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<![CDATA[Weebly.com - Blog]]>Wed, 18 Feb 2026 07:44:32 -0800Weebly<![CDATA[Weebly Feature Release Notes: February]]>Tue, 06 Mar 2018 23:01:45 GMThttp://www.weebly.com/blog/release-notes-february-2018Hey there, Weebly community! We’re excited to share what’s new with the Weebly product in February. Last month we focused on making it easier for you to ship your products within Weebly. Our Weebly Mobile App for iOS got an updated look and revamped Insights. Plus, our Weebly Cloud Partners can now enjoy more advanced online store features. Read more about our new features below and reach out to us if you have any questions. We can’t wait to see how you’ll use Weebly to continue to grow your business.

Now It’s Easier to Ship with Weebly

Shipping products to your customers is an important part of your business operations. We’re focused on making shipping easier for you by helping you choose shipping rates and carriers when you first set up your store.

Our improved shipping experience includes:

A progress bar to guide you through shipping setup and let you know what you have left to do.
Based on a your shipping address, we automatically create a destination region for your shipments so you can start shipping sooner. You can always add more destinations if you need to.
Useful information to help you choose the shipping carrier and rate that’s right for you.
A real-time shipping calculator so that you charge your customers the correct amount for shipping every time (included in our Performance plan only).

Set up shipping today.

Meet the New Mobile App for iOS

The latest version of the mobile app for iOS has a brand new look and makes it even easier to have the freedom to manage your website or online store on the go.
Note: Android users can enjoy an update to the Weebly App in mid-March. Stay tuned for details!

New Insights: Use the Insights section of the app, available to Weebly Pro plan customers and above, to see sales insights such as total sales, orders and average order value. If you’re a Business or Performance plan customer, you can see top products and categories as well as traffic insights such as page views, unique visits, top pages, search terms and referring sites. Performance customers can also use the Insights tab to track abandoned carts.

New Updated Look: Enjoy an easier, cleaner way to update and maintain your website in the app.

New Home Tab: The home tab keeps you up to date on site stats and performance. New to Weebly? Home is there to help you get started with your site.

Website Tab: Use the website tab on the app to edit your site on the go and purchase domains.

New in Promote

St Patrick’s Day Email Template
Want to send a holiday email in March? You’re in luck. We released a new template to help Promote customers drive sales and celebrate St Patrick’s Day. This template will only be available for a few weeks so don’t miss out on this fun opportunity to connect with your customers.

How To Access Holiday Emails
From the Weebly Promote dashboard, click Suggested Emails to see a list of all pre-made holiday email templates. Click on the St Patrick’s Day template to start customizing your email.

Try it out. You get up to 2 free email campaigns on any plan.

Create an email.

Lead Capture Form with Coupon

We’ve added the ability to include a coupon on lead capture forms to encourage your visitors to share their email address. Simply create a coupon, select lead capture forms and opt to create a “coupon” pop up form. You can also setup an email automation with the coupon code to welcome new contacts.

Upgrade to Promote Grow or Promote Accelerate to enable this feature.

Add a lead capture form.

You Spoke, We Heard

Some of you told us that you were being returned to page 1 when you were done editing an order or a product. We fixed this issue so that now, when you’re done editing an order or product you’ll be returned to the page you were on. Thank you for bringing this to our attention.

Platform Updates for Weebly Cloud: Online Store Edition

Our most advanced online store features are now available on Weebly Cloud through the Weebly Performance Plan. This plan powers sellers who are focused on growing their business with features like abandoned cart recovery emails, product reviews and digital gift cards.

Weebly Cloud Partners’ customers can also enjoy new product features for online stores to help drive more sales such as product reviews, “on sale” badges, “low stock” badges and “out of stock” badges.

If you’re one of our Cloud Partners and want to share this plan with your customers, please contact your Weebly Business Development representative to get started. Learn more.

Thanks for reading! As always, let us know about your experience with Weebly.

]]><![CDATA[How to Get Discovered with Online Marketing: Contests & Polls]]>Wed, 28 Feb 2018 19:30:51 GMThttp://www.weebly.com/blog/contests-and-polls

Do you want to get discovered on social media? There are two very simple methods that can get your product or website discovered right away: online contests and online polls. Whether you use an app embedded in a blog post or you create a social media poll or contest, you can get a lot of word-of-mouth attention with these simple marketing approaches.

The Magic of Online Polls

Online polls can attract attention to your website if you focus on a topic that people are passionate about. Have you ever seen those fandom polls that ask people to vote on their favorite TV show relationship? The polls are often done in stages, with stage one featuring seven or eight couples, stage two featuring four couples and stage three featuring a showdown between the top two couples. These "ship polls" can actually take a little-known-website and get it a lot of attention simply by tapping into people's competitive nature. Fans will share a poll far and wide just to help their favorite couple win.

You can take this knowledge and apply it to anything people are passionate and competitive about, whether it's a TV show, a hot-button political topic or even a poll about whether dogs or cats are better. Get the poll in front of a few key players and it will spread fast. To increase your chances of getting noticed, look for influencers who talk about the topic on social media and get a lot of responses. Message them privately and ask them to share your poll. Some may ask for a nominal fee in exchange for doing so.

