SiteGround Academy

If you want to grow your small business, digital marketing is the modern way to reach results that bring your business success. This is especially true with the consistent growth of technologies, online communication, and social media platforms. 

Digital marketing for a small business isn’t limited to paid ads and posting on social media. For an all-around effective strategy, it’s crucial to include SEO, content marketing, and email marketing, as well. 

Whether you run a full-on e-commerce business or a brick-and-mortar store, these digital marketing tips will help you get more online engagement with your audience and conversions.

Forms of Content Marketing

As a marketer, you’ve likely come across the saying “content is king.” 

Content brings many benefits like building trust with your audience, generating leads, and establishing your business as an authority in your niche. 

In fact, according to Demand Metric, content generates three times as many leads as outbound marketing, drives six times higher conversion rates, and potentially has a 7.8-fold boost in web traffic. 

Content marketing is too valuable for brands and customers to ever go away. That’s why scaling your content marketing is a winning digital marketing strategy for your business. 

So, what’s included in content marketing?

Blog Content Marketing

Blogs are a powerful type of inbound marketing and allow for flexibility in terms of topics and purposes. You can use them to promote internal and external content and blog articles via links, add social share buttons, and incorporate product information. 

Take OptinMonster, for example. It’s now a huge company under AwesomeMotive’s wing, but it wasn’t always like that. They got there by consistently creating high-quality content and sticking to a publishing schedule.

More specifically, OptinMonster excels at pillar posts. Pillar posts are long-form content to inform the reader deeply on a topic. They usually steer away from salesy language and are extremely actionable. Another word is 10x content.

Creating longer and more informative articles like OptinMonster rather than shorter, lower-quality ones will help your business long-term since it builds trust with readers and they generally prefer this kind of content. 

And you can achieve a consistent blog posting schedule with a content calendar and keyword mapping. It will help you visualize your projects and stay on track with publishing.

Social Media Content Marketing

Social media has become so widely used across the globe, amounting to an entire 4.65 billion users, according to Kepios. With that said, smart marketers know not to skip social media in their small business digital marketing strategies.

You can use many platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, LinkedIn, and even Snapchat. You can share current discounts, product releases, and show off your brand culture through posts and stories. Plus, social media is an excellent outlet to grow brand awareness and engage your audience. 

According to a HubSpot case study, a small business generated $1.2 million in revenue from its social media marketing strategy. $1.2 million results are an excellent incentive to start a social media marketing strategy. The biggest hurdle is time as a social media strategy doesn’t get created and executed overnight. It takes time to see results.

Video Content Marketing

Video content marketing is a fairly new strategy that encapsulates the principle of producing and sharing relevant video content to your target audience to create interest and attract leads. 

Video content has become increasingly popular over the last few years. For example, a study by BusinessofApps shows that YouTube now has 2.3 billion monthly users. And, an entire 69% of consumers say that they prefer to learn about a brand’s product or services through video content rather than any other form (as per Wyzowl’s statistics).

To create videos for your marketing campaigns, remember that video marketing is to educate your audience. Educate them on how your product works, the benefits, where it can be used, case studies, and success stories on how clients have used it in the past, etc. 

Here are some more tips on creating successful video marketing campaigns:

• Center your videos around the story, not the sale
• Hook the viewers in the first ten seconds with a captivating intro
• Use humor, animations, and effects 
• Upload your videos on your own domain before uploading on sharing sites to drive maximum SEO value
• Use video to educate and prove yourself 

You can upload your videos on social media platforms like Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, or landing pages. All you need is a good camera (iPhone works excellent) and editing software like iMovie or Adobe Premiere Pro.

Podcast Content Marketing

Podcasting can add a new dimension to your brand and content marketing strategy. There are many ways you can approach podcasting, utilizing different mediums, channels, and distribution methods.

Some of the top benefits of podcasting for your brand include:

• The current popularity of podcasting 
• Ease of entry with inexpensive equipment and free uploading
• You can turn any content like videos and blogs into a podcast
• There’s a lot of potential for collaboration 
• Break into new audience segments

With those benefits in mind, the best way to think about podcasting in content marketing is to think of it as a new marketing channel. Content marketing always has the same goal: to reach people and generate new leads. This could mean providing answers to questions (essential for SEO) or entertainment in podcasting.

