Passion pushed you to start your small business, but now you find your profits aren’t what you’d like.

To keep your business open, you need to increase sales and revenue — which is easier said than done, isn’t it?

You’re competing with larger businesses that have more robust marketing budgets.

But whether you have a brick and mortar store or are getting your business online, smarter tools like email marketing for ecommerce makes it easy and affordable to compete.

Here are five proven ways to increase revenue using online tools.

1. Encourage repeat business

Many businesses put all their energy into gaining new customers while neglecting to retain existing customers.

Business relationships are all about trust. And who trusts you more than those who have already done business with you?

Gain repeat business by encouraging customers to join your email list. With email marketing, you can continually communicate with your customers, keep them updated on your latest products and services, and persuade them to do business with you again.

Tip: If your business has a storefront, check out these three easy ways to build your email list in store.

2. Provide value with coupons and discounts

The phrase “spend money to make money” is used often for a reason.

It’s absolutely true.

In your case, the phrase may sound more like “make less money on one sale to make more on future sales.”

Make your customers an offer they can’t refuse through coupons and discounts to encourage future business.

Coupons are especially effective for new customers who are on the fence about purchasing from you. Give them a little push by providing a limited time incentive.

Take a look at how poet GennaRose Nethercott encourages future event bookings and commissions with a $50 discount:

increase revenue example

3. Show off your industry expertise

Whether someone is looking for a plumber or a pastry chef, they want the best goods and services their money can afford.

You’re an expert in your industry, but are you making that known?

Reinforce your expertise by sending out newsletters containing advice relevant to your industry. Consistently send these emails and your audience will begin relying on you for your insight.

You can write blog posts on topics relevant to your industry or provide a roundup of resources written by others in your field. If you’re using articles from other sources, just be sure to mention the original source.

When your customers require a good or service you provide, your business will be the first one they think of.

4. Take advantage of ecommerce

Ecommerce is growing 23 percent each year, with 51 percent of Americans preferring to shop online. However, 46 percent of small businesses still don’t have a website. If you fall into this category, you are leaving massive amounts of revenue on the table.

If you have a business that only sells in-store, it’s time to bring your products to the web. It’s easier than ever to get started with an online store and integrate with ecommerce marketing automation tools.

5. Consider outsourcing your marketing

Despite your best efforts, you might not have the extra time needed to successfully market your business.

Rather than spreading yourself too thin, try asking for help.

By outsourcing your marketing to a professional, you will be able to give the other aspects of running your business the time and energy they deserve.

Work with a professional who knows what works and who will always make you more money than they cost you.

TIP: Constant Contact has expert Marketing Advisors available to help you find ways to increase revenue through marketing. Get help by calling our LIVE Helpline at 1-888-IDK-MKTG (1-888-435-6584)

Increase revenue by focusing on proven strategies

By following these five steps, you’ll begin increasing revenue for your business today, keeping your doors open tomorrow.


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You need your small business to bring in money reliably.

But your customers are inconsistent and getting them in the door seems more like luck than science.

How can you turn things around to create a profitable small business?

Don’t worry — with just a few simple marketing tactics, you have the power to create a consistently profitable small business.

Get started with these five tactics:

1. Focus on your existing customers

Small businesses are always on the hunt for new customers.

What many don’t realize is that the fastest way to reach new customers is to nurture relationships with your existing customers.

Use email marketing to stay fresh in your customers’ minds and drive repeat business. A simple monthly email newsletter will keep your audience up-to-date on what’s going on at your business and drive them towards a sale.

In fact, 66 percent of consumers have made a purchase as a result of an email marketing message.

New to email marketing? Try Constant Contact for free! Sign up for a 60-day free trial.

2. Encourage recommendations and reviews

Your current customers love your business.

They are already recommending you to their friends and family. You just need to further encourage they sing your praises online — where their testimonials are publically visible.

Ask for your happy customers to leave reviews on your businesses’ Facebook page.

Encourage your audience to share your email newsletters. And ask for reviews on sites that are relevant to your business, such as Yelp, TripAdvisor, or Trustpilot.

Then, make sure you’re sharing these positive reviews in your marketing. Take a look at how Inn at Seaside shows off their positive TripAdvisor reviews in their email newsletter:

Profitable small business email example

3. Dress (your website) to impress

81 percent of shoppers research online before buying.