If you're not interested in "going big" with a poll, you can also create one just for your clients or the followers you already have. These polls can be very effective and generate customer feedback on your products. For example, ask which product is your clients' favorite or which they'd like to see go on sale. If you have limited-time products, ask your customers which one they'd like to bring back.

How to Create a Poll on Weebly

Now that you know how great polls can be, you might be wondering how to create one of your own. Weebly has two great apps to choose between. First, you can use Weeby's Pinpoll app to create a poll and add it directly to your site. The polls have many fun features, like videos and GIFs, real-time results and more. The tool is free or $9 a month for special features.

It only takes a few seconds to get a poll up and running. Just go to the App Center here and choose Add. Then select Pinpoll from your dashboard and drag the poll to where you want it featured. Click on the poll and choose the Create option. Now you can choose the layout you want, including the question, your answers and an eye-catching background photo. After choosing all your design options, click on the Extras tab. This is where you can activate extra features, some of which may have a one-time fee. These include:

Seeing the poll results now, or just showing the number of votes and revealing the results later.
Using a captcha to stop bots. (passionate fans may use bots to try to game polls.)
White labeling a poll so Pinpoll's logo doesn't show.
Automizing the poll's start and end date.
Letting users vote more than once or animating your answers.
Plotting votes on an interactive map.

Finally, it's time to save and publish your poll and tell all your users about it! You can track the results easily, looking at demographics, geography and vote history.

If Pinpoll isn't your favorite option, you can also make polls by installing Quick Polls from Weebly's App Center. Just go here and click Add to install the app. You can test it with a free trial for seven days; thereafter, it's free for 30 responses a month or $3.99 a month for unlimited responses.

To use the app, go through the pop-up box step-by-step on the dashboard after clicking on Quick Polls under Installed Apps. First, go to the Poll Setup tab and choose if you want a standard text-only poll, a poll with buttons and images, a star-review poll or an emoji poll. Then add your headline and questions (labeled Options). Next, choose your design preferences and color style, then choose display rules (such as removing watermarks or asking for emails after finishing the poll). After you've published the poll, you can come back later to the Answers tab to download results or see a graph of the votes.

The Simplicity of Online Contests

Another simple but effective way to get attention is through an online contest. These are great because you can offer a free product in exchange for spreading the word about your brand. The most successful contests allow participants to get extra entries depending on the actions they take. For example, they might get an entry for sharing your contest on Facebook, liking a post, tagging someone or referring your contest to others. You can even allow entries for writing blog posts about your contest. Be sure to set a deadline for entries, as this creates a sense of urgency. After the contest's over, create blog and social media posts sharing who won and the winner's excited response.

How to Create a Contest on Weebly

Weebly makes creating contests really simple with the Social Boost app. You can offer rewards for taking certain actions, such as following your social media profile. You can even give entries to the contest based on actions taken on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Pinterest and more. This app offers pretty much any feature you could want.

To get started, visit Social Boost on the App Center and click 'Add'. You'll be taken to a page where you can set up the contest. This is the admin page, and you can go here any time you want to start a new campaign. First, click on New Campaign and choose your campaign name, your header image, a description, the campaign's start and end time and the terms and conditions.

Click 'Next' and choose how you want people to participate and get entries. You have a lot of options, including blog comments, filling out a form, liking or sharing a Facebook page, visiting an Instagram page, following a Pinterest page, taking a quiz, retweeting a tweet or a hashtag and more. Save your choices and then move on to the Referrals tab. Here you can choose to reward referrals who get friends to join the campaign. Next, review your layout. Then choose where you want to install the campaign (including a Facebook tab, embedding it on websites, adding it to your Weebly site, and more). Finally, add analytics features and choose your prizes.

Setting up a contest through Social Boost is surprisingly simple. Just follow the app step-by-step through the tabs and you'll be done in no time. When you've finished, you'll need to install the Social Boost Widget's code on your website before visitors can see it. Then you're done!

With Weebly, creating an online poll or contest is easy. Just use the apps to embed a poll on your website, or create a contest that can be accessed through multiple social media outlets. Online polls and contests are great ways to harness the power of word-of-mouth marketing. You don't have to pay an exorbitant fee to advertise online. Just let passion for your poll or excitement about a free product be the fuel that drives more visitors to your website.

]]><![CDATA[Professional Product Photos, Made Simple with Weebly Photo Studio]]>Wed, 21 Feb 2018 21:07:59 GMThttp://www.weebly.com/blog/weebly-photo-studio

We have exciting news for entrepreneurs looking to elevate their brand. We’re launching a new service called Weebly Photo Studio. It’s simple. Ship us your products, our expert photographers will shoot three product photos then send your products back to you for only $10 per product!

We’ll be giving early access to the first 300 entrepreneurs who want beautiful, professional product photos for their online store.

Sign up for this exclusive offer of 3 professional product photos for just $10 per product:

Get on the List

How it works

Ship us your product - you can ship us up to five
Weebly Photo Studio will shoot professional product photos for you
You’ll get a link to download three product photos
We’ll ship your product back to you

Professional product photography is a vital part of any online shopping experience and can help you sell more. In fact, research shows that 94% of potential customers are more likely to shop at a site with quality product photos and well-designed visuals.