Grow Your Email List

The email list is the heart of your business, and without it, that heart would fail to beat. And essentially, email marketing remains one of the most effective digital marketing for small business strategies today. 

Unfortunately, there are so many elements that can cause your email list to shrink, such as:

• The subscriber has changed companies and now has a new email.
• The subscriber gave you their spam email, which they rarely check.
• The subscriber has unfortunately decided that your content isn’t for them anymore and has unsubscribed.

Did you know that an average email list decays approximately 22.5% every year, according to Marketing Sherpas? So that’s basically a quarter of what you have! 

As sad as all of that sounds, it’s part of your content life cycle, frankly inevitable. 

Wherever you are right now with your list in terms of numbers, let’s talk about some ways to grow and maintain your email list.

Insert Subscribe and Social Share Buttons on Your Pages

Don’t feel restricted to only adding subscribe and social share buttons on your homepage. You can put it on all of your content pages. Besides, once people get further into your blog’s pages, they’re unlikely to return to the homepage.

You can include them in different places like the sidebar, header, and footer. You can add a subscribe bar in the footer of each page of your website or blog. Or include social share buttons in its header, giving it more visibility.

You can even include your social share buttons on multiple spots on the same page. The point is to make it visible to your audience and include several platform options. It may turn out that your audience prefers using different platforms.

Offer Something In Return “What’s in it For Me?”

Just asking people for their emails may not always get you the desired conversions. If you’re looking for better and faster results, try offering your audience a lead magnet.

It doesn’t have to cost you much time or money to make, but make sure it’s something of value to your subscribers.

Here are some more examples of opt-in incentives you can offer:

• Downloadable articles
• Access to a private Facebook group
• Templates
• Stock Photos
• Live call with you
• Demo coaching session 
• Free newsletter 
• White papers

Those are just a few ideas, but the possibilities are endless. 

If you have a cooking blog, for example, you can offer a free cookbook in exchange for emails. A great lead magnet solves a customer’s problem, promises a quick win, is specific, quick to digest, of high value, instantly accessible, and demonstrates your expertise.

Use CTAs on Blog Posts (Call To Action)

Most signups come from an effective CTA. Even better, clickable CTA buttons have proven many times over to increase conversions. So much so that a study by Protocol 80 found that adding a CTA button to their article templates increased conversions by 83% and boosted e-Commerce conversions by 22%. 

Clickable CTA buttons help users navigate through your site and take specific actions. It’s equally crucial for your home page and high-converting landing pages. 

Some criteria for a good CTA include contrasting colors, a clickable button, text that adds context around the button, and it’s put in a place that catches the eye. 

Remember to always test your CTAs on different devices for bugs and improvements. You can use your email marketing ideas to convert your audience into customers now that you know how to grow and maintain your email list.

Optimize Your SEO strategy

To help you rank your small business on top of Google search results, we’ve written an extensive blog post you can refer to. Once you’ve nailed your SEO rankings, you can now fine-tune your strategy with some additional tips:

Use Local Search Engine Optimization

Many smaller brick-and-mortar businesses feel insignificant compared to giant corporations. However, unlike their global counterparts, local businesses have the advantage of targeting a local market. Small businesses can appear in the (Snack) Pack Rankings and organic page rankings by using local SEO. 

When using local SEO, the goal is to be in the Snack Pack Ratings. This is the little box you see appear at the top of the Google search results.

Within this box, you can usually find a business’s:

• Hours of operation
• Phone number, email, etc.
• Address
• Link to website
• Reviews and star rating
• Google map result

It’s important to program all this information into your Google Business Profile ( GBP ). It can ultimately persuade a potential customer to use your services while helping your business’s SEO ranking. 

Even further, to optimize your GBP, make sure:

• The category is correct
• The website link is active and functional
• Relevant keywords are included in the title tag
• Perform regular updates of your posts

Once you fill out the information and optimize it, it should take a few weeks before you start seeing results. Remember that any form of SEO takes time and is worth the wait!

Increase Site Speed

A technical SEO tip is to ensure your site is always running quickly since search engines prefer when page loading times are faster. 

