eager to bring this experience to their mutual merchants around the world.
“Our events program started very grassroots,” said Caitlin. “At the time, I was a Partner Manager. Our experiential marketing team asked us to pick one or two of the top partners in our region, so we started with around one meetup a month.
“The experiential marketing team was going to all of these events. They were heavily involved and invested, and that passion spread. Other partners saw what we were doing and wanted to get involved too.”
It became clear to Shopify’s teams that this program was going to grow exponentially. But from a tools and technology perspective, their program was not set up to scale effectively. Event pages were all ad hoc. Email marketing was disparate. Events weren’t working together, nor were they on-brand.
“Not having branded events was a big problem,” said Caitlin. “Everything from your registration experience to your on-site experience should ideally be in sync — the same feeling, the same look, the same touch.
“We eventually hit a wall. By this time, I transitioned from being a Partner Manager to an Experiential Marketing Manager. All our Partner Managers, partners, and other teams around the world would ask, ‘What’s our one source of truth for events?’ But we didn’t have an answer.”
Event marketers know there’s a lot that goes into building and hosting events. But there’s even more on the line when you’re scaling those events by empowering other teams to build and host their own. Shopify, for example, works with their partners to host many of these events.
“Our partners are the local experts,” said Caitlin. “While we are becoming more and more of an international e-commerce company, we have partners all over hosting events. We have a partner in South Africa who has been hosting Shopify meetups since the early days, and they love it. There are these amazing companies on the ground, our partners, who believe in our mission and are driven to be successful alongside us.
“But all the boxes to check, the time invested … it’s a lot. We have hundreds of partners who are hosting events, and before we implemented Splash, I would have to review every single event. We got to a point where it just wasn’t scaling. It was taking up more time than it should have.”
Like Caitlin, many event marketers have to deal with the stress that comes with multiple people or teams hosting events on multiple or ineffective platforms. One of the largest challenges with this is when a team wouldn’t check-in attendees, so you lose a key metric in determining the success of your event — leading to massive gaps in event data and an inability to prove event impact or ROI.
“People would knock on my door asking why we were focusing on certain events or about the value of those events,” said Caitlin. “I’d have to say it’s impossible to know without the right data. And even when we had some data to work with, it was hard to tell if it was the right data that we should be considering.”
Now, Caitlin and the Shopify team have the event marketing technology needed to not only scale event programs and event data internally, but also effectively empower their partners in the same way.
“All I have to do is go into Splash’s reporting feature and see all the aggregated data I need to use or export,” said Caitlin. “One of my favorite reports is the loyalty report. I love that I can see how many repeat attendees we have at events, whether people are traveling across Germany to attend different meetups or checking out several of our virtual events.”
Like so many others, Caitlin and the Shopify team hit a snag in their event marketing plans at the beginning of 2020. The COVID-19 pandemic hit nearly every country, and as a company with live events planned globally, Shopify had to pivot to virtual events — and fast.
“Our meetups were always meant to build community and let our merchants interact with each other and our partners,” said Caitlin. “Webinars are a great learning tool, but I’m really trying to push us to think outside the box and use tools that can facilitate those interactions.
“For example, we canceled Shopify Unite, our annual product conference for partners, and partners started reaching out to say they understood, but were sad it wasn’t happening. After some suggestions, a few of us got together to host a small virtual happy hour for our Facebook community of women who work with Shopify. We engaged some lightning speakers and used breakout rooms to connect with others.”
Figuring out what kind of virtual event to run is important, but only the tip of the iceberg right now. In this quick shift to virtual events, many event marketers have noticed their teams wanting to host more and more events, and Shopify is no exception.
“We’ve definitely seen a large uptick in events, but we’re still being methodical about it,” said Caitlin. “We’re still figuring out the differences between the types of virtual events we want to run, what makes sense from an attendee’s perspective, and what our goals are for those events.
“Our partner community and internal teams are equally picking up momentum. Even with internal interest, if a Shopify employee wants to set up a virtual meetup to discuss retail, for example, it’s as easy as clicking ‘new event’ — all of the tools to get registration open, promote and report on the event are at their fingertips.”