Using Weebly Photo Studio you’ll receive clean, clear images that will give your eCommerce website a polished look and feel. We use a white background to draw attention to your products and to suite any Weebly theme you choose.

You can always get great product photos if you have a nice camera, invest in lighting equipment, take a product photography class, purchase photoshop, learn how to use photoshop with online tutorials… the list could go on. But as an entrepreneur, your main goal is to sell your products. We don’t think you should have to become a professional photographer to do so. Weebly Photo Studio is here to help.

]]><![CDATA[Use Weebly Promote to Easily Achieve Powerful and Effective Social Marketing]]>Fri, 16 Feb 2018 20:44:18 GMThttp://www.weebly.com/blog/promote-social-marketing

Even the most experienced marketer can find creating Facebook Ads confusing, especially when trying to create ads with specific goals in mind, like retargeting previous visitors to a site or getting customers who abandoned their shopping carts to come back. You have to fiddle with various tracking pixels and the whole thing can be a bit too much.

Unless, of course, you manage your Facebook Ads using Weebly Promote. Weebly Promote is primarily an email marketing platform, but it also provides easy-to-use Facebook Ad Creation / Management that integrates directly with your Weebly site(s), so you don't have to spend hours trying to figure out which pixel goes where. A pixel is a tag placed on a landing page to collect information about the visitor and their behavior on the website.

Get Started

Any Weebly customer can easily create their own Weebly Promote account. To get to your own, click the Marketing link at the top of your main Weebly home screen.

To find the Facebook Ads section, click the rather appropriately named Ads link in the left sidebar. You'll be see several options, but before you can move forward you'll need to connect your Facebook account so that Weebly Promote can manage your ads.

When you Connect, you'll be prompted to select which of your Facebook pages you'd like to use with Weebly Promote. If you only have one business page, then it'll be pre-selected, if you have more than one be sure to keep a close eye and choose the page you want.

You'll also need to enter payment information, even though you won't be charged anything until your Facebook ads start delivering. Facebook ads cost money (Mark Zuckerberg wouldn't be able to afford a closet full of that one fancy grey t-shirt he wears if he was giving ads away for free) so you'll, of course, have to pay for them. Weebly Promote doesn't charge anything extra on top of what you're paying Facebook, though. And you'll have the option when creating your ad to set budget as low as $5.

After Facebook is connected, you'll be presented with four recommended ads, as well as the option to Create New custom ads.

You likely won't need to go beyond the Suggested Ads — at least not at first — so let's focus on those.

Suggested Ads

The four suggested ads are:

Promote Best Sellers — This automatically selects the best selling products from your site and creates ads linking new customers directly to them!
Brand Awareness — This allows you to promote your website or Facebook business page to a new audience with the goal of driving engagement and gaining new followers.
Abandoned Cart — This runs an ad targeted to anyone who added something to their cart and left without buying it, reminding them of the purchase that is still waiting for them back at your site.
Retarget Site Visitors — This runs ads directly to people who've previously visited your site to encourage them to come back and buy more. This may sound unnecessary since they've already been to your site, but it often a great way to close the deal and turn potential customers into actual ones.

The set up process for each ad is fairly similar, but let's use two as examples: Brand Awareness and Retarget Site Visitors.

Brand Awareness — Setup

As noted above, the Brand Awareness option lets you promote your website or business page to a new audience.

Launching the Ad is a three-step process: Crafting your ad's message alongside some images, selecting the audience you'd like to target and choosing a budget / timeframe for the ad.

Create Ad

You'll need a short description (what your ad is about), a headline (to get attention) and a subtitle (to continue getting that attention), plus you'll need to upload an image or two, place a link to the site or page where you want visitors to go, and choose from a small selection of different call-to-action buttons they can click. Take a look at this post if you need some inspiration about what to write.
This is all fairly straightforward and not particularly noteworthy. The most important parts are found in the next step.

Review and Submit

The title doesn't imply that you'll be doing much here other than reviewing and submitting, but that is not accurate. There are two very key parts to creating your ad in this section. The first is choosing your targeted audience. This is where Facebook is truly powerful (and vaguely creepy). They know everything we've all told them over the years: our neighborhoods, our favorite movies, events we've enjoyed. Utilizing Facebook's in-depth database of mostly trivial information can ensure your ad ends up in front of people who'll find it interesting.

Let's say you run a comic book shop in Spokane, Washington. You can limit ads so that they run for people in the Spokane area, between the ages of 16 and 45, who are interested in Black Panther, Spider-Man and Star Wars. This will get you a far more engaged audience than an ad that goes to everyone in Spokane, some of whom you may be surprised to learn don't even know who Stan Lee is.

Once you've chosen your audience, you then select the duration you'd like for the ad to run and the amount of money you want to spend per day. Obviously, the higher your spend, the more results you'll see from the ad. But it's a good idea to test things out with a lower budget first, just to make sure the ad works. Then you can increase your spend on the next go-round (or make some changes and try again if it didn't do as well as you'd hoped).

When you're done, submit the ad for Facebook's approval. This can take anywhere from a few minutes to several hours. Facebook will notify you when the ad is approved and Weebly Promote has no say in the process.