There are a few things you can do to obtain high website speeds, including:

• Minimize ‘HTTP requests’ and keep the use of scripts and plugins to a minimum.
• Use a CSS stylesheet instead of multiple CSS stylesheets or inline CSS. CSS stylesheets tell a website browser how to display your website.
• Make your image files as small as possible. 
• Compress your web pages. 
• Shrink your site’s code by deleting unnecessary spaces, line breaks, or identification in your HTML, CSS, and Javascript. 

Above all, possibly the most important way to ensure your site is running quickly is to choose a good hosting service. You can have this easily with SiteGround Hosting. We use all the newest technologies, including ultra-fast networks, ultrafast PHP, multiple server software solutions, etc.

And, if you’re set up on WordPress, the SiteGround Optimizer plugin lets you boost the speed of your website without having much tech knowledge. 

Your site’s speed needs to be consistent across all devices to boost your ranking, so once again, make sure to test it on every device.

Use Paid Ads (PPC)

While SEO and content marketing can bring in many new clients, paid ads have a ton to offer, too. In fact, a Trend Statistics study shows that 80% of marketers focus on Google Ads for PPC, proving that marketers know the effectiveness. 

Paid ads are useful to build brand awareness, and since most of the time they appear in front of customers who have expressed interest in the product with their online activity, the leads are way more likely to convert than those from organic traffic. 

Content marketing and SEO are always winning practices, but you might have noticed it’s very competitive. The internet is full of businesses of all sizes, all striving to make the top of the search results. It guarantees that you’ll always need existing domain authority.

The five most common types of paid ads include:

• Search ads: These ads appear first on Google’s search results, above all organic rankings. They look the same as regular search results except for the little “Ad” text in the corner. 
• Display ads: These banner ads appear in footers, headers, between text, and sidebars of content pages like blogs and product profiles.
• Social media ads: You can program these ads on social media platforms. Each platform will have its objective, but the ads are generally highly targeted and allow a lot of flexibility in how you program them. 
• Google shopping ads: Used by eCommerce owners and appear in the carousel on the results page when users search for a specific item. 
• Retargeting ads: These ads get specifically placed in front of users when they didn’t convert the first time they saw the product and were close to the checkout. 

This list just includes the most common types of ads, but there are many different types. The ad you use depends on your business’s needs and audience. 

There are a few tips for general success, whatever type of ad you choose.

Firstly, filter your audience to reach your ultimate target. When programming and launching an ad, you obviously want as many people to see it as possible. But, what’s most important is the right people seeing it. 

Most ad tools allow you to filter your buyer personas and get specific with demographics, geographics, needs, interests, etc. You should use more granular keywords to get the most out of your budget. 

For example, Facebook ads allow you to reach hyper-targeted audiences with geographic location settings, interests, ages, gender, etc. 

Another crucial tip for paid ads is regularly tracking your KPIs, as it’s the only way to know what’s working and dig into the data. Google and social media platforms make it simple for you to track your KPIs with data dashboards and metrics.

Is Paid Advertising a Worthy Alternative to SEO? 

Now, you might be wondering if paid advertising is an alternative to investing in SEO. The truth is, when it comes to small business ads, it’s never a one thing or the other situation. Your strategy should include organic and paid advertising, with complementary campaigns that help you find your audience (and help them find you). 

While paid advertising does lead to quicker results, the real question here is whether those results are sustainable for your business or will be short-lived. 

Paid advertising can take a big bite from your budget, especially if you’re using it constantly to substitute SEO. Another downside is that clicks never guarantee sales. It’s one thing to get people to click your ad, but you also have to convince them your product is worth buying. 

However, SEO is a long-term investment that will give you long-term results if you’re willing to be patient.

Sum Up

If you have a small business, you need to take these digital marketing tips and add them to your marketing plan. Some of these tips will be more effective depending on your business. 

Having said that, it’s important to think outside of the box and try different areas you think will be effective for your business. This is especially true as the digital landscape is constantly changing, and businesses are forced to adapt to keep a competitive advantage and gain new customers. 

If you have any questions about our digital marketing tips, leave a comment below!

[subscribe_cta]

Let’s say it straight: Small business SEO is hard in 2025.

