Top 20 Marketing Tips for Your Online Coffee Business

Top Marketing Tips for Your Online Coffee Business

Top 20 Marketing Tips for Your Online Coffee Business

If you have an online coffee business – or you are considering it – the name of the game is sales.

Selling coffee online is among the most profitable low-cost coffee business ideas out there. Yet, it can also be challenging to break a decent return if your sales are lagging.

One way to boost your online coffee sales is to develop a marketing plan with several easy-to-incorporate strategies. Below are our top marketing tips for selling more coffee online.

Top Marketing Tips for Your Online Coffee Business

1. Connect with Customers Through Content Marketing

Building out your website and the online coffee store is akin to building out your brick-and-mortar coffee shop. After you build your website, you need to fill it with fresh, relevant content that your website visitors can utilize to make their buying decisions.

Start small and build out. For example, design your front page with information detailing who you are and what you offer. Talk about your coffee and what makes your coffee special. Highlight your Unique Selling Point (USP). For example, you might have the best kid-friendly coffee shop in town – why not promote that?

Additionally, write detailed descriptions of each of your products. While you don't have to sound too flowery, you should do your best to describe the experience of tasting your coffee. How does it smell? How does it taste? What fruit or food does it taste like?

The exciting and flavorful text will pique your customer's interest. The words and descriptions will help put you over the top in generating more online coffee sales.

2. Express Your Coffee Brand Personality

Your brand and the quality of your coffee will define what type of online coffee seller you are. In everything you do, consider what your coffee brand represents and what kind of connection you want to develop with your customers.

Your coffee branding develops an emotional connection between your online coffee store and your customers. The relationship is essential to your ultimate success and sales.

In every interaction, express your coffee brand's personality. Allow your customers to get to know what your coffee brand is all about. Your effort is about breaking through the noise and developing professional and loyal customer relationships. You have several essential touchpoints of interaction with your customers. Your coffee brand should be at the forefront of each customer interaction.

3. Build Your Brand's Social Media Presence

You may have already opened your social media accounts, but you may need to redouble your efforts. Revisit them and develop a posting schedule for those accounts you already have open. Post pictures of your coffee. Take pictures of yourself with coffee. Get creative! Post things that embody what your online coffee business is all about. It doesn't have to be always exciting, but your post should be genuine.

Social media can be overwhelming. Start small. While you might have several accounts opened already, decide to work with only one or two of them. And stay active – social media algorithms like more activity on and around your profile.

At each post, work to cultivate a professional connection with your followers. Each post should promote your brand, mission, products, and awareness in your niche market.

4. Partner with Other Brands

If you are selling coffee online, you may be curating coffee from a variety of local roasters. Leverage their existing coffee brand to generate credibility among your potential online coffee customers.

Whether or not they are familiar with the coffee brands you offer, customers are aware that legit companies usually work with legit sellers. This will ultimately benefit you.

Existing coffee roasters have worked hard on their end to develop their brands. The value and goodwill that they have generated with their current customers can not be underestimated.

Position your online coffee company to benefit from those brands, as you would if you owned a traditional coffee shop or brick-and-mortar store. For example, consider a shoe retailer at your local mall. Your shoe retailer may have posters and logos of various shoe companies plastered on their window. These posted brands attract customers.

Likewise, utilize other brands to develop your online coffee shop's credibility and trust that you need to generate the online coffee sales you aim for.

5. Equip Your Website with Popular Payment Resources

To sell coffee online, you will need a secure payment system. This usually means that you will need a shopping cart and payment gateway system.

If you have a WordPress site, you might use something like WooCommerce. WooCommerce can be tricky, so being familiar with it before you start is beneficial.

If you are using Shopify, you already have a payment system taken care of automatically. While I work with WordPress and a third-party payment system, I still like Shopify because it makes e-commerce easy and hassle-free.

Shopify offers an all-inclusive setup where your website and shopping cart all come together in one easy package.

Your payment process should be secure and easy to navigate. Shopify has designed its entire online checkout system to be easy for you and your customers to process.

