With millions of sellers already on Etsy, it’s evident that the competition is tough. However, that doesn’t mean that creating a successful Etsy shop is impossible. It takes a little bit of dedication and taking the right moves, and you’ll get there.
Consider the following 11 steps essential for selling on Etsy successfully. Read on to discover them.
1. Begin Your Journey With Thorough Research
Having the product prepared is a great start, but before you log in to Etsy and start selling it, you should do market research first. While it does sound a bit complicated, it isn’t.
When you’re equipped with the right set of tools, conducting market research is easy. That’s the part where Alura Extension can be helpful.
After installing it, all you have to do is do a regular Etsy search and use the extension afterward. You’ll get a range of valuable data that you can use. Some of it includes:
- Potential sales figures
- Potential revenue
- Tags
- Keywords
- Potential ranking
After you get all the data, you can head over to individual listings and check out the listing description, store layout, and anything else that can help you rank better.
The whole research process aims to see what the competitors are offering and how they’re doing it. That way, you can see what’s missing and provide more to the potential buyer.
2. Establish a Brand From the Start
Creating a brand from the start is essential for the future. While it won’t mean too much initially, it’ll play a crucial role as your business grows. While many people think that creating a brand is a massive investment, we’re here to tell you that it’s not.
All you have to do is think of your slogan, create a logo, and the other imagery that you’ll use on your social media accounts. You can get all that on a freelancing platform for $100-$200.
Creating a brand will allow you to more easily:
- Build a social media following
- Build an email list
- Establish a community
- Build trust
Spend a little bit of time on creating your business name, purpose, and logo. It’ll help you create a unique Etsy shop to which people will return.
3. Optimize, Optimize, Optimize
When it comes to optimization, you need to think in two different terms: on-site optimization and off-site optimization.
Our recommendation is to be more focused on on-site optimization, as you’ll receive most of your traffic from Etsy search. To successfully do this, you’ll need to optimize your:
- Listing Tags - include all the tags that are relevant to the product you’re selling. Use up all of them.
- Listing Images - upload as many photos as the platform allows. Remember to take clear images that the buyers will enjoy. Here’s how you can do that.
- Listing Title - write a compelling listing title that indicates what you’re selling.Now that’s out of the way. It’s time to start thinking about steps you can take to optimize better outside of Etsy. That’s where product description optimization comes in handy. Use the description to present your item genuinely and notify the buyer about its features.
But also, use it to add relevant keywords, as search engines can display Etsy listings as search results.
Remember, you’re not only optimizing for search engines but your customers. That’s where the store policy can come in handy, as it’s one of the places where you can say more about your products and services.
That way, all the customers will know all the essentials of the services you provide.
Use the Alura Listing Helper to analyze your listings and check whether they are correctly optimized.
4. Utilize All the Marketing Tools Etsy Offers
Whenever you get the chance to advertise your products, you should do it. The Etsy marketplace landscape is very competitive, and advertising has become a regular part of the whole journey.
You should rely on both the Etsy Ads and Etsy Off-site ads. Etsy Ads is an affordable way of advertising on the platform.
Etsy will feature your listings in search results when you start your PPC campaign, with a disclaimer that it’s an ad. That way, you get much more impressions on the listings you’re advertising, which might potentially lead to more sales.
When it comes to Etsy Off-site ads, costs add up a bit more, but it’s no wonder, as Etsy advertises your listings on a broad range of platforms. Participation in this program is optional for stores with under $10,000 in revenue.
However, if your store goes over $10,000 in revenue, it’ll automatically become part of the Etsy Off-site ads program. Therefore, make sure that you include the fees you’ll pay if you make a sale through the program.
Stores with revenue lower than $10,000 will pay 15% per sale. At the same time, those exceeding $10,000 in income will pay 12%.
We believe that you should leverage both of these advertising strategies to grow your Etsy store. Consider the costs, pick the best performing listings and promote them
5. Build High-Quality Products
No matter what kind of marketing efforts you deploy, the quality of your product is the only thing that matters. Whatever you are selling, put in that extra effort to ensure that the materials you use are of the highest quality.
Otherwise, prepare for plenty of returns and bad reviews. That’s no way to grow a business. Always keep your product quality in mind first. Don’t forget about the power of word of mouth. It’s still a crucial advertising strategy.
However, it only works if your products and services are flawless.
6. Make Your Customer Support Impeccable
Besides creating a great product, you should always go above and beyond to ensure that the service you’re providing to your customer is outstanding. When it comes to running an Etsy store, that primarily refers to any potential delivery issues you might experience.