And yet, many businesses still aren’t making their website a priority. When potential customers visit your website, you want to deliver an excellent experience with clean, easy-to-navigate design.

If you have yet to create a website for your business, look into options like HostGator or Bluehost.

Creating your website doesn’t have to be a huge undertaking. Start your site with these five website essentials and then add on as needed.

Soon you’ll have an online presence that converts potential customers rather than pushing them away.

4. Build and leverage a strong social media presence

Once you have a great website and a loyal following, it’s time to build up your social media presence.

Social media allows for you to engage with your current and potential customers, addressing any questions they have while also defining your brand identity.

With so many social media channels out there, it can seem overwhelming getting started.

Rather than trying to be everywhere, start by developing a presence on the channels your customers visit the most.

Not sure which channels to start with? Send an online survey to your current customer to help you determine which channels to prioritize.

Hint: For more social media help, make sure to visit our Social Media Quickstarter.

5. Track your success

You’ll never know what kind of impact your efforts are making if you aren’t measuring their effectiveness.

You should constantly review the numbers behind your marketing. Important metrics may include email click-through and open rates, website traffic, and social media engagement.

You might find that what you’re doing is working perfectly. More likely though, you’ll see that your tactics could be working better and you’ll be able to adjust your strategy accordingly.

Use these resources to improve your analytics:

Ready to put it all together?

Creating a profitable small business doesn’t happen overnight.

But by focusing on your existing customers, encouraging shares and reviews, building a professional website and social media presence, and measuring what matters — you’ll set yourself up for a steady stream of new and repeat customers to fuel your business.

Looking for more small business marketing tips? Sign up for our newsletter! Our Hints & Tips newsletter includes the latest marketing trends and tips — delivered to your inbox twice each month.

How many business tools do you currently have open in your web browser?

Whether you are a small business or nonprofit organization, you probably have multiple places to go to hunt down metrics for your recent marketing campaigns.

Wouldn’t it be easier if everything was in one place?

One of the best ways to save time and review your metrics is with business dashboards.

Business dashboards connect hundreds of applications you use on a regular basis, curating the data you want into one easy-to-read display.

Let’s take a closer look at a few business dashboards that offer a clean, crisp way to analyze your all your marketing results, including Constant Contact’s reporting.

1. Dasheroo

Business Dashboard -- Dasheroo

If you’re new to business dashboards, Dasheroo has pre-built templates to get you started quickly

Dasheroo lets you analyze your Constant Contact email reports and contact lists. You can create a dashboard showing the total number of email address added to your list and track the overall engagement.

Sending one email to several lists? Dasheroo lets you track engagement based off of each list, giving you insight into how well your email performed with different audiences.

Business Dashboard -- Dasheroo screenshot

You can even review the overall success of your last 30 emails alongside other business apps, including Google Analytics and your social media channels.

2. TapClicks

Business Dashboards -- TapClicks

TapClicks has created over 100 integrations to visualize and compare marketing activities, including your email marketing activity in Constant Contact.

Running online advertisements through Google AdWords or Bing? TapClicks lets you create categories that help you measure success based on your marketing channels.

Business Dashboard -- TapClicks screenshot

A great way to leverage one of TapClicks’ dashboards is by viewing your Constant Contact email reporting with your website traffic.

Whether you’re running a special discount or holding an event, you can create a dashboard to understand the increased website traffic from your emails.

3. Cyfe

Business Dashboards -- Cyfe 1

Cyfe lets you monitor individual departments, projects, websites and more with their dashboards online or from your mobile device.

You’ll get a variety of tools including custom widgets to display data from your business’s databases.

Free Business Dashboard -- Cyfe

You can also set your dashboard on TV mode, rotating dashboards and displaying your results at the office.

Whether you’re keeping tabs on your expenses or simply keeping a close view on your latest projects, Cyfe offers a variety of pre-built templates to get you started.

Looking for more tools to manage and grow your email marketing efforts?

Our Apps & Integrations Page has a full listing of our integrations — including integrations with Outlook, WordPress, QuickBooks, and more.

Search by your business needs to discover integrations that can work for you.

Visit our Apps & Integrations Page for a full list of tools that integrate with Constant Contact.

