If your Etsy sales have been kind of quiet, there are several things you can do to get those “ca-chings” ringing. This post will share several ways shop owners can boost Etsy sales in the short term and for months to come.
Add More Items
Adding more items in your Etsy store increases the odds that someone will find them.
New listings are also given a temporary boost in search, which can also sometimes help boost sales.
And guess what? You don’t necessarily need new products to add a new listing.
If you have a digital product or more than one in stock for a particular product, you can also add a new listing for the item targeting different keywords and using different photos. This is a great way to test out what works better for a product.
To learn more about duplicate product listings and Etsy’s policy on them, check out this post.
Offer Discounts
Run A Sale
Running a sale of at least 20% off in your shop will boost your listings in search. This is especially helpful during holidays where people are shopping more.
Etsy generally emails and announces dates that shoppers are expecting to see sales, so it generally helps to run sales during these peak times.
Set Up Abandoned Cart Coupons
To incentivize people to buy, you can also set up an abandoned cart coupon. This is a discount coupon that gets sent to Etsy users that add your item to their cart but don’t check out.
Coupon Codes
If you want to share an exclusive discount to people that follow you on social media or maybe even through email marketing, coupon codes are a great way to offer a fixed amount or a certain percentage off of your items.
Run Etsy Ads
Ads are a great way to increase traffic to your Etsy listings. You can decide how much money you want to spend per day and turn on Ads for particular listings. It works better to only advertise 1 or 2 listings instead of your whole shop, especially if you have a lower budget.
Running ads is a bit of a more advanced strategy for your Etsy business and it’s one that you can easily lose money from, so it’s important to frequently review your stats and figure out your return on investment with ads after you’ve had them running for about a week.
To learn more about getting started with them, check out this article.
Share On Social Media
An easy way to boost traffic to your shop is to share your products on social media platforms. Followers are generally a warmer audience (more ready to buy) than someone that is visiting your shop for the first time.
Social media is a great way to increase brand awareness. It allows you to show your items to a wider audience, which may increase the chances of getting new customers.
An obvious thing to do is to share your product photos but you can also use your social media accounts to share more of the story and details about your products.
Here are a few ways to create more interest around your items:
- Share a behind the scenes photo or video of you making an item
- Talk about the story behind your item and the problem it solves
- Share a video of your item being used
- If you have photos from customers (aka user-generated content), that’s some of the best social proof to share.
Offer Free Shipping
Etsy has confirmed that offering free shipping on items over $30 dollars will rank you higher in the search results.
You can turn on free shipping by editing the shipping profiles of your items.
And don’t worry: to account for the shipping fees, you may want to build shipping into the total price of the item.
Rework Under Performing Listings
Etsy SEO, also known as “Search Engine Optimization” is one of the most important and effective ways to get found on Etsy. Even if you’ve paid attention to your seo while you were creating the listing, it may be time to look at your listing stats to see how it’s doing.
Note: you should only change the optimization of your listing if it’s performing poorly. If you have particular listings that are getting good traffic and have a good conversion rate (greater than 1%), you should leave it alone!
Update Product Images
First impressions are important, and photos are one of the first things a potential buyer will see. Naturally, you’ll want your photos to look amazing and stand out. However, you don’t need to be a professional photographer to take great photos. Here are a few tips for taking them by yourself.
- It’s a good idea to have high-quality images that are clear and well lit. A potential buyer should have a clear understanding of what the item is when they look at the photos. At the very least, you should take photos in natural light, but you can also learn about setting up lighting for product photography here.
- Include a good assortment of photos of your product at different angles.
- It’s also helpful to include photos that will show the size and scale of the item. This could be by holding the item, including decorative objects, or including a ruler in the listing photo.
- Make sure the entire item is shown in the thumbnail of your main listing photo. You’ll also want to make sure that the photo is zoomed in enough so that it’s easy to see what it is at first glance.
- If possible, upload 10 photos to your listing, which is the max amount you can use per listing.
If you’ve checked all of these boxes and your photos are looking great, you can also experiment with which photo you choose as the primary listing photo.
Include A Video
Etsy now allows short videos in the listings. This is another great way to show more details of the item.
Update Product Titles
Check your Etsy stats for all of your listings. If your listing doesn’t seem to be showing up in Etsy search, you may need to revisit the keywords you are targeting in your title.
You can use tools like erank to look for low competition keywords with high traffic or you can use the Etsy search bar which autocompletes to popular searches. You can roughly gauge how much competition a keyword has on Etsy based on how many results come back for search terms!
Place the main keyword you want to target towards the front of the title. You can include more than one keyword in the title, but Etsy does recommend that the title is readable and doesn’t look like it’s stuffed with keywords.
And if you’re having trouble figuring out the right keywords, try to brainstorm what your ideal customer is interested in or what they would be searching for. You can look at similar products to see what search terms they are using. Pinterest is also a great place to get ideas for your target market.
Update Tags
Once you’ve updated the keywords in your title, you’ll also want to update the tags. This is also an opportunity to add even more relevant keywords that may not have made it in your title which will increase your chances of being found in search for additional queries.
Review Pricing
If you’re getting a lot of favorites on certain items but not very many sales, you may need to revisit your pricing. Take a look at similar handmade products on the platform to see how they are priced and if you are able to, price your items similarly.
After you update an Etsy listing, it’s best to wait about 30 days to see how it performs.
Provide A Great Customer Experience
Providing exceptional customer service and a streamlined experience will help you build a good base of loyal customers that will come back and buy from you again and again.
While this tip won’t get you immediate results, you will start to see your efforts pay off long term. It’s kind of like a waterfall effect! When a customer is extremely happy with a product and the overall buying experience, they are more inclined to give you good reviews and become a repeat customer. And they may even spread the word about you!
In addition to this, the more positive reviews you have on an item will help to rank it higher in search.
Examples of providing a great customer experience are:
- Shipping items within the timeframe that is reflected in your shop policy and listings
- Responding promptly to customer messages (within 24hrs)
- Including a thank you note, maybe even hand written, in every order
- Providing plenty of high quality images and detailed product descriptions that clearly represent the item
- Packaging items with care so they arrive safely and undamaged
- Adding a personal touch to your product packaging – check out these ideas
This will also improve your chances of getting the Star Seller badge, which is calculated based off of average reviews, shipping times, and message response times. This badge is displayed in your shop and potential customers may see it as a sign that your small business has a good reputation.
Your Etsy marketing strategy is an ongoing and ever changing process, so don’t get discouraged if you don’t see significant or immediate results! Everyone goes through times of slow sales which may be caused from market trends or even the economy. If you find yourself with more time, it may be a great opportunity to try new things. You never know, you may create your next best selling product!
I hope that these tips help you, happy selling. 🙂