Have you ever thought about what you can do to increase Etsy sales? Setting up your shop in one of the leading global e-commerce marketplaces may seem easy. However, the ratio of 96 million active buyers to 9 million active sellers means competition is fierce. So, it’s much more difficult to build customer loyalty.
Even so, although Etsy is known for handmade items, it’s also a fabulous place to sell your clothes and outfit collections.
You need a solid selling strategy using the most effective strategies while keeping your operating and marketing costs as low as possible. Here we’ll talk about the best ways to build a successful Etsy store. We’ll especially introduce you to the concept of leveraging value-targeted blogs and collaborations to increase your Etsy sales and establish a thriving online business.
11 Awesome Ways to Promote and Increase Etsy Sales
There are a variety of solutions you can leverage to get more traffic to your Etsy store. Some directly boost your traffic and visibility. Others focus on helping boost your conversions. Keep reading to uncover the many effective strategies on how to sell on Etsy successfully.
Use Social Media to Increase Etsy Sales
I’ll always recommend building your social media page as soon as you set up your Etsy Shop. For your fashion blog, your most favorable social media channels are Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and to some extent Instagram.
Beyond that, you need to figure out when your target audience especially uses these channels, so you can post accordingly to get noticed on these sites. Also, note that each social media channel also has specific hacks and tips that work best.
For Instagram, focus on high-quality videos about your product, and brand. For Facebook, focus on high-quality photos and videos targeting building a community that would rave about your brand. And in the case of TikTok consider creating content based on current trends related to your products.
Also, make sure you’re using high-quality photos and videos of your product. That said, merely posting your products on social media is not the way to go. That only creates a mechanical and robotic brand that no one connects with. It’s much better to use all kinds of creative angles, lifestyle shots, close-ups, and videos about how you create your fashion line.
Also, engage your audience by asking questions, running polls, hosting contests, and responding to comments and messages. Depending on the social media channel, you’ll need a mix of popular and niche hashtags to help boost visibility. You should also consider creating unique hashtags for your shop and use them consistently across your posts. That way, customers will come to connect those particular words with your brands.
Leverage Etsy Ads on Your Social Media Channels
If you just began using Etsy, you’ll find that every one in four rows of results is reserved for sponsored Etsy-promoted listings. This paid listing is a fantastic way to bring more buyers to your Etsy store and products. However, you shouldn’t stop there.
Also consider using Etsy Offste ads which allow you not only to list your product on Etsy but to explore other traffic sources from social media sites and even search engines. The Etsy Offsite ads work like a CPC model where you only pay if the buyer clicks on the ad and then makes a purchase within 30 days of the ad.
Depending on how strategic you want to go, you can also use social media sponsored posts and ads to boost awareness independently about your brand. That way, you aren’t just selling your products but also making more people remember your brand. This can significantly increase your Etsy sales.
Also remember, that you don’t have to do this every time. It’s best to do so around big trends that directly impact your products.
Pitch your Products to Relevant Publications and Websites
Adding a blog to your Etsyp store through the platform called “Pattern by Etsy” is a great promotional strategy that helps your brand stand out. Blogging is a vital aspect of your Etsy store SEO, allowing you to enjoy greater visibility and sales.
However, it’s not always feasible for everyone to build a consistent blog. And while you should consider doing so, also pair that up by placing your products on the blogs of bigger media publications.
That way, you can continuously build that emotional rapport and supercharge traffic for the exact type of people you want to your Etsy store.
Build your Email List
Every brand – big or small – needs an email list. And your Etsy shop will benefit remarkably from creating an email list. That way, customers who have expressed interest in your shop or products may exchange their email addresses for your free resources. Thereafter, you can craft engaging email newsletters that would periodically remind your customers that you’re still in business.
However, you cannot get people’s emails in exchange for their sales directly from Etsy. This is why you should leverage your social media pages to connect and reconnect alongside building this list.
Your email list is your own audience. It provides the chance to build an authentic and intimate relationship with your customers. It’s independent of algorithms like on social media that can limit how and where you communicate with them.
It also allows you to nurture relationships with new and past customers encouraging repeat purchases and customer loyalty. Whenever you run campaigns, always remember to offer exclusive discounts, early access to new products, and special promotions to your email subscribers. That’s how you increase Etsy sales.
Expand your Product Offerings
Sometimes offering fresh new products can be the key to increasing your Etsy Sales. This helps you in remarkable ways. First, new products boost your Etsy SEO helping your brand stay relevant. Secondly, it inspires your former customers to come back and check out your new offerings.
This in turn boosts sales and conversions. Finally, it allows you to diversify your sales, allowing you to enter new markets and avoid seasonal slumps from lower demand for one product over the next.
Beyond that, creating new products also helps you fill the gap within your product niche. It allows you to directly learn from customer’s feedbacks and provide the things they also need in real-time.
Nevertheless, you also need to be careful about how you expand your product offerings. Ensure to do your market research, understand your inventory and build your supply network. That way, you can maintain the same consistency with how your products are perceived by your customers.
Use User-generated Content to Promote Your Products
People love buying after they’ve seen reviews about your products. And while you can always wait for actual sales to access these reviews, you can also do so using user-generated content. This means reaching out to customers and asking them to showcase content on how they love your products. These photos, videos, and reviews they provide help build trust and social proof.
