This webinar covers:

• Why leading e-commerce brands like Nike and Puma are adopting headless CMS platforms.
• How sales campaign management works on a headless platform like Sanity.
• Steps to audit your sales content workflows and create a tailored headless e-commerce roadmap for your brand.

What Does “Going Headless” Mean?

A headless CMS decouples content management from design and layout. Unlike traditional systems like WordPress, where content is tightly linked to presentation, headless CMS platforms allow you to manage content independently.

• Content authors, such as marketing or e-commerce teams, use a user-friendly interface to update content, create new pages, modify layouts, and publish changes—all without involving developers.
• These updates are directly connected to your e-commerce platform (e.g., Shopify), ensuring that when you hit publish, your changes go live seamlessly.

Additional benefits include:

• Draft & Preview: You can preview unpublished content, such as an upcoming sale, and share the preview with your team for feedback.
• Safe Content Updates: Because content is separate from the website’s code, you can confidently make changes without breaking the site.

Why Are Leading Brands Going Headless?

On traditional CMS platforms, updating website content required developer involvement. For example, launching a Black Friday banner might involve weeks of back-and-forth with your dev team. With a headless CMS like Sanity, marketers can directly manage these updates.

Key Benefits:

• Efficiency: Brands report cutting the time to launch sales from weeks to hours.
• Centralized Control: All sales content—product pages, banners, homepage heroes, and more—can be managed in one place.
• Scalability: Whether it’s a one-day sale or a complex multi-locale campaign, headless CMS platforms streamline the process.

Why Sanity for E-Commerce?

Sanity’s headless CMS is especially powerful for e-commerce due to its seamless integration with platforms like Shopify via the Sanity Connect app. Highlights include:

• Customizable UI: Tailored to meet the needs of both marketing teams and developers.
• Scheduling Features: Plan and automate content publishing/unpublishing for specific dates.
• Data Integration: Synchronize sales logic, such as discounts, directly with e-commerce platforms.

Managing Sales Campaigns in Sanity

Let’s explore what sales campaign management looks like in Sanity.

Scheduling Sales:

• Set up campaigns in advance, such as Mother’s Day, Cyber Monday, or Boxing Day.
• Use Sanity’s scheduling functionality to automate when sales content is published and unpublished.

Defining Sales Logic:

• For example, you can configure a “15% off with a $100 minimum purchase” discount directly in Sanity.
• Sanity pulls this logic from your e-commerce platform, ensuring consistency between the UI and backend.

Content Management:

• Manage all sales touchpoints—heroes, banners, product pages—within Sanity’s centralized interface.
• Customize content for specific pages, such as a spring sale homepage hero offering “15% off everything.”

Best Practices for Building a Headless Workflow

While the headless approach is transformative, poorly designed workflows can undermine its benefits. To ensure success:

Understand Your Sales Strategy:

• Identify the types of sales you run: seasonal, recurring, site-wide, or product-specific.
• Account for multi-locale and multilingual campaigns.

Catalog Your Touchpoints:

• Determine which pages (e.g., homepage, product pages) and content blocks (e.g., banners, carousels) need updates during sales.
• Map these touchpoints to create a streamlined workflow.

Leverage Sanity’s Features:

• Live Previews: Visualize updates in real-time without affecting your live site.
• Stakeholder Reviews: Share preview links with team members for feedback and approvals.

Key Takeaways

• Sanity’s headless CMS is highly customizable and integrates well with Shopify and other e-commerce platforms.
• Create all of your sales for the year without developer bottlenecks
• Preview your sales without affecting your default site experience
• Watch your sales content publish (and unpublish!) on schedule.
• Audit and catalog your sales content touchpoints to build a useful headless e-commerce platform.