If that happens, the key is to act swiftly, remain polite and find a solution to the problem in the best way possible.
The customer needs to feel that you care about any challenges they are facing. That’ll alleviate the stress from a potentially tense situation. The professional approach always pays off, which can result in a positive review for your Etsy shop.
7. Leverage the Power of Social Media
From the moment you open your store, start working on building your social media on multiple fronts. The platforms you’ll want to tap into include:
- Pinterest - Because this platform is visual, you’ll find it to be the perfect way to promote your products. Just make sure that you regularly pin photos of your products. The best part, your activity on it will generate traffic to your Etsy shop.
- Instagram - Instagram’s the perfect place for sharing outstanding photos with your community. Over time, you can steadily build up the number of your followers. It’s one of the best places to share your coupon codes and notify followers of other types of promotions.
- Facebook - Facebook is another place where you can build followers around your brand. However, given how saturated the platform is, you’ll have to promote your shop’s page to get followers.
- TikTok - Being the fastest growing social media network, TikTok needs to be on your list of social media where you’re establishing a presence. Share videos of how you’re making your products and various fun facts about them. You can quickly garner some following and forward the traffic to your Etsy shop.
Use each of these platforms differently to maximize your conversion rates. It all comes down to figuring out what type of content works best for creating an effective advertising strategy.
8. Work With Influencers
Picking the influencer approach will require some initial investment. Therefore, set aside some budget for advertising and prepare to partner up various creators across multiple platforms.
A viable approach is to work with smaller influencers who are still on their growth path. Working with them brings a lot of value, as they have managed to build up a great relationship with their audience.
When you add some strategies to improve conversion rates, you can rest assured that your collaboration with influencers will be effective.
Try it out a couple of times and check the results. If it’s profitable, repeat the whole process.
9. Ask for Reviews
Receiving positive reviews is one of the best ways to instill trust from the moment someone lands on your shop’s page. Therefore, it’s good to create a strategy to ask for a review without being too pushy.
You can try to do it on several occasions when you’re communicating with your customers.
- Confirmation page and email - Use the message on the confirmation page and the automated email to remind your customers to let you know what they think about the product once it arrives.
- Insert cards - Insert cards are impactful gestures that personally thank your buyers for choosing you and one more opportunity to ask for their feedback.
- Follow-up message - Send a follow-up message to your customers once they receive the order. It’s great to ask for a review at that time, as they’ve just received the product.
- Etsy Follow-up - This is the platform’s automated message. Given that this sort of notification can be disabled, it’s simply better to use your follow-up. If you still prefer this option, you can leave a call to action requesting the buyer to leave a review.
Always remember to be polite and don’t spam your customers. Not only will they not leave a review, but they also won’t come back to buy from you in the future.
If you want to simplify the whole follow-up process, take a look at the Alura tool. We know the importance of a good follow-up message. You can use our tool to deliver personal messages that show how much you care.
Take a look at a couple of message examples we’ve prepared for you.
10. Stay Up to Date with Platform Changes
Etsy is actively working on improving its platform. That’s why it’s essential to follow the Etsy News Blog. That way, you can stay up to date with the latest platform changes. If there’s something big coming up, that’s the place to hear about it.
Furthermore, you can see various platform trends and shift towards making products that follow those trends.
Another way of staying up to date is by joining the Etsy Community forum. Talk with other sellers, ask questions, learn new things, and stay updated with the platform’s trends firsthand. Learning from other seller’s stories is a great way to keep on the right track.
Another similar place is the Etsy subreddit. It’s another place where you can connect with both buyers and sellers.
11. Revisit Your Math Every Quarter
When you’re running your store over a more extended period, collecting data needs to be one of your top priorities. Doing that’s the only way to learn something new and prepare for market trends.
If you’re planning to run a single store, you can use Etsy Analytics. However, if you want to grow more and follow multiple Etsy shops, it’s better to connect Google Analytics to your Etsy store.
What will you learn? Well, as two or more years go by, you can notice a pattern in trends for certain seasons. The result? You can prepare better for every season.
On the other hand, you can try out different optimization approaches to see which listings perform better.
Do your math every quarter. It’ll help you stay in the right lane and ensure steady growth over time.
Concluding Thoughts
While you can run your Etsy store manually, consider adding as many Etsy tools to your arsenal as possible. Alura is one that you have to consider. We’ve built a great Etsy tool that’ll help you outperform your competitors with our features.
If you’re eager to learn more, feel free to reach out to us! We’ll help you turn your Etsy shop into a success.