Every website needs a refresher now and then to make sure everything’s working properly, looking good, and meeting the goals you need it to.

The beginning of spring is a good time to take on any the projects you’ve been putting off, and we’re betting a website refresh is overdue for you.

This month, take some time to spring clean your website and make sure everything’s in good working order.

Here are seven steps to guide you through the process.

1. Make sure all your software and plugins are up-to-date

You might feel like you see an alert for a new software or plugin update every other day.

It’s easy to ignore them when they seem so constant, but oftentimes those updates specifically address security vulnerabilities and sometimes they provide additional improvements and features as well. It’s in your interest to keep things up-to-date.

Check for any updates available to the software and plugins you use on your website and take the time to download the newest version of everything.  

Often, these updates don’t take too long and they can make a big difference to how secure your website is.

2. Review your analytics to pinpoint potential issues

Your analytics can give you a quick look at potential issues on your website.

Do some pages have abnormally high bounce rates? Then you should give those a look to see if you can identify something about the design or copy that’s keeping people from sticking around.

Do mobile users convert at much lower rates than desktop users? Maybe you need to update your buttons or forms to be more intuitive on mobile.

Starting with your analytics can save you some time as you go through the upcoming steps since you’ll know which pages, forms, and links are the most likely to need your attention.

Tip: Here are five Google Analytics reports to focus on.

3. Check for broken links

You know the feeling when you’re on a website, click on a link you’re interested in, and get the dreaded 404 page.

Inevitably, pages will move and websites will be left with broken links that disappoint visitors, unless you make a point to stay on top of it.

Ideally, this is a job you should tackle once every few months, but it’s easy to let it get away from you. If you haven’t checked for broken links in a while, this website refresh is a good time to do it.

You can use a free broken link checker to quickly simplify the process of finding all your broken links. Then, you just need to get in there and make updates.

4. Give it a proofread

You probably proofread every word on the website before it went up, but even so, minor errors have a way of slipping through.

Most of us have had the experience of noticing a months old typo in something we were sure we’d properly proofread at the time.

Take this opportunity to read over your website. If you have a lot of pages or a blog, this may take a while, but it’s worth it to make sure that you don’t have any embarrassing typos on the site for all your visitors to see.

Tip: Make sure your website is free of any of these 12 common grammar mistakes.

5. Confirm your pages look good on mobile

Mobile should be a key part of your marketing strategy — from mobile responsive email templates to mobile-friendly website design.

Not only do you need to make sure that you have a mobile-friendly website, you should also make sure that each page on your site looks good on mobile and any action you want your visitors to take is as easy to accomplish on mobile as it is on desktop.

Spend some time browsing your website on a mobile device. Find friends that have a different type of mobile device than you and spend time browsing the site on their device as well.

You want to know for sure that your pages look good and are easy to follow on mobile, that the buttons and links are big enough to be easy to click on a small device, and that the site is intuitive to use and navigate in its mobile form.

6. Do a content audit

A content audit can accomplish a few really important things for you. It will:

  • Show you what types of topics and content perform the best
  • Give you a clear picture of what topics you’ve covered thoroughly and help you identify gaps in your coverage
  • Allow you to identify the pieces of content that could benefit from an update or are worth repurposing into additional pieces of content

Basically, it can provide you with a wealth of valuable information to fuel your content strategy in the months and years to come.

As with the proofreading, this is a step that can take some real time if you have a good amount of content, but it could potentially save you time by helping you realize the potential of further promoting the content you already have or using it in new ways.

Don’t be afraid to promote an older piece of content in your email marketing or social media, as long as it’s up to date.

Tip: Boost your website traffic by sending relevant content to your email list and linking back to your site.

7. Look for new internal linking opportunities

While conducting your content audit, be on the lookout for internal linking opportunities.

If you’re actively thinking about SEO in your current content strategy, then you’re probably already good at including internal links in the new content you create. But how often do you go back and look for opportunities to link to the newer content from the old?

This is your chance to find those opportunities and take advantage of them to improve your on-site SEO.  It’s something that’s easy to forget to do, but worth the time it takes.

Make your website clean as a whistle!

These seven steps will take time and work, but as with giving your home a thorough spring cleaning, you’ll feel better when it’s done. And you’ll have a website that does its job better as a result.