If you are building a handmade business, email marketing is a HUGE opportunity that you don’t want to miss out on.
Why??
Because email marketing is a crucial part of any good marketing strategy that can not only bring you more sales and help you grow your business — but, most importantly, much of that can happen automatically!
But of course, you will want to make sure that you set up your email marketing system in the best possible way, and that is why I wrote today’s article.
We’re going to go into detail about how an email system works and what you need to do to make sure your email system is efficient and gets results.
So, ready? Let’s dive in!
We’re going to start with the basics:
Email marketing is a way of communicating a message, promotional offer, or information to your subscribers and customers via email.
You can use email to communicate all sorts of things to your customers:
. . . anything and everything!
In addition to communicating information to your customers and potential customers,
—and this is a HUGE benefit that email marketing provides, are you ready??—
Email marketing helps you build relationships with your customers and potential customers. . .
which means it helps you turn potential customers into actual customers, and turn first time customers into repeat customers!
So I’m really not kidding when I say that email marketing is a crucial part of your marketing strategy, it’s a game changer.
One question I hear a lot when I’m talking about email marketing is
Do I really need an email list?
I’m already on Instagram/Pinterest/Facebook.
My answer is absolutely YES you definitely still need an email list!
Why? There are quite a few advantages:
First of all, literally anyone surfing the internet these days has an email address. There are actually three times more email accounts than Facebook and Twitter accounts combined—that’s a lot of email addresses!
When you put a message out on social media, you don’t know how many of your followers will even see it— it depends on the social media algorithm, if your customers are on social media at the time your post would show in their feed . . . you just can’t be sure they will see your post.
Emails all go to the person’s inbox, and will sit there until that person has time to go through their emails.
Another advantage of email marketing over social media is that it’s highly targeted, meaning that when you send an email to your email list, you are engaging with people that are already interested in your brand and your products. . .
. . . and already interested in your products = more likely to purchase!
Remember that if you are in their inbox, it’s because they invited you in. Maybe they’re subscribed on your blog, maybe they subscribed on your shop, or maybe they downloaded a free ebook that you were giving away.
It doesn’t matter how but they signed up for your email list for your newsletter; they typed in their email address and clicked the button that meant “Yes, please do send me emails!”
This free email planner will help turn your email subscribers into customers so you can get more sales for your handmade shop!
Social media studies show that emails have a higher conversion rate, meaning that people reading and clicking on your emails are more likely to buy your products vs. people seeing your posts on social media.
This is very important, because if for some reason, something happens with your social media account –
maybe it gets shut down,
maybe the algorithm is changing on the platform you’re the most present on and suddenly you can’t reach as many people that you used to, or
maybe your Etsy shop gets shut down for some reason –
Suddenly you will have lost access to your customer list, and that would be devastating. You would have to start from scratch again, and your sales could really take a hit.
Sadly I have seen this happen to makers many times before.
When you use an email list, you own this list. No one can restrict your access to it
There is no algorithm with email marketing either. You can easily reach out to the people on your email list and communicate with them without wondering if they will even see it in their feed.
All right, so that is in a nutshell why it’s so important to use email communications and not just rely on social media.
But there are more reasons to use email marketing, let’s talk more about why email marketing is so powerful and effective.
Email marketing is also very inexpensive. At first you can set up a free account with an email marketing provider. As your email list grows bigger you will have to start paying a monthly fee for the email provider services, but trust me the results you get from those email marketing campaigns you’re going to send are well worth it.
In fact, a report on Litmus.com states that for every $1 spent on email marketing the average return is $44. Imagine if I told you I had one thing you could do that would generate $44 in sales for every $1 you spend – you would jump on it, right?!
Let’s talk a bit about why it’s so cost effective.
Email marketing not only does a great job driving traffic to your shop, but also turns that traffic into sales.
The first way email does this is by building customer relationships.
Sales aren’t just about getting traffic to your website, you actually have to build relationships with your customers and your visitors before they turn into customers.
As a rule, people need to see your products and be in contact with your brand at least seven times before they are ready to purchase from you.
And email is the perfect way to do that!
It allows you to turn someone who just discovered your shop into a subscriber, and then to a customer, and from a customer to a repeat buyer, and finally into a raving fan that LOVES your products!
What this means is that traffic alone isn’t going to work in marketing. You are going to use email marketing to convert traffic into customers.
Another great advantage of email is that it’s really easy to track results, learn what’s working, and change what’s not working.
Email marketing providers have great analytics tools that help you quickly understand what worked and didn’t work each time you send out an email.
You can use the analytics to find out if one subject line works better than another, or if a coupon code that you sent out or a special sale that you had worked very well.