And frankly, it was never easy. Maybe back in 2010, when marketers could trick Google with keyword stuffing, PBNs, and various other methods like message board posts used for backlinks. There was also a lot less competition. 

These days, basically all keyword clusters and niches are taken by well-known sites and are hard to outrank. However, small businesses have endless opportunities to rank in their niches for the right keywords.

In this article, we’ll discuss how you, as a small business, can boost your SEO and gain organic traffic.

To stay ahead in the world of SEO, check out our video: SEO in 2025: 6 Trends Truly Changing The Landscape.

What Is Small Business SEO?

SEO (search engine optimization) for small businesses is a combination of strategies that make your page on Google get traffic, clicks, and conversions. In other words, it makes your website appear higher in search results to make your business more discoverable, surpassing the competition’s rankings.

If your online and local SEO strategy is effective, your website should show up on the first page of the search results like the links below.

Did you know that according to Search Engine Journal, 25% of people click on the first page of the search results? Apart from that, the first page in the search results gets an average CTR of 31.7%, according to Backlinko. These statistics are powerful reminders that SEO is crucial for organic traffic.

Is it 100% necessary to do SEO? 

Well, let’s put it this way: if you don’t have an elaborate SEO strategy, you’re at a serious disadvantage with your competition. Their SEO efforts will keep them climbing up the ladder while your page sits at the bottom and never goes up.

Not to mention, your organic traffic will suffer, and if your business depends heavily on online marketing, this could mean some serious consequences for your business.

How SEO Benefits Small Businesses

As mentioned above, SEO is crucial for your business’s success. But let’s dive into that deeper.

What benefits does SEO specifically have?

Boost Organic Traffic from Search Engines

The most significant benefit of SEO for small businesses is the organic traffic it brings. Organic traffic doesn’t only help you save money on things like paid advertising, but it generally brings in prospects that are further along in the buying journey. 

Your organic traffic leads will more likely end up buying your products since they’re searching for specific queries.

Ranking on the first page of the search engines is necessary to be seen by most customers. And if you’re in the first position, it can double your click-through rate over the number two result, according to Smart Insights.

Even better, claiming the featured snippet can help you jump over the number one spot and give you a double chance at gaining more organic traffic.

Replace Expensive Paid Ads

Now, you might be wondering if paid advertising is an alternative to investing in SEO. Let’s look at a cat sitting example where the first three links are advertisements.

Paid ads allow you to “artificially” have your links show up first in Google. 

It can be a good idea in many instances, leading to quicker results. The real question is whether those results are sustainable for your business or will be short-lived. 

Paid advertising can cost a lot of money, especially if you’re using it constantly to substitute SEO. Another downside is that clicks never guarantee sales. It’s one thing to get people to click your ad, but you must convince them your product is worth buying. 

So, paid advertising does have its benefits like amplified reach and enhanced targeting and should be used as part of a marketing strategy. But it’s not a valid replacement for SEO entirely.

Increase the Number of New Leads

Each new lead presents a unique opportunity. New leads can become long-term clients, recommend your services/products to their networks, and leave persuasive reviews on your website. 

It’s essential for a small business to constantly search for new leads to increase the customer database.

SEO Tips for Small Businesses

Now that we’ve gone over the importance and benefits of SEO for small businesses, let’s dive into the tips.

Keyword Research and Competitor Analysis

Keyword research is the backbone of SEO. Basically, if nobody searches for the product you offer or your content topics, you won’t get promising traffic results.

You need to know your keywords to avoid being in the 90.63% of pages that don’t get any organic traffic from Google, as per a study by Ahrefs. You read that right; keyword research is THAT important.

Aside from helping your pages gain traffic, keyword research helps to:

• See how much traffic you can get for specific keywords
• Know how hard it is to rank for certain keywords
• Create content plans for keywords
• Understand the likeness of searchers becoming customers 

Keyword research starts with a list of topic ideas that your potential customers may be searching for. Let’s say you own a gardening store. You’ll look for “seed” keywords (no pun intended). Your seed keywords could be: 

• Plants
• Landscape
• Pots
• Shrubs
• Nursery
  

Seed keywords are meant to be vague, and you won’t use these as are to create content. They’re meant to be general topic ideas that you’ll narrow down on later. 

