4 ways to do marketing for your Etsy business or website

4 ways to do marketing for your Etsy business or website

Everyone here likely knows what Etsy is, if you don't, it's a place where you can list all your hand made items for sale.  These items usually consist of jewelry, clothing, household items, etc.  Anything that you've seen at a craft fair, if you've been to one, will likely be on Etsy.com for sale.  Now if you already know what etsy is because you have your store up an running, you're ahead of the game on this discussion

Doing your marketing for an etsy shop is necessary since the sales won't just come rolling in after you set everything up.  There are many things you need to focus on and not just the quality of your products.  In this discussion I'll go over 4 main ways you can do some marketing for your etsy business and/or website.


Generate Word-of-Mouth Marketing
Now this isn't as easy as you would think because it consists of more than just texting everyone you know and asking them to post on social media or text their friends about your new products.  I actually did a test on this and messaged 100 people and only 3 of them actually did what I asked.  My own sisters didn't even share my links lol!

Generating word of mouth about your new products isn't easy, but there are ways to encourage others to do this for you.  Of course you can give them the best possible item of the highest quality and hope they share their purchase with the masses, but happy people don't willingly share on social media (which is sad).  To encourage your happy buyers to share for you, you need to give them some sort of incentive.  Now I know you're thinking "I don't make much per sale to begin with, how will I give them an incentive?" and that's easy.  You can offer them a 2 for 1 or some sort of small discount so you can break even on their next order... as long as they share on social media or a different 3rd party website you have no control over  

This type of "word-of-mouth" marketing is the digital kind.  People who are on the fence about purchasing something will likely go ahead with the payment if their friend or family member has done it first.  And if you're getting high quality items in the hands of happy buyers, they'll likely share for you in order to get a B.O.G.O. deal on their next order


Turn one time buyers into repeat buyers
After you dive into marketing your business, you will soon realize that turning your buyers into repeat buyers is what you'll need to focus on as well.  Generating massive amounts of traffic to your store is going to cost a decent amount of money and also takes a good amount of time.  But if you're pleasing your buyers and getting them to come back for a second, third or tenth order, you're making it much easier on yourself

If you can keep a good conversation going with the buyers, they will likely come back for more.  This could be done in a few ways, which I'll list below

1. Offer exclusive discount for repeat buyers
2. Reward high ticket buyers with discounts or gift cards.  If someone is purchasing $100 worth of goods from you, give them a $10 or $20 gift card in return.
3. Encourage users to sign up for your newsletters.  You can send these out once a week, once every two weeks or just once a month in order to bring them back in for a possible purchase.
4. Write some unique blog posts every week and have discounts linked within it. 
5. Offer birthday discounts for people with upcoming birthdays.  This is a good thing to do, but be sure to get the discount in front of them at least a week prior to the big day.  If you send it on their birthday, they will likely be busy and miss your email or notification until it's too late.
6. Have a referral program set up for existing buyers as well as new incoming buyers.  The existing buyer will get credit for the referral and the referral will get a discount for being referred.  You're pleasing every party with this set up
7. Share your goods on social media and run some ads in order to pull in more people who might not have found you in the first place.  Promote online only discounts through you social media profiles.
8. Distribute some coupon codes for a percentage off, a specific dollar amount off or free shipping on the buyers next order.

Gain as many positive reviews and ratings as you can
With everything moving to online sales, it's more difficult to figure out who the good and bad sellers are unless there is a rating system.  Someone with just 1 positive rating will sell exponentially more than someone with no reviews.  This is because the person with 1 good review has already been tried, tested and passed the standards of the first buyer who took a chance on you.

After you get your first few positive reviews you will notice that it's easier to make a sale.  People coming to your product pages will see that your company has already been reviewed and this means they don't have to do any due diligence before ordering, which is great for you!  Of course you'll still have to produce great products and have amazing customer support, but that just comes with running a business.  If you have amazing products and your customer support is rude, you will get negative reviews and ratings.  It won't matter if you're giving away diamonds for $10 a piece, if your customer service is extremely negative, you will get negative reviews.

When someone buys from you and eventually receives their item(s), they don't have to leave a review.  This is where you step in and encourage a review, because you deserve one, but you can't come off as cocky or arrogant lol.  Simply ask them for an honest review, not a positive one.  If you ask for a positive one it will come off as if you know you're the best and you deserve 10 star reviews, not just 5 start reviews.  Asking them for an honest review shows that you're wanting to hear their honest opinion of your products and services, which most people will welcome and then review your product.

Great reviews can make your business shoot up in sales, but poor ones can cripple you where you stand.  Getting a negative review can be so devastating that it will push your sales down to 50% of what they currently were.  It doesn't matter if you've had 100 positive reviews and then get one negative one, you will notice a drop in sales because of it.  You will see an increase in sales when that negative review begins to get drown out by positive ones, but that could take time.  For this reason, it's good to have a steady stream of repeat buyers coming in so you can drown out any negativity from someone who doesn't know what they're talking about.


Etsy has their own SEO tools and you should be using them
Just like a listing here at SEOclerks, you can optimize your listing for better search results.  If you have not optimized your listing for the specific keyword you are providing a service for, you can be sure that you won't show up as much for basic searches.  On Etsy it's pretty much the same, and you need to be optimizing for your product or service.

Add product specific tags that will help you get found when someone searches for something similar to what you're selling.  This will increase your product views and essentially increase your sales.

Now Etsy doesn't fully disclose what their algorithm ranks on, but just like other search engines, we can assume a few things that will always work. 

1. Titles:  Getting a keyword, or two, in the titles of your products will help increase your rankings and product views usually.
2. Descriptions: Having an optimized product description and not just a simple line of text, will help you get seen more often and help increase your sales.
3. Sales:  Sometimes with marketplaces like this, you will get seen more depending on how many sales you have, but not always because of reviews (which are next).
4. Positive Reviews: Having a good amount of positive reviews will usually tell the algorithm that the majority of people love your product so much that they wanted to rate you highly.  If everyone loves you, it's a no brainer for the algorithm to show your products, right?

Get on your social media profiles
There are literally billions of people on social media every day.  If you're not active on social media in order to pull those people to your etsy shop, you're just leaving money on the table!  By getting active on social media you're potential for sales increases exponentially.  There are plenty of people who don't always think to go to etsy when they want to make a purchase.  Most people just do a basic search on Google and find what they're looking for, but the ones who prefer social media will be on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, etc.

There have been million dollar companies built solely through social media marketing, and that's why you need to be active.  You can post to your social media profiles that were made specifically for your etsy shop and then run some small ads to bring people in.  I would recommend building traffic to your social media profiles and not getting clicks right to your shop though.  This is because you can freely market to anyone who clicks like on your page instead of hoping they turn into a sale by going to your shop.  They won't have to leave the social media platform and can read everything on your page, and make a purchasing decision later on.  You might see them come back 10 weeks later because they stumbled upon your newest post, but that's a free click now and you are getting a sale



In Conclusion:
It's not easy to be an etsy shop owner and do all your own marketing, but it can be done.  You can automate your social media posts with hootsuite and focus on customer service in order to increase your sales.  After that you will need to offer the best customer service and offer some referral bonuses or discounts in order to keep the returning buyers coming back time and time again


Remember to follow me!
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Thanks!

Razzy


P.S. I now have my own writing service which you all can benefit from!
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