Once the ad begins running, you'll see the number of people you've reached and the cost of each engagement. The lower the cost per engagement, of course, the better your ad is doing.

Retarget Site Visitors — Setup

When you create this ad, you'll see that Weebly Promote has already done all the work in setting it up. Easy! Now you can relax and watch the money (hopefully) roll in. Under normal circumstances, this kind of ad would be fairly complicated to run. With Weebly Promote and Weebly, it's a breeze. How?

Thanks to the direct connection between Weebly Promote and your Weebly site, this ad campaign can automatically show visitors previous products and pages that they've viewed while on your site, which are the exact things that might convince them to come back and spend money. There is nothing else you need to do aside from set a budget and duration for the ad run.

And considering retargeted ads bring in anywhere from a 2x to 10x return on investment (and sometimes more) it'd be a waste to not at least test this kind of ad out.

The average person spends around 35 minutes a day on Facebook, with most of that time devoted to avoiding work. Give them an even better reason to avoid work by advertising products they'll enjoy.

]]><![CDATA[4 Weebly SEO Features You Should Be Using Right Now]]>Thu, 15 Feb 2018 23:01:22 GMThttp://www.weebly.com/blog/4-weebly-seo-features-you-should-use

Search Engine Optimization can feel like a confusing maze of a morass of a swamp, with tons of websites all claiming they contain the very best secrets to game Google's system and rank highly for any search terms you consider important to your business. And while many of these articles have useful information, it can all be a touch overwhelming, especially if you are just starting out. It can even be plenty overwhelming if you're an old hand at this and have had a site for years.

As with most anything in life — like building a business or creating a website or walking — Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is best tackled one step at a time. The first step? Putting all of Weebly's many simple and powerful SEO features to use. If you're not doing that, then all the other tips in the world won't provide you nearly as much value as they could.

Where to begin?

Page Titles & Descriptions

These provide you with the power to specifically highlight the search phrases you'd like to be ranked in. Plus, your page titles and descriptions appear directly in search results when someone finds your site on a search engine, giving you a great opportunity to influence searchers to visit your site.

You can see this in effect even on Weebly's own site. The SEO page title for the home page is Weebly Website Builder: Create a Free Website, Store or Blog and the description is the two sentences that follow it.

You might write a page title and description like this other example below. That is, assuming you own a business in Oakland called Rockridge Bakery that has been around since 1972. Otherwise you might just use it as a guide and write something else.
About Rockridge Bakery: Serving Oakland since 1972

Rockridge Bakery has been part of the North Oakland community since my mother founded the business in 1972. We hope to still be here in 2072.

The option to add Titles and Descriptions can be found in the same place as the permalinks discussed above. You'll need to Publish for any changes to take effect and you'll also need to give Google a week or two to index the changes you've made.

Page Permalinks

Every page on your site has a name that you provide (separate from the title noted above), and this name is used by default to both generate your navigation and to create links for each individual page. You'll generally want to keep these names short and to the point for navigation purposes: Contact, About, Store, etc. And when you do this it also means that you end up with very short links: mysite.com/about, mysite.com/contact, etc.

The thing about using these short names for your links is that you're missing a valuable opportunity to use those links to highlight how you'd want them to be found via a search, since Google (and the other search engines) take those names into consideration when ranking your site.

So for your About page, you'd be a touch more descriptive for your permalink (about-the-rockridge-bakery-team). Same for your Contact page (reach-out-to-us). And so on from there.

Wait, wouldn't you already be doing this same thing with the titles and descriptions we just discussed? Kinda, but these permalinks are even more useful in that they literally become the address where the page lives. This a great opportunity to really reinforce what you've written in your title field for a page or to highlight a different key phrase you'd like to see your page rank in.

To change your permalinks go to Pages and click the page you'd like to change. Then choose the SEO Settings options for that page and enter a Page Permalink in the provided box. You'll need to Publish your site for the change to take effect.

And don't go overboard. Still try to keep your permalinks to five or six words.

The Header & Footer Code

The header and footer code are big blank boxes that may entice you to enter a bunch of text in them. And why not? They are found in the exact same menu as the other features we've previously discussed. But you shouldn't put just anything in these boxes.

Why not?

Because they're meant solely to use for HTML or JavaScript code. If you don't have any code in hand then putting anything in those boxes is simply going to hurt your SEO instead of helping it.

That said, there is a very important SEO step you can take that does involve the Header Code specifically, and that's submitting and verifying your site with Google Search Console (also knows as Webmaster Tools). See Weebly's detailed guide on how to do just that.

301 Redirects

If you're moving a site from another host to Weebly, ideally you don't want to lose all the search engine history and optimization you gained from your time with that site. And, thankfully, there's a way to redirect both traffic and search engines from your old pages to your new ones within Weebly using the 301 Redirects feature.

This option is found under Settings > SEO in the editor, at the very bottom of that page. All you need do here is enter the page permalink from the old site and select which new page that should point to in the new one. Then Save.

That's it. Once you Publish your site, all those old pages will redirect to the new ones so that you continue to get value from them. But note that this is only works if you're using the same domain with Weebly as you were using at your previous host. Weebly's article and video explain this in detail.

