Why June Is When Back to School Planning Starts

Most marketers think back to school is an August thing. They're wrong. Parents start shopping in late June, and search volume for school supplies climbs steadily through July. According to the National Retail Federation, families planned to spend an average of $890 on back-to-school shopping in 2025. That number keeps going up.

If you wait until August to build your back to school marketing funnel, you're already competing against brands that started running ads six weeks earlier. And you're building pages under time pressure, which means more mistakes and less testing.

I've managed back-to-school campaigns for three different e-commerce brands, and every year the same pattern plays out. The teams that start early and monitor their funnels from day one outperform the ones scrambling in late July.

Your Back to School Marketing Funnel Has More Failure Points Than You Think

A seasonal funnel isn't just a landing page and a checkout. It's a chain of moving parts, and each one can break independently.

Think about what's involved:

  • Paid ads on Google Ads and Meta pointing to seasonal landing pages
  • Landing pages with time-sensitive offers and promo codes
  • Product pages with inventory that changes daily
  • Cart and checkout flows handling discount logic
  • Email sequences triggered by abandoned carts
  • Confirmation pages with upsells or cross-sells

Each connection between those steps is a potential break point. I worked with a retailer last July whose back-to-school promo code stopped working on their mobile site because the discount logic was tied to a product tag that someone renamed in Shopify. Desktop worked fine. Mobile showed "invalid code" for every customer. They didn't catch it for five days.

Building the Funnel Right the First Time

Start simple. Map out your funnel in a document before you touch any tools. What's the entry point? Where does the customer go after clicking the ad? What action do you want them to take on the landing page? What happens after they add to cart?

Once you've mapped it, build each piece and test the connections. Don't just test on your laptop. Pull out your phone. Try it on an older Android device. Ask someone on your team to walk through the whole flow and take notes on anything that feels off.

Then set up monitoring. Your back to school marketing funnel needs automated checks running on the landing pages, the discount code application, and the checkout completion. Tools like FunnelLeaks can run these checks on a schedule so you're not relying on manual spot-checks that happen when someone remembers.

Don't Forget the Email Layer

Your abandoned cart emails are part of this funnel too. If your email platform sends a cart recovery message with a broken link, that's lost revenue. We've seen this happen with HubSpot workflows where the product URL template variable pulled an incorrect path after a catalog update.

Test every email in the sequence. Click every link. Verify the discount codes work. Do this once a week during your campaign window, at minimum.

Start Now, Not in August

June is the right time to plan, build, and begin testing your back to school marketing funnel. Get the landing pages up, configure the promo codes, set up your email sequences, and start monitoring everything before you turn on paid traffic. Your competitors are already planning. If you want to make this your best back-to-school season yet, get your monitoring set up at FunnelLeaks and start catching problems before they cost you sales.