Etsy is a great place to sell. It’s easy and convenient and provides creators and entrepreneurs with a huge advantage in terms of traffic and visibility for their products.
That said, setting up an Etsy shop is only the first step in the process of building a profitable online business. Etsy provides a place to sell your products but your shop will be successful only if you know how to publicize your Etsy shop to attract the customers who are in the market for products like yours.
With that in mind, I want to share some of my proven tips to help you increase your profits on Etsy.
Promote Your Best Sellers
Some Etsy shops get listed on the front page based on the user’s interests and past purchases. That’s not something you can control. What you can control is which products you choose to promote.
A good first step is to promote your best sellers. These are proven products that you know people like. You can review your sales statistics and put some money into advertising the products that perform well to a new audience.
Promote Your New Products
If you’re just starting out on Etsy or you want to give your new products a boost, another suggestion is to promote your new products. New product promotion can help you launch a new item.
Any time you promote a product, make sure that you have a professional-looking image and an eye-catching headline to maximize your ad’s impact.
Build a Mailing List
Did you know that Etsy allows sellers to put a link to an email list in product descriptions? Email marketing has one of the highest ROIs among all types of digital marketing and it makes sense to connect your email list and your Etsy shop.
In your product description, put a link to the opt-in form for your list. Make sure to specify that there are perks to opting in. On the opt-in page, you should list the benefits. I suggest letting people know that they’ll get new product notifications, coupons, and special promotions. That way, they’ll be incentivized to sign up and every time you send them an email, there’s the potential that they’ll buy something.
Offer Free Shipping
This is such an easy trick and I’m surprised that more Etsy sellers don’t do it. If you’re selling a physical product that requires shipping, the best way to increase the perceived value of the product is to include shipping in the price.
It might seem silly, but people react differently to a $7 product that has a $3 shipping fee added to it at checkout than they do to the same product priced at $10 with free shipping. It’s due to something called the anchoring effect which is a mental glitch that causes people to latch on to the first price they see for a product.
Offer Express Shipping
It can be frustrating to order something from Etsy and end up waiting weeks for the product to arrive. Like it or not, Etsy shoppers prefer to receive their orders quickly.
For that reason, offering express shipping as the default on your orders can help increase your shop’s visibility (Etsy factors shipping cost and speed into its algorithm) and help customers choose your products over others that are available. The Post Office offers 2-3 day shipping to anywhere in the US and it’s easy to build the cost into your product price.
Personalize Your Products
In these days of digital and print on demand products, personalization is easier than ever. One way to make your products stand out in a crowded marketplace is to offer personalization.
Product personalization doesn’t need to take up much of your time. The idea is to create products where you have an existing design where you ask customers to provide information (such as a name) to personalize it. The entire process takes only slightly longer than a non-personalized item and adds a lot of perceived value to a product.
Get Keyword Ideas from Pinterest
The audience demographics for Etsy and Pinterest are similar and that makes Pinterest a great place to market your Etsy products. I’ve written about that before. What you may not know is that you can use Pinterest hashtags and search terms as keywords in your Etsy shop.
For example, if I search for ‘wedding planner’ on Pinterest, the suggestions that appear include:
- Wedding planner checklist
- Wedding planner binder
- Wedding planner book
- Wedding planner aesthetic
- Wedding planner printables
There’s no guarantee that every suggestion that appears will work for your shop, but the suggestions that appear indicate what search terms are most popular with Pinterest users — and that can help you attract more traffic to your Etsy shop.
Cross Sell Products
You may have noticed that when you shop on Amazon and other sites, you’ll see a list of product suggestions. While Etsy doesn’t do that automatically, you can cross-sell your own products by getting creative with your product descriptions.
If you sell printable wedding invitations, for example, you could cross promote your wedding planner or save the date cards. The most effective cross-promotions happen when you share a link to another product that is genuinely useful to the shopper who’s buying the first item.
Have a Hassle-Free Return Policy
We have all experienced the headache of buying a product online and needing to return or exchange it. If the process isn’t easy, you might think twice before ordering that same product — or from the same buyer — again.
For that reason, your Etsy shop should have an easy-to-understand and hassle-free return policy. In your shop, you should list the policy. Make sure to specify any time parameters (exchanges for 30 days after delivery, for example) and other limitations — and then stick to it. Like free shipping and express shipping, this is something that Etsy’s algorithm takes into account.
It’s Time to Grow Your Etsy Shop
Etsy is my favorite place to sell printables and POD products for a reason. The suggestions here will help you to get more traffic to your Etsy shop and sell more products, so you can increase your profits.
Need help getting started on Etsy? Click here to check out Easy Etsy Profits, a guide that will help you set up your Etsy shop and create products that people will love
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