Once you get these basic Search Engine Optimizations in place, you'll be well on your way to seeing your site ranking much higher in search results. Next up, read a more advanced SEO guide like Are the Right People Searching for You? or How to Create a Perfectly Optimized Page.

]]><![CDATA[4 Steps to Making Email Integral to Your Marketing in 2018]]>Tue, 06 Feb 2018 19:33:06 GMThttp://www.weebly.com/blog/making-email-integral-to-marketing

Every year brings new advances in practically every area of technology, but one thing remains the same year-in and year-out: email is the most effective form of marketing. In the U.S., on average, every marketing dollar spent on email leads to $44 in sales. This is a remarkable ROI. Compared to $2 for every $1 spent on Google Ads, well, there really is no comparison.

Why does email perform so much better than these other (still very valuable) forms of marketing? Because it targets customers who have already expressed interest in your business in the past and is helping you close the deal with them.

Here's how to make email integral to your marketing this year:

Add a Lead Capture Form to Your Site

You can't send emails out if you don't have anywhere to send them, which is why adding a lead capture form to your site is a key first step in your email marketing strategy. Potential customers will want to hear from you, so there is no reason not to provide them with the opportunity to do so.

Weebly's Promote includes a very powerful lead capture form creator that provides four different kinds of forms, each of which have their own benefits:

Popup — This for pops up after a set period of time (that you determine), giving visitors the option to either sign-up or ignore it. This is the default form, but keep in mind that the way it functions could disrupt whatever else a visitor is doing on your site.

Smart Bar — This adds a small one line form to the top of your site, ensuring visitors see it no matter where they are without otherwise intruding on their experience.

Welcome Mat — Essentially a full screen version of Popup that briefly takes over the entire site. And as with the Popup, it ensures more people interact with (and use) your form while potentially disrupting some other people out of the act of using your site.

Anchored — Similar to the Smart Bar, except it's a form or mail icon anchored to the lower right of your site. This is the probably the most stylish of the options, but also the least noticeable as a result.

Assuming you're using Weebly, these can all be added to your site automatically at the press of a button. Learn more about setting up lead capture forms.

Create Your First Newsletter

Email marketing is most effective when you establish a relationship with your subscribers. And you can't establish that relationship if you allow several months to pass between every message you send them. Even if you only have a few subscribers right now (and even if your list currently consists of friends and family who are cheering you on), this is the time to get in the habit of sending an email out to your entire list at least once a month.

Why? Because this keeps your subscribers from forgetting you. Imagine if you signed up for a mailing list at a small business and didn't otherwise interact with them after that. Would you remember joining their list if they didn't write to you until six months or even a year later? Probably not. They'd be wasting their money and your time.

Weebly Promote has a simple email creation system that works in much the same way as Weebly: you select a template and then drag and drop your text and images where you want them.

Weebly's help center provides guidance on the creation of each part of the email. If you've also been blogging, you can automatically add blog posts to newsletters; a great way to repurpose content that many of your subscribers probably haven't yet seen.

Send Welcome Emails to New Customers & Subscribers

Along the same lines as the above, Welcome Emails establish a connection with new subscribers right away. It shows them what your emails will look like (so they'll be less likely to miss them next time) and gives you an opportunity to offer a discount or some other value to bring them back to your site right away.

This would be tedious if you had to do it manually, which is why Weebly Promote provides Automated Emails that can be sent after a customer's first purchase or a subscriber's initial sign up.

The help center can walk you through setting up an automated welcome email for both new contacts and first time customers.

Create Your First Drip Campaign

A drip campaign is a series of Automated Emails that go out over a set period of time. You create the content once and then customers / subscribers receive the emails based entirely on a set of rules that you determine.

So instead of sending a single welcome email for a new customer, you might instead send a welcome email followed by a brand email four days later, and an up sell message another three days after that. You determine the timing and what triggers a subscriber to receive the campaign.

Be creative with this! These automated emails can easily be set up to be triggered by very specific purchases, which is great since email becomes more powerful, the more specific it is. A four-email drip relating to a product the customer just purchased describing ways they can use it and other products they might like is even more likely to get results than a more generic email about your business. Plus, once it's set up you can just let it run, generating revenue without any more work on your part.

If you want more ideas, look at emails from companies you admire and frequent. They're successful for a reason and Weebly Promote gives you every tool you'd need to create the same types of winning emails. Get started, and soon other entrepreneurs will be looking to your business as an example of how to do things right.

]]><![CDATA[The Psychology of Coupons: How Weebly Can Help You Use Them to Your Advantage]]>Fri, 02 Feb 2018 23:27:56 GMThttp://www.weebly.com/blog/how-to-use-coupons-to-your-advantage

Coupons might be that one final step that turns a potential sale into a lifelong customer — and their value is only increasing. In 2013, 92% of consumers reported using coupons, up from 63.6% in 2007. This should really come as no surprise to anyone. We all know that coupons work, and many of us have bought something online simply because we had a coupon. But why do coupons work? And how can you put that psychology to work in your own business?

