One of the biggest struggles that people have in the Etsy world (Whether they have an existing shop or just getting started), is understanding how to get more traffic and sales from the platform.
After all, who doesn't want to make a bit more from their existing effort?
I wanted to quickly break down the five things you should be doing if you want to start scaling both of those quickly.
These are the same five factors that we focused on to grow our sales by over 300% in just one year.
Paying Attention To Your Shop
The very first thing that we did and that you must do to continuously grow your Etsy shop is to pay attention to what's going on on a day-to-day basis.
We were making the same mistake that many Etsy sellers were making, posting listings and then not bothering to check in daily to do some of the boring daily maintenance stuff.
While you technically can get away with just creating a listing and only checking in when you make a sale, at the end of the day, what gets measured gets managed and what gets managed grows.
If you're not checking in at least once daily, it's easy to miss little things.
For example, it's easy to miss the window to respond to a message from a prospective buyer if you're not checking every day.
The message response rate has been one of the key indicators that Etsy has started to use for helping to track the quality of a seller, and not checking in for a day or two can cost you a nice boost in the form of a star seller badge.
Additionally, you can have listings expire or other notifications pop up in your dashboard, and if you don't catch it right away, it can cost you sales directly
I know it sounds a little silly, but setting aside even just 30 minutes every day to check into your Etsy shop can start to make a huge difference.
Doing Product Research The Right Way
The second thing we did was to ensure we were doing product research the right way.
My wife, like many Etsy Sellers, (And ecom sellers in general), often made the mistake of only doing very basic product research and focusing on creating the products she thought the market would want, rather than letting the market help influence the products she created.
As I said, this is the most common mistake and I see it every day on Etsy and in all of the Etsy-related Facebook groups and forums.
In my mind, it's almost always the number one reason that people aren't achieving the sales that they want to.
You can create the best designs in the world, but if no one is looking for them on the platform, they will never turn into sales.
Rather than guessing, you should be making your product creation decisions based on the sales data of similar products in your niche.
To do this, we use a tool called EverBee.
Not only does this make the process substantially faster, but it also helps us avoid wasting time on designs that won't sell.
The Simple 5-Step Process We Used To Generate $64,000 In 12 Months Working Part Time On Etsy.
Yes, Send Me The Roadmap!Consistently List Products
The third thing is having a consistent schedule for releasing new products in your store.
In addition to having more chances for people to find one or more of your products in Etsy's organic search, you also will start to gain a broader understanding of the market that you serve.
On top of that, it seems that every time you launch a product, Etsy gives you a little bump in the organic algorithm to help make sure you get rewarded for helping them to fill out their catalog.
Recently, we launched 30 products over the course of 30 days and the results blew even our wildest expectations out of the water.
You can check that whole article out here.
Keep in mind that when we talk about launching new products, this isn't necessarily the same thing as new designs.
Although you can create new designs and should, you can also take your more successful designs and apply them to different kinds of products.
For example, if you have a t-shirt that is selling well, try applying that design to a mug or pillow to see how the market reacts.
Not only will you still get a little bit of market data and the Etsy bump, but you'll save yourself the stress and headache of being focused on only creating brand-new designs.
Use Etsy To Do Better On Etsy
The fourth step in this process was making sure to use the tools Etsy gives us to do better on Etsy.
For example, Etsy has started giving us more and more data inside of the marketing dashboard to tell us how people are coming to our listings, including the exact search term that they used and information like when they land on listing x they buy listing y.
This type of information isn't usually freely given by platforms like Etsy or Amazon and should be considered solid gold.
Along those same lines, many sellers choose not to take advantage of The ads platform built directly into Etsy.
Too many sellers see spending $3 or $4 to gain a sale that they may only normally make $3 or $4 on as a waste of time.
After all, if you're not making any money when you sell a product, it's a waste of time right?
Wrong.
Even if your ads on Etsy are only break-even, many sellers forget about the potential boost that comes from making any sale on the platform.
Having all the keywords in the world on your listing is great, but at the end of the day, what Etsy cares about is traffic and sales.
If your Etsy listing doesn't have any sales or traffic coming to it, you're never going to shoot to the top of the Etsy rankings.
The opposite is also true, even if you're breaking even or possibly losing a little bit on your first few sales from Etsy ads, it starts what we refer to as the flywheel effect.
More sales and more traffic leads to more sales and more traffic.
Etsy wants to be sure that if they send a visitor to your listing, they will turn into a customer.
The more sales you have, the more chances you have to prove to Etsy that if they send traffic to you, you will turn that person into a customer, and the higher rankings you will start to see inside Etsy's organic search.
Now, I'm not saying go spend thousands of dollars a day, this process can be kickstarted with as little as between $5 and $10 per day spent on Etsy ads.
Drive Your Own Traffic
The 5th and final thing to focus on is mastering the ability to drive your own traffic to Etsy.
When most people talk about driving external traffic to Etsy, they think about things like running Facebook ads or pinning pins on Pinterest.
Although there's nothing inherently wrong with these strategies And they can be part of your overall mix, people seem to forget about the highest-converting marketing channel.
Email marketing.
We've had a ton of success with it using a very simple approach to building a highly converting list.
While I can't dive into the entire process in this article, you'd be here for the next hour and a half, I can give you a few basic steps.
- Use the giveaway method to create your email list
- Email that lists at least once per week
- Sometimes you will only be sending them content that they might be interested in
- Sometimes you may be sending them directly to your Etsy store to buy your products
Like many things, people tend to massively overcomplicate this process, so if you'd like to learn the exact strategy that we use, we wrote a complete article on it here
A Quick Recap
I know that this may sound like a lot to do to grow, but I promise when you think about it in terms of small things you can do it on a day-to-day basis. It becomes much easier.
To quickly recap the five parts of this process, they are:
- Pay attention to your shop daily
- Do proper product research
- Use Etsy's data to do better on Etsy
- Consistently list products
- Master driving your traffic
If you can focus on doing each of these things over the next few months, you may not see the same 300% growth that we saw in our store, but you will start to see consistent sales and traffic growth.
Scott Voelker
Over the years I’ve helped thousands of people TAKE ACTION to UNLOCK their true potential on building their ultimate freedom business, by developing the skills to make them resilient, confident and FUTURE PROOF. I’ve clocked my 10,000 hours over the years working in the trenches myself and helping others build and grow their brands. I know the power in TAKING ACTION better than anyone and I’ve seen people lives changed as a result of it...including my OWN!The Simple 5-Step Process We Used To Generate $64,000 In 12 Months Working Part Time On Etsy.
Yes, Send Me The Roadmap!