Once you’ve developed a list of seed keywords, you can quickly check to see what keywords your competitors are using. Take one of your seed keywords and search it on Google.

You need to use your best judgment when determining competing websites. If huge brands like Home Depot and Amazon appear, you shouldn’t necessarily treat them as competitors. Instead, look for websites like your own or ones that you’re trying to be like. 

Once you find your main competitors, you can see which keywords bring them the most traffic. Tools like Ahrefs have an excellent feature for this.

A successful business can rank for dozens of top keywords. Does that mean you need to try to rank for the same ones? Not always, as large companies generally have more budgets to ensure they’re constantly ranking for the top keywords.

In this case, consider which keywords will bring more leads to your specific products or product line.

For example, if your audience is looking for succulents, you can use a keyword related to the most popular, cheap, longest-living succulent. The more specific you get, the more leads it will bring you. 

Overall, a successful competitor analysis involves finding gaps or disconnects between the competition and the audience, then finding ways to fill those gaps. 

But competition research isn’t all. In fact, there are usually a ton of potential keywords your competition may not be targeting. To find them, you’ll need to use keyword research tools like Moz, Semrush, Ahrefs, Google Keyword Planner, Keyword Surfer, etc. 

Whichever you plan to work with, they generally all work the same. You plug in a seedword, and the keyword tool pulls keywords from its database based on that keyword. 

Google Keyword Planner is easily the most talked about since it’s effective and free. 

If we enter our seed keywords from above, we get the following results:

Google Keyword Planner takes your seed keywords and generates ideas from them, avoiding overlapping the keywords you enter. 

Now, if you want to level up your keyword research and access more data, you’ll need a paid tool like Semrush or Moz. These tools generally give you more diverse and higher-quality keywords. Additionally, analyzing the length of your content using a word counter can help ensure that your pages are well optimized without unnecessary fluff or keyword stuffing.

Add Your Location to Your Google Business Profile

Today, businesses with a physical location need a local SEO strategy so customers can find them. Local SEO is so powerful that consumers’ use of Google to evaluate local businesses has leaped from 63% in 2020 to 81% in 2021, according to BrightLocal. 

By skipping local SEO, you miss out on the primary channel of how consumers discover local businesses.

Did you know you can have your website show up in the map and in the search results below? That means you have a double chance of getting clicks on your website and gaining customers. 

You can set up your location on your Google Business Profile ( GBP ). Google will need to verify some information with you like opening and closing hours, type of business, proof of location, etc. 

The process is relatively simple and well worth it.

Enable Reviews From Your Google Business Profile

Google Maps results are best accompanied by customer reviews. According to Dimensional Research, as many as 90% of prospects are influenced by online reviews when considering an online purchase. 

Having said that, ensure the star ratings are visible from the first search page.

Then when the user clicks on your link, they should be directed to the written reviews.

Your reviews can tell prospects a lot about the services or products you offer, how many people recommend you, the use cases, etc. 

You should always include reviews on your website, even if you have an online store. People are consistently searching for product reviews, so you could also have a chance at gaining organic traffic just by having product review pages.

Build links to your site

To make your content rank, you need backlinks. Backlinks from authoritative sites signal to search engines like Google that others vouch for your content and are worth surfacing in rankings. 

Some of the most common ways to get backlinks include:

• Guest posting (publishing content on reputable blogs or podcasts)
• PR campaigns (an SEO or marketing campaign)
• SEO outreach (sending emails asking for backlinks)
• Links from customers (links in reviews) 
• Forums and comments (Quora, product reviews, TripAdvisor)

Remember to always look for trustworthy, authoritative, popular, and quality blogs when getting backlinks.

On the other hand, avoid getting links from poor quality guest posts, private blog networks, duplicate content, and foreign language websites, as Google may see them as spam. Even worse, your rankings can actually suffer because of this. 

Did you know that the links you accept on your website also differ in value and affect SEO? When spreading link love, the websites you choose to link out to, even the anchor text you use, whether you choose the follow or nofollow link, and any meta tags you associate with the linking page can heavily impact your site’s value.

If you’re doing link outreach and aren’t able to find an email or name of a specific person in the company, you can use Hunter.io.