Coupons Give Value and Urgency

According to Vouchercloud, 57% of shoppers say they would not have made a purchase without a coupon first. Furthermore, 65% of consumers agreed with the following statement: “Online voucher codes often finalize the decision for me if I am undecided on a purchase."

What causes this change in behavior? And how can you harness that for your business? Behavior economist Dan Ariely told Marketplace.org that coupons can create an added sense of urgency and value.

“Imagine that a new car is $30,000 discounted to $20,000," he explained. "So you say to yourself, 'Oh my goodness this is really worth $30,000, [but] right now it's $20,000.' It gives you an extra sense of value."

If your discount expires, it can create a sense of urgency, Ariely added, making you feel like you really need to take advantage of a limited-time offer.

So coupons enhance the customer's your perception of value. The customer feels like they're getting a bargain, whether or not they really are. But you might be surprised to learn there's even more to it than just that. Marketing expert Michiel Heijmans said that a different psychological mechanism is also at work. He wrote:

According to the Pleasure Principle and the Regulatory Focus Theory, people seek pleasure and avoid pain. The anticipation of missing out on a discount is definitely a pain people will want to avoid.

While these theories sound convincing, there's also a chance that customers are simply happier and therefore more willing to buy. According to a Coupons.com study conducted in 2012: "Those who received coupons were 11 percent happier than those participants who did not get coupons."

Whatever the underlying mechanism, it has been proven time and again that coupons are an effective way to bring customers through the door. And Weebly's coupon builder is the perfect tool to execute your coupon strategy.

Using Coupons in the Weebly Store is Easy

All Weebly Business and Performance plans come with the coupon builder. Using the builder, it's easy to set up many different types of coupons. You can give your customers a percentage off or an exact dollar amount. You can make codes that expire soon or codes that never expire at all. (But from what the studies said above, a limited-time offer might work best from a psychological standpoint.)

You can limit an offer to the first 50 customers, thus adding value to the discount, or allow for unlimited uses. Or you can limit a Weebly coupon to specific products or apply it to your whole catalogue. The choice is yours.

Weebly even makes it easy to offer free shipping, which can be a great way to close the sale. According to research conducted by UPS, 93% of shoppers take action to qualify for free shipping, and the leading action taken is adding items to a cart.

Once you build a coupon, the checkout screen on your website will include a field to enter a coupon code, making it easy for customers to use the code without any additional setup. The coupon box integrates seamless with your shopping cart design and looks great on mobile and desktop.

Don't Forget to Promote Your Coupons

Creating a great coupon is only half the work. You've got to get the message out there and put those coupons into the right hands. Weebly Promote helps you send coupon offers to your mailing list via smart email marketing programs.

You should also consider advertising your coupons on social media — and not just once. Make sure you get the most out of your promotional campaign by displaying your discount early and often. In this hectic world, sometimes it can take multiple notices before your customer will take action.

Using Weebly to make and promote coupons is an easy, straightforward process. And psychology is teaching us that these coupons are very worthwhile. If you employ a sense of urgency and value into your offers, you may gain some new, happy customers that you might never have had otherwise. So why not give coupons a try?

]]><![CDATA[Weebly Release Notes: New Features and Apps from January]]>Thu, 01 Feb 2018 21:02:57 GMThttp://www.weebly.com/blog/release-notes-january-2018We hit the ground running in January with several sizable product improvements and integrations. Plus, the future looks bright for our new class of App Center apps. Behind the scenes, we’re heads down working on updates to our online store offering and increased security for all sites.

January Feature Releases:

Inspiration Center Refresh - Our beloved Inspiration Center received a huge makeover last month! You can now more easily navigate through articles and stay current with actionable content. Get ideas on website design trends, marketing tactics and much more. If you’d like expert advice delivered straight to your inbox, sign up for our weekly newsletter on the Inspiration Center or Blog and never miss a beat.

Help Center Improvements - We implemented new technology to help you find the answers to your questions, faster. Quickly get the information you need through knowledge base articles without a phone call, chat or email. If you can’t find what you’re looking for right away, our Customer Success team offers one-on-one support from a real human being.

Accessibility for All - We believe anyone should be able to browse the web. That’s why we rolled out improvements to make it easier for people with disabilities to access the content on any Weebly site by automatically adding copy to form fields, alt text to social media icons, titles for embedded multimedia (audio, video, document and flash) and alt text to site logos. These improvements help people that use alternative methods, such as keyboard input, screen readers and specialized software, explore your pages with ease. It’s our priority to make the web more accessible to everyone.

Promote Automations - Upsell customers post purchase and reward loyal customers with triggered emails. Plus, you can now select ‘Best Sellers’, ‘Newest’ and ‘Popular’ product categories in the editor and your email will automatically populate with the correct products.

January App Releases:

Easyship - Get access to 100+ shipping solutions and discounts up to 70% - Free.
PayPal Marketing - Add promotions to your site and get access to free insights into the shopping activity of visitors - Free.
RabbitSEO - Successfully manage and improve your site’s SEO using this intuitive app - Free to $25/month.
AutoMailer - Use your own email address to schedule and send professional email marketing campaigns to all of your customers at the same time - Free to $22/month.
Translate.com - Go international by translating your site’s existing content - Free to $299/month.
WherEver Chat - Live chat with audio call and video chat - $12/month.
popBox - Add pop-up boxes to your site to guide readers through the flow of your page - Free.
X Divider - Transform regular sections into beautiful share-based modules - $10.
Futurestay - Instantly add online booking and an availability calendar to your vacation rental website - Free.

