When a customer is taking a coffee to-go, you often miss out on the chance for them to sit down in your cafe and form a connection with your business.

But that doesn’t mean that there are no marketing opportunities available that you can use to entice the customers looking to quickly grab a drink and be on their way.

In this post, we’ll be sharing some of our most creative ideas on how you can get the most out of the express coffee cups you buy from Pack Genie.

Keep reading to find out more about the marketing strategies that your business could start to use this year. 

 

1. Use your coffee store’s branding

The first, and maybe the most important tip, is to make sure that you personalise your coffee cups to include your store’s branding.

Your branding is the way to share your brand’s message and form a connection with your customer, so you want to make sure that it’s included across all of your marketing materials – including your to-go coffee mugs.

Whether you have specific colours or fonts that you use, or just include your logo as the main feature of your coffee mug, it’s important to include these features.

Plus, the more aesthetic you make the design, the more likely customers are to share images on social media and allow your brand to reach an even larger audience. 

 

2.  Personalise with customer’s name

Everyone loves getting personalised things as it’s unique and individual to them, so go out of your way to make adding your customer’s name to their mug as exciting as possible.

Most coffee shops will just write the customer’s name in a big black pen anywhere there’s space on the mug, but if you create a space for their name and use multi-coloured pens, for example, this makes the whole experience much more interesting for your customers.

You could also include on your designs something like “___’s cup of coffee” that has a space for their name to make it extremely personalised. 

 

3. Include a fun quote on every cup

Inspired by the popular tea bags that include quotes on every package, you could also incorporate this idea onto your coffee mugs.

Include some fun and inspiring quotes that people can read as they’re enjoying their daily caffeine fix and it could also be a fun addition that could encourage people to share pictures on social media.

Quotes could include things like:

"The smell of fresh-made coffee is one of the world's greatest inventions."

"Never trust anyone who doesn't drink coffee."

"Once you wake up and smell the coffee, it's hard to go back to sleep."

"Coffee smells like freshly ground heaven."

 

4. Start your loyalty scheme

Loyalty schemes are a great way to get customers to continue returning to your shop and they are easy to introduce.

Simply include a space on your coffee cup that can be ripped off and stamped every time a customer buys a coffee from you.

Then, when they fill up all the stamps, they can take them into the store to redeem for a free coffee.

 

5. Experiment with QR codes

QR codes are extremely popular at the moment and are extremely easy to add to your coffee cups.

By scanning a particular QR code, your customers could be taken to your social media page, your website, or to any other content you have online that may be of interest to them.

 

6. Introduce offers and discount codes

Everyone loves to take advantage of a good offer or discount code so, by including details of one on your coffee cup, it’s highly likely that a customer will return to your shop to redeem the offer.

You could offer something like 10% off your next drink, or a free pastry next time they come in to buy a coffee. Whatever it is, make it clear and noticeable on the express coffee cup and look forward to welcoming the customer back to your shop very soon.

 

7. Include links to your social media handles

You may think that the number of followers you have on social media isn’t important when you’re running a physical coffee business – but that’s not true.

Social media is your chance to reach a large group of potential customers who may have never heard of you before. 

When you link to your social media handles on your express coffee cups, people are more likely to follow you, share your photos, and increase your exposure to even more of their friends and family.

 

8. Return the cup for money off your next drink

Sustainability is increasingly important for all businesses and, unfortunately, you can’t always rely on customers to recycle your express coffee cups properly.

One way to get around this is by offering an incentive to encourage customers to bring their finished cups back to you, so you can properly recycle them.

Not only is this strategy good for the environment, but it also increases the chance of customers coming back to your shop again and again.

 

9. Use your cups to advertise a giveaway

Giveaways are a popular marketing tactic that many different brands use to get customers to engage with their brand and expand their reach to a larger audience.

You can use your coffee cups as the place to advertise this giveaway and tell customers how they can get involved.

 

10. Be creative and introduce seasonal designs

Huge coffee chain, Starbucks, is extremely well-known for their seasonal to-go coffee mugs and plenty of customers will get excited around Christmas when their signature red cups are launched.

Every year the design is different, and it encourages people to post on social media and share their love for the new designs. 

This is something that could also be introduced in other coffee stores, for example having new designs for each season, or introducing limited edition designs for holidays such as Easter, Halloween, Christmas, or Valentine’s Day.

Shop Express cups here