It’s a great tool to include in your small business SEO strategy.

Rich Results with Structured Data

In 2009, Google introduced Rich Results to create a better user experience and help searchers find their queries easier. 

Some common types of rich results include:

Breadcrumbs

Breadcrumbs enable Google to indicate your webpage’s position within the website’s hierarchy.

It helps users understand the relationship between the pages and navigate your site easier. 

Frequently Asked Questions 

Another common rich result is the FAQ on the search results. 

This section helps users know more about your product or service and can encourage clicks. 

Star Ratings

Star ratings in snippets make the search results more appealing to the eye.

It also tells users that other people found this recipe worth trying. 

The most practical way of enabling rich results is by adding structured data to your website’s coding. For instance, the title, author of the post, featured image, time and date of the post, etc., can all be formatted to help classify your webpage and help search engines understand the web page. 

You can use the three formats (JSON-D, RDFa, and Microdata) supported by Google when structuring your data.

You can refer to Google’s official reference or find codes from schema.org to find the right structured data code. Many content management systems also provide plugins that allow web builders to insert several codes into their web pages. 

It’s always important to test your page’s structured data. Tools like Google’s structured data testing tool or Google’s rich results test make it easy to check if the coding of your pages is correct.

Choose a Great Hosting Provider

Last, but not least, choosing a multifunctional hosting provider that gives you a competitive edge is another critical factor in your SEO rankings. 

The most important things to look for when choosing a provider include: 

Fast loading

Ensuring you have a fast-loading website will help users perform all the actions they want, making it easier for Google to understand that users find your website valuable and giving it higher chances of ranking. 

Server Reliability and Uptime Scores

In 2013, Amazon went down for 30 minutes, costing them $66,240 in revenue every minute, according to the Service Health Dashboard. 

Having said that, staying online is important, and having a reliable host is a key part of this. 

Today’s industry standard is 99.95% uptime. Any hosting provider that has an uptime below 99% should be avoided. 

Essential Plugins 

Choosing a hosting provider with ample plugins will help your site maintain healthy growth and keep its rankings high. For example, SiteGround Optimizer includes caching controls, speed tests, multisite options, and environment, frontend, and media optimizations. 

A security plugin, for example, is essential as cyber security threats are higher than ever before. As a website owner, look for plugins like SiteGround Security to protect your WordPress site from threats like brute-force attacks, data leaks, compromised logins, and more.

While you can download SiteGround plugins without having the hosting, it’s nice to have hosting and strong plugins in one place for a streamlined process.

In a nutshell, choosing a hosting provider like SiteGround that offers fast loading, is reliable, and includes features and plugins to help your site rank, plays a huge part in helping your website. Of course, you can rely on your keyword research and other important SEO practices, but your hosting provider will work in the background to help you achieve your SEO goals. 

Conclusion

SEO for small businesses is a long journey that is key to receiving organic traffic and creating sustainable leads. Although the information in this article may seem overwhelming, you can work on developing and executing your SEO strategy step by step. 

Remember to be patient and persistent when waiting for your SEO effort results to come in, as SEO in all cases takes time. 

[subscribe_cta]

Building an e-commerce site doesn’t mean that it will be successful. The site is only 1/2 of the equation, the other 1/2 is buyers. To be successful you need to attract buyers. There are a lot of different ways that you can attract new customers to your site and encourage previous buyers to return. Books have been written, courses developed just to show you how to drive a steady stream of buyers to your site.

One method that has worked in retail almost since there has been retail is couponing. Everybody loves coupons, and that means that EVERYBODY loves to use coupons. Building a coupon marketing strategy is one of the absolute best ways to drive traffic. They work because coupons, as a concept, serve one single purpose, changing the user’s buying habits.

What Are Coupons?

Coupons are a pull marketing strategy that merchants use to change buying habits. The hope is that, if you change your habits once and like it, the new habit will stick without the need for more coupons. 

If you normally buy brand X wine but you get a coupon for brand Y wine, the hope is to break your existing buying habits and convince you to try brand Y.

Additionally, some coupons are designed not to make you change brands but to buy more. Some coupons for brand Y wine are not for people who have never tried brand Y but for those that regularly buy a bottle. The hope is to change their buying behavior by convincing them to buy more than they usually do. 

