Anyone who knows me knows that I am a HUGE advocate for using email marketing to grow and scale your handmade business.
But you may be wondering
Why is email marketing so important?
Can’t I just rely on Etsy’s marketing and Etsy SEO to succeed?
So today I’m going to talk about WHY email marketing is so important — and by so important I mean it is a great reason to build your own website in addition to Etsy, plus I want to show you what you’re not able to do on Etsy but could do if you had your own website.
So, ready? Let’s dive in.
Before we start talking about what you can do with email marketing, I want to quickly talk about why email marketing matters so much in the first place.
This graphic shows the pathway to making money in your handmade business.
What’s often forgotten – or underestimated – is how many people are going to land in your shop or your product listing and not actually turn into customers the first time around.
The first time they visit your shop, most visitors just get to know you.
They might be browsing or looking for ideas, they might want to go and compare other products and other brands, they may be busy or they don’t have their credit card handy — there are a million reasons why it’s actually very unlikely that someone will land on your product page and purchase from you the first time they land there.
And it’s to be expected that it wouldn’t happen this way. You need to build trust, you need to get people to come back many times to your shop and to your listing so that they eventually buy, because over time they get to know you and you build that trust factor with them.
Then, once they are customers, you want to turn them into return customers to boost their lifetime value to your shop.
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And because it’s much harder to turn a new visitor into a customer vs. turning an existing customer into a repeat customer, you absolutely do not want to miss out on this repeat customer opportunity!
Email marketing will help you on all fronts.
If a person lands on your website or your product listing, we’ve already discussed that the majority of these people are not going to turn into customers that first time.
And what email marketing does here is help to capture a portion of those people so that even though they haven’t made a purchase you can start marketing and promoting and building that trust factor — so that they go back to the store eventually to purchase.
On Etsy, most of those first time visitors will leave your shop without purchasing and you can’t control if they come back and visit again, which is a BIG missed opportunity.
Email marketing is all about putting the right offer in front of the right person at the right time (when they’re ready to buy). You can keep putting your products in front of people who’ve shown interest until they buy.
This is so much more effective than hoping that all of your traffic will turn into customers and just letting them go back to searching the Internet, which is exactly what happens if you don’t get them added to your email list.
Once they are customers, Email marketing is the absolute BEST way to turn them into repeat customers.
For example, email allows you to keep in contact by sending them special offers to try a product they have never purchased before.
You can also send reminder messages, like a “need a refill?” message at just the right time.
Your email messages help each customer feel like they are a special customer – a VIP, and none of this relationship building can happen on Etsy.
If you hear anyone say that email marketing doesn’t work or that you don’t need it, that’s a lot of BS. You all know that I do not like using FOMO messages where I tell you guys “if you don’t do this, your business will collapse!”
But the one exception to that rule has always been email marketing for me, because it is truly the foundation of any marketing system. In general, if you don’t have email marketing in your ecommerce business, you’re missing an enormous building block.
Email marketing should contribute 30% of your revenue… so it’s definitely not something that you should ignore.
Okay, now that we know why you absolutely need to be doing email marketing, and how it makes each of the steps we have talked about much easier, let’s look at what you can actually accomplish on Etsy versus outside of Etsy.
The first thing I want to look at is lead generation.
So on Etsy there are ways to try and get someone to sign up for your email list, but it’s really cumbersome and inefficient, and you’re essentially hacking to make it work.
Etsy does not let you grab email addresses – like there’s no way to have a form on your shop or on your listing where people can directly enter their email address and get added to your email list.
This is because Etsy doesn’t want you to get that data, it’s their data. That’s how they make money and that’s how they stay in control of the marketing that they send to Etsy buyers and how they bring them back to Etsy —but not necessarily to your store.
Now even though Etsy doesn’t really want you to do it, there are ways that you can collect emails (in a way that respects Etsy’s terms and conditions) … BUT the process is much more complex and to be very honest that results in a really low opt-in rate.
Here is what it looks like:
You can put text in your shop banner graphic, for example, showing a web address that will take them to a landing page outside of Etsy where you have a form for them to enter their email address.
You can also have a graphic in the Etsy listing pictures that says “to get 20% off, go to this URL, enter your email, and then I’ll send you a code.”
You can also put a link in your product description or your shop announcements, but it won’t be clickable.
Here’s the problem: NONE of these links are clickable. They’re all just images or text that can’t actually be clicked.
There’s no actual URL where people can just click and boom, they go to a page with the email signup form.
So people would need to remember the signup web address… open a new tab… type the entire URL… enter the email… wait to receive their discount code… and THEN go back to your store and use it.
And this process is really, really asking too much of people and so the opt in rate when you do this on Etsy is pretty low. It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it, you still should! BUT – it’s just not as efficient or anywhere near as successful as it can be if you’re on your own website.
So let’s look at that and what possibilities you would have on your website.
The first thing that you’re going to be able to do when you have your own website is control the email signup experience: so you can decide what type of form you want to show when, what it looks like, who it shows to, when it shows, and all of that.
You can choose from all sorts of forms to entice your website visitors to sign up on your website, let’s take a look at your options:
Popup
A popup will pop out like this one here and generally needs to be dismissed before the visitor can continue reading.
A flyaway is a little less obtrusive and stays over on the side so people can continue reading like you see in this example here:
An embed form is embedded on a specific page or section of your website, for example in your footer. This can be used in addition to a popup or flyaway and is a good option to have on your site for visitors who are looking for an email signup.
Finally there is a full page form that appears and fills the entire window. They are definitely more intrusive but they also have a very high conversion rate so are something to consider.
When you have your own website you can also make sure it’s showing these signup forms at the right time for the right person.
