A little while back, Etsy introduced a pretty cool new feature to help you market your handmade shop and handmade products: You can now send a special offer in the form of a coupon code, to shoppers who’ve added your items to their carts or have favorited your items.
So, is this thing worth it? Should you try it? How much should you spend on it?
Let’s get into it.
This is actually a very common marketing strategy in e-commerce usually called “Cart Recovery Campaign” or “Cart Recovery Strategy”.
The idea is to fight “cart abandonment” which is another fancy word to say: convince people who are interested in your products and have added them to their cart, but didn’t finish the checkout process.
These people are obviously VERY interested because they came close to actually purchasing your products, so it makes sense to send them a message to say “Hey, you’ve left XYZ in your cart, finish checking out today and get $10 OFF”.
I need to warn you: some people find the strategy spammy, like it’s an intrusion in their email and feels a bit off. I can understand that, but anyone using Etsy can actually change their preferences settings to NOT receive those.
In my opinion, if you sign up for promotions, expect to receive… promotions.
If you’re wondering where that option is for you as a buyer, it’s under Account Setting => Emails => Your Subscriptions:
This is obviously a personal decision if you find it spammy and don’t want to use it in the end, but know that you are potentially walking away from sales and that a LOT of people and delighted to receive those offers (me for example!)
This is too new to have any Etsy stats to give you on the subject but according to the Baymard Institute, the average documented online shopping cart abandonment rate is 69.23%. That’s a lot of money left on the table and cart recovery campaigns have been proven to boost conversion rate and sales significantly.
SO YES I am excited about this new Etsy feature and I am glad they made this available to Etsy shoppers.
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Etsy gives you 2 options, you can send an email to:
Shoppers who have added any of your listings to their cart, but navigate away without purchasing, will get an email offering them a coupon for that item after 24 hours.
Shoppers who’ve added one your items to their favorites will get an email offering them a coupon for that item after 48 hours.
Each automatic email send of a special offer is $0.10 USD
So how does it looks like within Etsy and how can you set up such campaigns? You can see that in the video above (starting at 5:14 mark).
With all of the basics covered, the remaining question is: should you try it?
Personally, think it’s worth giving it a try as it has been proven to work really well across a wide range of niches and industries in the e-commerce world. It’s a great way to target a WARM audience. With that said, don’t expect it to be a miracle or a cure for low sales. You still have to do the work of making people either add your products to their cart OR favorite them.
You already know it costs 0.10USD for each automatic email sent. I am sure you’re wondering how much you should spend on this and although the answer will be different for each and any of you depending on the stage of growth you’re in and your pricing strategy, here are a couple of tips:
Bottom line is: you will have to experiment for yourself to see how effective those campaigns are for you. Run your numbers, set a budget and re-assess once it ends. Before making any conclusion you should really wait until you get to AT LEAST 100 email sent (the more, the better), so don’t cancel a campaign after 5 emails sent that didn’t turn into sales. If you can afford to put $50 (500 emails sent) on it and see after that – that’s probably best.
Make sure to check on your results regularly and compare and keep an eye on both types of campaigns as favorited and the CART will most likely have very different results – favorites campaign could get more email sent but less conversion for example. You want to pause/stop the one that’s not working so well and focus on the one that’s working better if the difference is important.
I’d love to hear from you what do you think about this new feature, will you be using it? Are you already using it? What results?
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