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The Ultimate Playbook for Profitable Live Shopping Events on BigCommerce

You've invested time and energy into creating an exciting live shopping event on your BigCommerce store, but when it's time to go live, the audience is smaller than you hoped. You're blasting promotions on email and social media, but it feels like you're just guessing. After the event, you're left wondering: Which campaigns actually drove sales? Was it that Instagram post or the email blast? Without clear data, you can't prove the ROI of your efforts or make smarter decisions for your next event.

The SMB All-Rounder stack provides a powerful, low-cost marketing engine to solve this exact challenge. By combining a free CRM (HubSpot) with a best-in-class email platform (Mailchimp), you can build a cohesive promotional strategy. This playbook shows you how to use a UTM generator to create unique tracking links for every social post, story, and email campaign. These tracked activities are funneled into HubSpot, which then correlates your marketing efforts with actual sales data from your BigCommerce store and traffic patterns from Google Analytics. You'll finally have a single source of truth to see exactly which channels are driving viewers and converting customers, enabling you to calculate true ROI and double down on what works.

Expected Outcomes

  • Accurately attribute sales from live events to specific marketing channels.
  • Calculate the precise ROI for each promotional campaign (email, social, etc.).
  • Optimize future marketing spend by investing in top-performing channels.
  • Increase live shopping event attendance through data-driven promotion.
  • Create a unified customer view by consolidating marketing and sales data in one place.

Core Tools in This Stack

HubSpot CRM

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A comprehensive CRM platform that includes a suite of tools for marketing, sales, content management, and customer service, with a completely free CRM at its core to help businesses manage customer relationships and accelerate growth.

Key Features
  • Contact & Lead Management
  • Sales Pipeline Visualization
  • Deal Tracking and Management
  • Email Tracking and Templates
  • Meeting Scheduling Tool
  • Live Chat and Chatbots
  • Reporting and Analytics Dashboards
  • Task and Activity Automation
Ideal For

Company Size: Small, Medium

Industries: Technology & Software, Business & Professional Services, Retail & E-commerce, Creative & Media

Pricing

Model: Freemium, Subscription

Tier: Starter

Ease of Use

Very High

Mailchimp

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Mailchimp is an all-in-one marketing platform that helps small businesses and larger enterprises market smarter, not harder. It provides AI-powered tools to create and send engaging email campaigns, automate marketing tasks, manage audiences, and analyze campaign performance.

Key Features
  • Email Campaign Builder
  • Marketing Automation
  • Audience Management & Segmentation (CRM)
  • AI-powered Content Optimizer
  • Landing Page and Website Builder
  • A/B Testing
  • Advanced Reporting & Analytics
  • Extensive Integrations with other apps
Ideal For

Company Size: Micro, Small, Medium, Large

Industries: Technology & Software, Business & Professional Services, Retail & E-commerce, Creative & Media, Education & Non-Profit, Health & Wellness, Other

Pricing

Model: Free, Freemium, Subscription

Tier: Mid-tier

Ease of Use

User-Friendly

The Workflow

graph TD subgraph "The SMB All-Rounder" direction LR N0["HubSpot CRM"] N1["Mailchimp"] N1 -- "Creates Timeline Event for Sent Campaign" --> N0 N1 -- "Logs Opens & Clicks as Timeline Events" --> N0 end classDef blue fill:#3498db,stroke:#2980b9,stroke-width:2px,color:#fff; classDef green fill:#2ecc71,stroke:#27ae60,stroke-width:2px,color:#fff; classDef orange fill:#f39c12,stroke:#d35400,stroke-width:2px,color:#fff; class N0 blue; class N1 blue;

Integration Logic

  • HubSpot Campaign Sync

    This integration establishes a data flow from Mailchimp to HubSpot. When a campaign is sent in Mailchimp, a trigger fires. The integration logic then finds the corresponding contact in HubSpot using their email address. Once the contact is identified, a new timeline event is created on their HubSpot record, detailing the specific Mailchimp campaign they received, including campaign name, subject, and send date. Further configurations can also log email opens and clicks as separate events on the contact's timeline, providing granular engagement metrics within HubSpot.

Get Your Profitable Live Shopping Playbook

Stop guessing which campaigns work and start proving the ROI of every live event.