So you can decide that you don’t want to just show it straight away when someone arrives on your website because they haven’t even had time to get to know your products or your brand yet. Instead you can choose options like showing it after they’ve been on your site for 10 seconds, or showing a message saying “Don’t go yet! Here’s 10% off for you to use today!” when they show exit intent and move their cursor to close the tab.
Another great tool that you have when you collect email from your own website is called targeting by visitor.
For example, you can decide that you want to show a certain coupon to people who have never purchased from you before, and show a different one for people who are already customers of yours.
Perhaps you want to offer new customers a special incentive for their first purchase, or offer past customers a VIP discount for their next order.
If you’re wondering how the heck you can do that I’ll explain in a second, but it is totally possible to do this kind of fun stuff with your own website!
So all of these additional timing and targeting options mean that you’re going to have a much, much, MUCH higher conversion rate (as in from visitors to email subscribers) than if you’re then trying to build your email list and grow your email subscribers number on Etsy.
Now that we’ve looked at how lead generation differs between Etsy and your own website, let’s take a look at integration.
When you have a shop on Etsy, there is no communication between Etsy and your email service provider.
This means that if you use one of the hacks I mentioned above and some people sign up, you can send email newsletters and set up a welcome sequence (which is a series of emails someone receives when they first sign up to your list) to help those people to get to know your brand…
But if one of them turns into a customer and buys something from your Etsy store, it’s not going to be updated in your email subscriber service, right?
If someone is in your Etsy store and goes to the cart page, so ALMOST purchases but doesn’t quite (maybe they got distracted or couldn’t make up their mind or something similar), you can set up Etsy to send an email offering them a coupon for that item after 24 hours.
But here’s the problem:
This forces you to use a coupon/discount, plus the conversion from this email is very low — it’s a once off email that often gets ignored by customers… and it’s nothing like what can be done with an effective series of emails that you can create and send if this happens on your own website.
Let’s contrast this with what you can do with email when you have your own website. For this example let’s say you use Shopify for your website and Klaviyo for your email service provider.
Now you will have customer data syncing back and forth between the two, which means that you can really take things up to a new level and boost your sales in a way that you can’t when your email service is not connected to your store.
So what are those things — what is really possible? Let’s look at a few examples.
The first scenario is the abandoned checkout situation. Let’s say someone started to checkout from your store, they enter their email address, but then they get distracted and don’t finish and hit the “pay” button.
When they added that email address they were added to your email list automatically and you can send them an email a few hours later saying “You didn’t finish checking out!” or “You left something in your cart!” — you could even offer a discount after a few days to convert those lost sales into purchases.
Next let’s say you have an existing subscriber who has been on your site looking at a certain product.
Shopify will communicate this to Klaviyo and voila! Their email record is updated to show what they were looking at on your website, and now you can send that shopper automated emails about that product to encourage them to purchase even after they finish browsing.
So if I’ve signed up for your email list but I haven’t bought yet — I’ve been browsing, been coming back to your site and considering what am I going to buy — you will know exactly what I’ve been looking at.
So you can send me really targeted, really relevant campaigns to help me cross the finish line and make the purchase.
Finally let’s talk about post-purchase examples — so emails that you can use to maximize future sales.
This is when someone has actually just become a customer. It’s only the beginning because remember — we want to turn customers into repeat customers, so you want this experience when they’ve just purchased to be exciting for them.
Even though for you it feels like the end of the journey because you’ve made the sale, you want to remember that for them this is when the excitement is at its peak!
They’re excited about their purchase and waiting for it to come, they’re probably checking their mailbox every day to see if it has arrived, and you want to capitalize on that by making them feel good about the purchase and reassure them that they made a good choice.
There are all sorts of messages you can send them to do that: you can send one to confirm the order, another to tell them that it’s been shipped, you can send a really personal founder story to help them connect more with your business, send tips on how to use the product when it gets there so they get really excited.
Once they get the order you can wait a little bit and say “Hey how’s it going?” Or you can send them a special discount for being a customer, you can ask for reviews — there is so much that you can do that you simply can’t do on Etsy.
These are only a few examples of the different kinds of segmentation that you can do with your own email list.
Klaviyo takes in all the Shopify-collected customer data like AOV, conversions, purchase frequency, specific items bought, and more. This allows you to send campaigns that are very personalized, and you’re going to get much better results because of that.
So if someone has bought from you pretty frequently you could send them a big thank you and ask if they would post a review.
Or if you know one of your customers bought a little girl’s dress, when your summer sale comes around you’re not going to send them the same email that you would send if they’ve been buying boy products because you can assume they have a little girl in their life not a little boy.
So imagine how much more efficient it will be to send an email with the top three girl items on sale this week vs. sending a generic sale email with a bunch of different products for boys or girls? You know they are interested in girl stuff so you can send them exactly what they like to shop for.
This kind of segmentation just isn’t remotely possible on Etsy.
The final advantage I want to cover today is discounts.
So Etsy basically sucks for this. If you want to use a discount code as your lead magnet, so as your reason for people to sign up, you can…. But you’ll be sending the same one to every subscriber and they can use it again and again… not ideal.
But with Klaviyo and Shopify you can send what are called dynamic discounts, meaning that the discount is created automatically for each person and it’s valid one time — so there’s no risk of someone reusing the same discount or sharing it with other people, etc.
I could go on all day about all the ways an email marketing list helps grow your business, but to sum it up:
Email marketing is a MUST!
You simply can’t’ grow an email list efficiently with Etsy, and even when you create one using the methods I described above you can do approx 5% of what’s possible when you have your own website.
So believe me when I say it’s worth it. Absolutely.
If you want to learn more about what’s possible beyond Etsy I have a playlist that will give you all sorts of ideas of how to grow your handmade shop beyond Etsy, just click this link.
Thanks for reading, and until next time, aurevoir!
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