]]><![CDATA[3 Benefits of Joining the Weebly Community]]>Wed, 31 Jan 2018 20:22:39 GMThttp://www.weebly.com/blog/3-benefits-of-joining-the-weebly-community

Now matter what your resolutions are this year, you can find strength and support in the Weebly Community to help you reach new goals for your eCommerce site or store in 2018. With 3.8 million new websites published in 2017, we've expanded our community to 225 countries and territories across the globe.

Entrepreneurs can leverage the community as both a networking tool and a resource for starting conversations, asking questions, finding inspiration, sharing suggestions and receiving tips from Weebly experts and other small business owners.

To access the Weebly community, simply select “Support" from the dropdown menu in your Dashboard or visit community.weebly.com. Here are three ways you can use the community to find support, education, and inspiration to take your site or store to new heights this year.

1. Seek Support

One great way to make connections – and get support feedback for any new features or designs you may want to try – is to show off your site. In the community forum, all you have to do is introduce yourself, share the URL for your Weebly site and request any specific feedback that you may want.

Showing off your site is also a good way to broaden your audience, share your expertise with other community members and even discover new business relationships that can take your site or store to the next level.

2. Get Educated

Another helpful feature of Weebly Community is a wide range of discussion boards that can help you find answers to a multitude of questions, get support, and learn new techniques.

While you're visiting, you can also share your own tips about how you created your own site or store and built your small business. There are separate boards for talking about Weebly features and for discussing business topics. Whether you're looking for advice on how to sell inventory, add an online photo gallery, or navigate sales tax issues, the Weebly Community is here to help!

3. Share Inspiration

Weebly users love to share suggestions for new features and we regularly include your ideas in updates and new features as Weebly continues to grow. So we created a section of the community designed just for this purpose. Check out the Vote on Features section to share feedback, ideas, and inspirations. Don't forget to vote on which Weebly improvements or features we should incorporate as we continue to grow!

Some suggestions before you submit a new idea are to do a quick search to see if someone else already suggested the idea. Also write out who your idea is for, the motivation behind it, the benefit, and of course, the actual idea.

Getting Started

To help keep the Weebly community strong, we offer a few helpful guidelines. First, think before you post on the site. Is your comment relevant to the Weebly Community? Next, make sure that you are posting your content is the right places and subtopics. Keeping the community organized makes it easier for everyone to find content quickly and easily. Last, make sure that you are posting items that are designed for the community rather than attempting to talk at them. We're excited about the Weebly community and having everyone take part in 2018. Check it out today – and let us know what you think!

]]><![CDATA[Hack Week: Nurturing Innovation at Weebly]]>Fri, 26 Jan 2018 19:31:32 GMThttp://www.weebly.com/blog/hack-week-nurturing-innovation-at-weebly

There are two characteristics unique to technology professionals who write code for a living:

They have a strong passion to innovate, create, and solve problems which is what attracted them to the profession (software, hardware, ops, support, QA, etc…)
Successful technology companies want to retain their talent

I challenge you to ask one or more members of your technical team(s), “What is the biggest obstacle to you innovating for our [your] company?”.

You’ll likely receive answers relating to one or more of the following:

Time / Priority
Bandwidth / Workload
Autonomy / Freedom
Culture / Propriety

Weebly created a unique solution to remove these blockers of innovation and encourages our staff to step into the realm of possibility, we call it “Hack Week”.

Hack Week at Weebly is a bi-annual event held during times of the year which are least impactful to our customers and business operations. Hack Week enables our team members to explore, develop, and present new solutions and ideas for Weebly, its customers, and developers.

We completed our most recent Hack Week on December 7th 2017, and I was granted the opportunity to help with the event.

In the remainder of this post, I will share the key aspects of Hack Week, some of our success stories, and lessons learned in the hopes of helping you while exploring how to nourish your technologist’s passion for innovation in your company!

Key Aspects of the Weebly’s December 2017 Hack Week

5 days in length
Sprints were lightened to accommodate
Work is done during normal business hours
Teams can be any size (recommend five person max)
Projects can address any subject
Participation is optional

We experienced solid participation with over 23% of all Weebly employees across six (6) different departments who submitted twenty-two (22) different projects on Demo Day!

Each iteration of Hack Week makes an attempt to improve upon the previous event. In the most recent Hack Week event, we organized projects into two main categories with cash prizes for the winning teams (1st, 2nd, 3rd places):

Product-Specific Projects (customer-facing, and/or related to our products and services)
Non-Product Projects (internal, operations, creative, or discovery focused)

Additionally, we offered three recognition-only awards (bragging rights, but no cash prizes):

Best in Show
Best Customer Project
Founder’s Award

Our Success Stories

The scope of Hack Week projects was to focus upon making Weebly better for employees, customers, partners, and developers.