Both of these types of coupons are trying to change buying behavior, but each targets a different behavior and thus a different group of consumers. 

Physical Coupons

Physical coupons are usually printed pieces of paper with a discount code on it that retailers will honor. Many times physical coupons are distributed by the postal service, however, in some cases, they are handed out at a store. Physical coupons are more costly for retailers because there is a physical cost to creating and distributing them. Even if they are printed on a copier and handed out by employees at the store, they cost. This means that retailers are more cautious about what they offer with physical coupons. Experiments are more expensive so most retailers stick with what they know will work to change behavior.

Digital Coupons

On the other hand, digital coupons have almost no costs associated with creation and distribution. If you are using WordPress and WooCommerce and want to run an online coupon marketing strategy, you can create a 10% off coupon for your T-Shirts and send it to everyone on your mailing list. Your total cost for this was the time it took to enter the coupon into the system and write the email.

Because they are so cheap to create, many retailers set their online coupon marketing strategy incorrectly. They will literally create a 10% off coupon for one of their products and send it to everyone they can, hoping that if they send it to enough people that they will generate some sales. The problem with this “shotgun” approach to coupons is that if you do it enough, the only behavior you are changing is that you are teaching your customers to wait to purchase until you send out a coupon. This is not the behavior you want from your customers.

3 Key Ecommerce Coupon Marketing Tips

In order to create an effective coupon marketing strategy, before you create your first coupon, ask yourself, “What behavior am I trying to change?” Then, figure out which customers have that behavior, and craft not only a coupon but a message specifically for those customers.

1. Set the behavior you want to change

Let’s say you want to increase your average cart value, the amount of goods that a customer buys in any given transaction. One way to do that is with a digital coupon.

For every customer that regularly purchases from you, but purchases less than $50 per transaction, send them a coupon to give them a 10% discount on their next transaction if it is over $75.

Don’t send them more than 1 of these coupons and don’t send this coupon to every customer on your mailing list. Only send it to customers that have already purchased from you once and you expect to purchase from you again.

For each customer that uses this coupon, you have changed their behavior, at least once, and increased your average cart value for that customer.  Whatever you do next, do not send this customer another “10% discount when they purchase $75 or more” coupon. Sending them the same thing over and over just encourages the bad behavior of waiting for the coupon to arrive before purchasing. 

2. Personalized coupons

Digital coupons are easy to personalize. Up to this point we’ve talked about sending out coupons to groups of customers, but you can easily create a coupon that is good only for a specific person. The most common version of this is a birthday salutation. 

If you have collected your customer’s birthday (or any other special life event date) then you can easily send that person a happy birthday email and a special discount coupon good only on their birthday.

If you are going to do this, make it personal.

Bad Example:

Happy birthday! Here’s a 10% off our latest book.

Better Example:

Today is your birthday since you like ”X”, here is a 30% off coupon that is valid only for today.

Best Example:

Cal, to celebrate your birthday, we want to give you a 30% off of ”X” because we know you like ”X”. it’s only good for today.

The best scenario above takes more time because you have to do a little research. You have to figure out who is having a birthday tomorrow. If they are a regular customer, you also want to figure out what they buy the most of and offer them a coupon for that.

This type of coupon builds brand loyalty. By offering a sizable discount on something they already purchase from you, you are letting them know that you appreciate their business. This will stick in people’s mind and they will remember it the next time they go to buy anything that you sell.

You can do this for customers that haven’t bought from you yet but you need to remember two things:

• It needs to be sincere
  

• It needs to be a steep enough discount to cause someone to buy something from you.
  

A generic Happy Birthday email with a 10% discount on something the person would never purchase, to begin with, will likely be deleted without even a click.

On the other hand, a sincere happy birthday that greets the person by name and offers them a 50% discount this one time as your way of celebrating their birthday will most likely move the needle. 

[subscribe_cta]

3. Create a sense of urgency

In each of the Happy Birthday examples above, the discounts were limited to the birthday. This serves two purposes. First, it keeps you from being surprised in 6 months when things may have changed and all of a sudden you’ve got to sell something at a 50% discount. Second – and most importantly, it tells the person receiving the coupon that the matter is urgent. It may only be urgent for a moment or two as they make the buy/no buy decision but it will be urgent when you want it to be, when the offer is fresh in the mind of the customer.