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6. Ensure Your Website is Mobile Friendly

Creating your online coffee website can be a fun challenge. Getting it to look right and easy to navigate can take time and a little experimenting.

Consider choosing the right theme that allows your website to look good on a variety of devices well. As you probably already know from your personal experiences, many people shop or search for options with their phones or tablets. Ensure your website is mobile-friendly by choosing the right theme and plugins.

The lingo used to describe mobile-friendly websites is “responsive.” Some pictures and plugins can interfere with the look of your website's responsiveness on the phone, so consider checking how your website looks on mobile or tablet devices.

This will help your website's look and feel, but it will help you rank higher in search engines. For example, Google has issued best practices guidelines for website publishers that state it will rank responsive or mobile-friendly websites higher than those not responsive.

7. Run an Email Campaign

While your social media platform will be necessary, email is still the king of online conversions. Email can be an important way to generate sales and repeat sales.

Emails are so useful that you might consider collecting emails on your website and collecting emails from your existing customers. Write and deliver emails using one of the many email marketing options available.

After each person is subscribed, deliver interesting emails with small discounts. Let people know about an upcoming coffee profile that you will be getting soon.

8. Take Advantage of User-Generated Content

Your customers may provide comments, questions, or deliver feedback. Make sure that you utilize their interaction with you to generate more content for your website visitors.

Take pictures. For example, if your customers share photos of themselves drinking your coffee – retweet or repost their pictures and stories.

If customers have similar questions, develop a FAQ page (Frequently Asked Questions) and answer them for other customers.

If they have a testimonial, make sure that you have their positive testimonial up on your website, and social media account somewhere that is easily visible to new and existing clients. One idea might be to utilize direct quotes from testimonials and share them in an email. If you are having a hard time getting testimonials, consider asking your repeat customers if they would provide a testimonial.

9. Offer Incentives and Rewards to Keep Them Coming Back

Your online coffee customers are more likely to buy from you again if you have delivered exactly what you've promised.

To sweeten the deal, invite them to buy again with a coupon for free shipping or 10% off your merchandise, or something similar.

Invite them to participate in a coffee of the month club. After a certain amount of orders, for example, they can get their next one free.

Or offer them discounts where they receive free or reduced shipping. Functionally, you can offer these discounts with coupon codes through Shopify or another third-party e-commerce platform system.

Shopify offers various add-on plugins that you can buy to market to existing customers automatically and with ease. Your goal should be to make sure that each existing customer orders coffee from you again next month!

Marketing Tips for Your Online Coffee

10. Feature Engaging Images and Infographics

Take the time to create pictures of your coffee. One of the easy ways to do this is to visit your local roaster and take photos of them while roasting.  If they also have a café, consider taking pictures of their coffee being served, latte art, among other things.

Not only are these pictures engaging, interesting, and unique. But they add to your credibility. Your pictures are potent snapshots of your business that allow your customers – and future customers – to get to know you and your coffee.

Always have your camera or phone with you and ready to snap pictures of you roasting, brewing, or serving coffee.

Additionally, consider hiring a graphic designer to create unique infographics for your business and share them on your website, your social media, or print them out and add them to each customer's order.

11. Market to Customers Offline

While most of your coffee business will occur online, you can be an effective offline coffee marketer.

Share your coffee products with friends, family, co-workers, neighbors, and everyone you come across. When people ask what you do, consider giving them a subtle marketing pitch and ask them to check out your website and try out your products.

There are many different ways to market your customers offline. This may include selling offline too. For example, you can sell coffee at farmers' markets, pop-up stands, or various events – or anywhere you go. You might also want to expand your online coffee business and setup a drive-thru coffee stand or a mobile coffee trailer.

12. Print Business Cards

Treat your online coffee business like a real business. This would include designing and printing business cards. Detail all the pertinent information like your business name, email, website, phone number, etc.

Fortunately, there are a lot of affordable options to design and print your business cards online. You can upload your logo and put in your information, and have it shipped directly to you. Make it a habit to carry your cards with you everywhere you go and hand them out. Consider creating a discount code for family and friends to entice them to buy from you.