About half of the projects submitted were developed for internal only use as means to improve efficiency or resolve technical, business, or daily-work challenges:

Increasing adoption of new technical resources with builders and tools
Decreasing on-boarding time for technical new hires
Improving interoffice engagement
Automating development tasks to reduce GTM release time
Increasing understanding of our cafeteria demand and consumption

The remaining half of projects submitted were developed for our customers, partners, and developers and ways to improve their lives:

`node-weebly` A CLI tool to simplify developing Weebly App Center apps
Simplifying business/legal documentation on Weebly sites
Weebly site support for iOS TV
Amazon Alexa integration with Weebly Site data
Weebly Customer Appreciation and Achievement Notification System
Mini-Checkout System for Weebly Sites

One of the metrics used while evaluating projects was the team’s estimate for the amount of time/effort required to ship their project to production.

We are announcing one of those projects today, the new Node Weebly CLI (more on this in a separate blog post later). We are working to get the remaining projects into our development/workflow pipelines as soon as possible.

Lessons Learned

Over the past four (4) years working as a developer relations team member, I have participated in nearly fifty (50) hackathons, but Hack Week at Weebly is something altogether different and I learned a lot from the experience. There are plenty of good resources online about how to hold a hackathon, but not so for a week-long event held during normal business hours.

Hack Week is NOT a normal hackathon
- No late nights
- Not ‘regular’ work, but not free time either
- Emphasis on building value
Keep the rules simple
- You have to enforce any rules you add
- Participants regulate themselves (mostly)
Participating and simultaneously helping coordinate the event are ill-advised
- Don’t do both, you’ll fail at one or both
Provide ample time between submissions and demos/judging
- Use this time to improve the Demo Day event quality and preparedness
Keep judging simple
- Don’t confuse your audience/judges with complex criteria
- Encourage everyone to participate in judging
- We could benefit from simplifying further even
- Automate as much of the judging as possible
- Be impartial

If you’d like to know more about Hack Week, feel free to DM me on social media or via email.

The Winners!

Let’s close out this blog post by giving credit to our winning teams and a little information about their projects!

Best in Show Award - The Dream Team
A video documentary project highlighting the importance of the pursuit of employee happiness and interconnectivity at Weebly. Our automation touch points make us feel connected to our office, as it becomes a responsive environment. By diving into the real office woes, our team has gained new insight into our coworkers, and a new appreciation for those that make our office better in other ways.

Matt DeClaire
George Sukara
Kelly Fitch (and Otis, the official Weebly office mascot)
David Pearson
Yeuh-Lin Chung

Founder’s Award (tie) - Weebly Assist & Weebly TV

Weebly Assist is your small business digital assistant that you can talk or type to. Ask Weebly Assist "How's my business doing?" to get an update on sales and site traffic. Want to know if you have anything you need to act on, but you're busy driving, no worries, just speak to Weebly Assist and ask "Do I have any orders I need to ship?".

WeeblyTV is a dashboard for the most important insights to your small business – on the biggest screen you have, your TV. Graphs of your store's traffic, sales, and marketing metrics are viewable in a gallery, or in full-screen, where a swipe left or right explores each day. If you pick a few favorite insights, they'll be automatically rotated with a quick tap of the "Play Favorites" button. Sit back, and watch your business grow.

Eddie Kaiger (Weebly Assist)
Steve Uffelman (Weebly Assist)
Piyush Agarwal (WeeblyTV)
Lokesh Dhakar (WeebyTV)

Best Customer Project Award - Team DollaBill$ (no team photo available)

Team DollaBill$ completed work on a feature within Weebly’s new internal application used by our Customer Service Advocates (CSA). The feature we developed replicates the manual process our CSAs currently perform and automates that process to identify opportunities we can offer our customers to bring their business one step closer to success!

Brad Shaffer
Matt Porter
Michelle Sastri
Bo Han
Kris Krost
Ashley Klein

Non-Product Project Prize Winners

1st Place - The Dream Team (photo, team members, and description above)

2nd Place - Project Pluto
We created a visual user interface that allows any employee to quickly build a fully functional prototype with our internal front end framework and design system, Orbit. Our prototype builder generates the code needed to create the prototype without having to write any code, and is always synced with the latest version of Orbit's components. Our project's goal was to reduce prototype, development, and design time with an easy to use, visual UI.

Matthew Mewton
Patrick Khensovan
Linnea Watson
Michael Bonds

3rd Place - Master Chefs
The Master Chef team built a code playground that would make it easier to test, share, and save *recipes* leveraging Weebly's internal framework and component library: Orbit. The primary goal with the project was to help our Weebly squads build quick prototypes for our product and share solutions so everyone can learn from each other and build a better product for our customers.

Landon Durnan
Elizabeth So
Zechariah Campbell
Erik Pukinskis

Product Project Prize Winners

1st Place - Weebly Assist (photo and description above)

Piyush
Lokesh

2nd Place - Cheers (no photo available)
We created a project to make our our customers look like heroes by enabling them to send cheerful messages to their users celebrating achievement milestones!

Enrique Perez
Ethan Kalm
Nick Masters
Kolbe Bowring
Alex Auger

3rd Place - MiniCheckout API
Team members have asked for their project/faces to remain private

Yerkebulan Tuliberganov
Norman Chou

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