Limiting your coupons to a given timeframe is a good way to limit them. Another way is to limit the number of times a coupon can be used. This is the digital version of “The next 100 callers get…” that you see on TV ads running late a night. 

An example of this would be the following:

Send out an email to your existing customer base about a new T-Shirt design that you’ve released. In the email tell customers that the first 100 buyers that purchase the new t-shirt and use this coupon also get a coffee mug with the same design.

That creates urgency above and beyond a date. With a date they know they have until the end of that date to claim their discount. With a limited-use coupon, they don’t know how many people have purchased before them so they need to purchase quickly if they want to take advantage of the offer.

Urgency is used to change the behavior of fence-sitting. Those people get an offer and leave it in their inbox because they aren’t sure if they want to purchase it yet. Losing the discount will cause them to make the decision, even if the decision is no.

How To Create Coupon Codes For An Online Store

Now that you know the key 3 tips to create a successful coupon code for your online store, it is time to implement it on your site! Sounds difficult? Not at all! Check the video below to find the steps to easily set it up in WooCommerce, plus further examples on how to use them correctly: 

5 Innovative And Effective Ways to Use Digital Coupons For Your E-commerce

There are as many different ways to use coupons as there are coupons themselves. We’ve delved deep into a couple of ideas in this article but let’s close out with a few more ideas that I’ll leave for you to explore on your own.

1. Add coupons to your mailing list landing page

Everybody knows you need a lead magnet to get people to sign up for your mailing list. Coupons are a great lead magnet. Not only do they encourage the behavior of signing up for your mailing list but they also encourage a new customer to make a purchase. Macy’s online shop is a good example:

2. Create single-use coupons

In addition to celebrating life events with a single-use coupon, you can find many other uses. For example, if your product requires regular replenishment, such as coffee, offer a one-time discount of 30% off if the customer purchases the first replenishment when they purchase the product.

3. Run social ads offering coupons to audiences that frequent or follow your competitors

Whatever your favorite social platform is, run an ad on it offering new customers an incentive to try your product. Instead of targeting everyone, target people who are currently following your competition. Most social platforms have “Look-alike” audience features. Take advantage of that. Try changing their behavior of buying your competitor’s product into buying yours. 

For example, if you run an online store of items for weddings, you can target people following other wedding online store accounts to show them interesting discounts such as the following one:

4. Create coupons for influencers to hand out

Influencers get to be influencers by building big and/or niche audiences. They build these audiences by posting things that people want. One of the things you can do to help create an influencer is to give them a special coupon just for them to hand out. The bonuses to this tactic are:

• You now have an influencer that owes you a favor
• You can specifically track how many sales they sent to you to help determine how big of an influencer they are.

5. Create different coupon codes for different distribution channels

There is no rule that says you have to use the same coupon code for every channel. If you want to see which ones pull best for you, distribute different codes to different channels.

For instance, distribute the coupon code I_LOVE_BRAND_X_WINE to your Facebook followers and BRAND_X_WINE_IS_THE_BEST to your Twitter followers. Each of them gets the customer 10% off but you get a better understanding of which channels work best for you.

Wrap Up

Coupons excite customers and potential customers. Everyone loves a bargain. However, their true purpose is to influence behavior. Before you issue a digital coupon make sure you understand what behavior you are trying to influence. Once you do, craft your offer and your message around changing that behavior.

Indiscriminate use of coupons as a way of boosting sales numbers is a quick way to train your customers to simply wait for the coupon. That’s not a behavior you want to encourage in your customers.

Use coupons often, use them creatively, and use them effectively. They will help you move the needle both in the short term and the long term.

Now, coupons are just part of your whole eCommerce marketing strategy. If you want to dive deeper into how to start or enhance your online store, download ourfree guide on How to Start Selling Online, where you will get a comprehensive PDF and educational videos that will help you through the whole process of creating your online store using WooCommerce and tips to successfully run your online business. Download it to get expert guidance and make sure you don’t miss a thing to achieve success!

[subscribe_cta]