13. Develop Merchandise for Sale

In addition to selling your coffee online, consider other items you can sell on your website, including merchandise. For example, you can sell t-shirts, mugs, espresso shot glasses, demitasse cups, and other items. Each item can promote your online business, affirm customer loyalty, and generate more revenue.

I need to add that you will want to have settled on your business logo and branding before ordering merchandise. Additionally, you must consider that you will have to put up the money upfront to purchase your merchandise and get it branded. You will eventually get your money back along with profits. However, because you may be spending a lot of money upfront on merchandise, you will want to be careful that you don't spend more than you have to. So, keep your inventory and overhead low.

14. Refine your SEO

One of the most significant investments you can make with an online business is to focus on your website's SEO. That is your website's search engine optimization. SEO allows your coffee shop website to be indexed by search engines like Google and Bing and rank your website. This means that customers will be able to find you more quickly and buy your coffee.

When it comes to SEO, small things can help your website in significant ways. For example, I would always add fresh content. Add meta tags to your posts and pages. Add metadata to your pictures. The rules for SEO change all the time, so consider reading up on best practices that will help you stay on top of the subject.

15. Use Videos to Promote Your Coffee

Utilize video to display your coffee and other products. Take every opportunity to utilize video and show it on your blog post and social media posts.

Fortunately, we have access to high-quality, affordable cameras – many on our phones can easily take videos of activities that we do every day with our business.

Videos, like pictures, can bring your customers right to the forefront of your business. If you haven't already started, start today.

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16. Plan Ahead for Holidays and Special Events

Holidays typically see an increase in gift buying. Utilize this time to ramp up your sales. Use the annual calendar to plan out your marketing efforts around holidays and special days like Valentine's Day, Mother's Day, Father's Day, and Christmas.

Holiday shopping can boost your online coffee sales, but plan for it.

17. Create an Unboxing Experience

Unboxing can be a wonderful experience for your customers. It has the possibility of added value, which means this is where you earn the premium asking prices for your coffee.

Additionally, it's an excellent opportunity to create a great, memorable experience. Take the time to add some love to your packaging. A pleasant, shareable experience can add justification for higher prices and repeat business. If you need help coming up with some ideas, check out a few YouTube videos of unboxing experiences with other products. Try to determine which unboxing strategies would work best for you and your online coffee business.

18. Provide Brewing Recipes

Consider adding printed inserts with coffee beverage recipes in your packages. This additional care provides coffee newcomers to enjoy coffee the way you intended it to be enjoyed.

Rotate various recipes with each order. Allow your customers to try your coffee using multiple brewing techniques. These small freebies and additional support give your business a leg up on the competition.

19. Gift Certificates Options

Sell gift certificates for those customers who wish to purchase from your website for their friends and family.

Consider getting a payment gateway that allows you to sell and accept gift certificates, gift cards, or provide credits. Shopify and other POS systems have add-on plugins that will enable you to offer gift cards or credit purchases.

If you do institute a gift certificate program, make sure that you let your customers know about it! Write a blog post about it and mention it on your social media platforms.

20. Subscription Packages

Allow customers to order weekly, bi-monthly, or monthly subscriptions of your coffee. Having subscription-based customers, you can drive up repeat business.

The great thing about coffee is that people drink it every day. Chances are, your customers will order coffee again when they are done with their supply. Taking one more item off their grocery list is convenient for them and drives up coffee sales for you.

Marketing Tips for Your Online Coffee

Marketing Tips for Your Online Coffee Business

Selling coffee online is an excellent opportunity to get into the retail coffee business. It is a low-cost coffee business idea with many potential benefits, including being a perfect launching pad for developing a larger coffee business concept.

Start developing your online coffee marketing plan today. Determine which tips make the most sense for you and your online coffee business.

Develop a strategy and measure the outcome. By implementing these tactics, it is our hope you improve your online coffee business.

If you haven't already started your online coffee business and aren't sure where to start, consider reading our article, How to Start an Online Coffee Business.

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