There are a few basic things you need to have for email marketing:
First off, you are going to need an email address for your business. You want one that has your domain name within it, like yourname@yourshop.com – instead of a gmail type address (deb@gmail.com).
This is because some email service providers (ESPs) require that you have a domain email address instead of a gmail type one, including MailerLite, the ESP that I recommend. And actually, let’s talk about that.
Next you need to choose an email service provider (ESP), which is a program that offers email marketing services.
Why do you need one? In a nutshell, if you want to collect email addresses automatically, send bulk emails that don’t end up in a spam folder, and stay compliant with email rules and regulations, you will need to use an ESP.
An ESP allows you to:
There are many, many ESPs out there, and it can get really overwhelming if you start googling it and trying to compare all the different features.
Most of the time you will find yourself getting completely overwhelmed and not knowing which one you should be using.
I go into the pros and cons of different programs in much more detail in my Tizzit HQ Email course, but I will tell you that after comparing the different programs and the features they offer (both paid and unpaid versions), the one I recommend 90% of the time is MailerLite.
It has key features in the unpaid versions that other providers (including Mailchimp) now only offer in their paid versions, such as automation and scheduling a newsletter. It’s also super easy and intuitive to use, making sending emails actually kinda fun!
Now that you have your business email and email service provider all set up, you need to have an understanding of how your email marketing systems will work.
Here is a graphic showing the email marketing process; I want to briefly talk to you about each step.
The first step in your email marketing system is a lead magnet, also sometimes called an opt-in offer.
The lead magnet is something that you offer visitors on your shop or your website in exchange for their email address.
You want to choose a lead magnet that is so attractive that everyone wants it and signs up on your list (submits their email) in order to get it!
It could be a discount, something they can get for free . . .there are many ways you can get people to sign up for your email list. If you need ideas, check out these 6 Ideas to Get People to Sign Up for Your Handmade Shop’s Email list when you finish this article!
When a shop or website visitor clicks to receive the lead magnet, it will take them to a signup form or landing page.
The signup form or landing page is essentially how people are going to sign up for your email list.
If you don’t have your own website and you are working on a platform like Etsy, your ESP will let you create a landing page that is hosted on their account. You will have a URL that you can share that will take people to that page.
If you have your own website you can still of course use the ESP landing page, or you can make forms that you can embed into your own website pages, like popup forms or slides.
This page or form will help people sign up for your lead magnet and submit their email information.
Once the person submits their name and email, they are redirected to a thank you page.
At face value, the thank you page simply displays a thank you message, and your new customer’s data is stored in the ESP.
You can actually do a bit more than that on that page if you are a smart marketer; I go into more detail about it in our Tizzit HQ Email Marketing Mastery course, I’ll put the link below for you.
OK – so far so good. You’re doing great – now you have collected emails and are ready to use them to build customer relationships and generate sales with:
The first tool you will use is called a broadcast, which is another name for a newsletter.
These are emails that you schedule in advance but you set them up manually because each one will be different.
You send them at consistent intervals — for example weekly or monthly — there is no “right” time interval, what is important is the consistency.
So you basically create a strategic email plan in which you decide how often you want to send content and what the topics will be. Here again if you need help with this make sure to check the HQ course below, where I show you how to come up with 3-month worth of weekly emails.
The second email marketing tool is called an automation. Automations consist of emails that you set up once and then can forget about; they will run automatically and need no effort on your part unless at some point you want to change them.
You are going to want a welcome/sales sequence to get started – this sequence is going to introduce you, your products, and your brand.
How?
You create a series of emails that start getting sent the moment someone subscribes to your email list.
So for example if I subscribe on Wednesday, your automations could start for me on Wednesday and then send me new emails every 2 days up till day 10. The emails will introduce your business, your products, and your shop to me.
Once you set up your broadcast plan and automations, that covers the basics of what you need when you’re getting started.
Down the track you can do some more fancy things like cart recovery (if you sell on your own website), segmentation, and more; but my tip is to start simple.
Once you have your broadcast plan and automations set up you are well on your way to becoming an email marketing Wizard!
You are now engaging with people who showed interest in your brand, helping them to learn about your products, and building relationships (this is huge!) with your customers and potential customers.
My absolute best recommendation though, as we dive into things in much more detail, including all the strategy and all the tutorials to get you all set up is to check out the Email Marketing Mastery course available over at Tizzit.co.
GET THE EMAIL MARKETING for makers CoURSE
LEARN HOW TO USE EMAIL MARKETING TO INCREASE YOUR SHOP’S SALES AND REVENUE:
If you think you’d benefit from further help, support, and guidance as you master your shop’s email marketing strategy; Email Marketing Mastery For Your Handmade Shop is the course for you.
Thanks for reading and until next time . . . au revoir!
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