If you’re just starting your Etsy shop, you can consider running a campaign, contest, or giveaway that encourages customers to share photos of themselves using your products, in exchange for actual products or other attractive prizes. I also recommend creating a unique hashtag for your brand’s user-generated content.
Encourage customers to use this hashtag when they share photos and videos of your products on social media. You can always repurpose this content in the future either on dedicated sections of your website and social media pages or even within your email newsletters and Esty product listings. UGC content is a great way to add visual appeal and showcase the positive experiences of your customers when using your products.
Partner with Micro-Influencers
Influencer marketing is also an amazing way to reach a bigger audience that can help sell your products. However, you need to be careful with this form of marketing. Often, the bigger the audience, does not translate to greater the sales and traffic for you. Instead, as a small business, you are better served by micro-influencers with smaller highly engaged following.
Always research them carefully to make sure their target audience would indeed be interested in pursuing your products. Reach out to them and build relationships with them, offering free products, discounts, or even money in exchange for promoting your shop to their followers.
Don’t forget to set clear goals – whether it’s traffic to your Etsy shop, getting people to join your email list, participating in your contest, and more. You also need to clearly define the scope of the partnership including the number of posts, the desired content, and the hashtag you wish to use.
As said earlier, you must always track your results to see how your influencer marketing campaigns are doing. that’s the only way to ensure you goals to increase Esty sales is happening.
Nurture Customer Loyalty through Speedy Service
One of the biggest issues with any online business is delivering your products at the specified agreed-upon time. This depends on how you track your inventory, manage supply issues, understand your processing time, and everything in between. That way, your delivery times are realistic, and strive to meet them consistently. When you streamline order fulfillment, it helps you minimize delays. And that’s the extra mile you must be willing to go to ensure customer satisfaction.
And even, when it’s impossible due to unforeseen circumstances to deliver at said time, always respond to customers’ inquiries and keep them updated on any potential delays.
Note that speedy service does not always mean next-day deliveries. It means communicating realistic timelines and doing everything possible to achieve that. When your customers know you’re reliable about your deadlines, they will be willing to purchase more from you.
Remember, unlike running an Amazon store, Etsy provides no shipping support. That further emphasizes how vital it is to fully understand what your shipping would look like. Use that information to write your Etsy shop policies. Ensure your policies carefully outline your shipping, returns, and exchange parameters. Above everything always keep Etsy shop policies customer-friendly and competitive.
Providing Free Shipping to Increase Etsy Sales
Research shows that users consider free shipping as a positive experience with any brand. If you can consider offering free shipping or deciding a minimum order value that qualifies anyone for that. However, free shipping also eats into your profit. So, you also need to be sure the value you gain goes beyond sales. Here are some ideas:
- You can offer free shipping alongside that minimum order but exclusive to people who join your email list. That way, you are being more targeted about how you drive nurturing and relationships with your customers.
- Offer free shipping during a specific time frame, especially increasing sales during slow periods.
These two moves can significantly boost your Etsy sales in more ways than you can imagine
Create a System That Drives Customer Reviews
Like Natalie of Honesty Nat says, bad reviews can happen and they are often like getting a tooth pulled out. But you should always remember that they are rarely personal and often those feelings may not be connected with your customer’s purchase.
However, you want to implement a system that drives and collects more positive reviews. This means prompt and honest communication, being able to reach out to your customers, whether the transaction was a happy one or not. Note that, Etsy’s reviews on Trustpilot are only about 13,000 which is not reflective of its global network. So, you need to encourage more buyers to send in their reviews by implementing that system.
Beyond that, always respond to customer reviews both positive and negative in a professional and timely manner. As a bonus tip, I recommend setting up mentions related to your business name, keywords connecting to what you sell, and trends around you. That way, you can provide answers to your customers even when the reviews are made elsewhere. And you can jump on trends and keywords out there to improve awareness about your brand and increase Etsy sales.
Strategically Run Etsy Sales and Promotions
We all love sales – it creates excitement and compels more people to stop putting off their desire to buy from you. When you run effective sales and promotions, you can attract new customers and boost sales to your Etsy store. Fortunately, Etsy provides a variety of built-in sales tools. These range from flash sales where you can create short-term or time-limited sales to generate urgency among shoppers.
There’s also offering unique coupon codes for specific products, categories, or occasions targeting customers who meet a certain spending threshold. And you can always consider providing discounts to repeat customers to encourage them to buy from you.
Nevertheless, you must be careful never to underprice your products by so much. You don’t want to rack up sales quickly and yet your entire labor amounts to nothing because your profit is shockingly small. Do your market research, measure the material costs and costs of marketing, and find your sweet spot.
More Tips to Build a Solid Foundation Around Your Etsy Store Promotion
All we’ve talked about directly connects to your conversions and sales. However, there are also foundational things you need to do that will also help promote your Etsy store and further increase sales.
Be Consistent with your Branding Your Etsy Shop
Although Etsy allows you to quickly set up your Etsy shop and start selling. You need to carefully and meaningfully pick every aspect of your brand. This means picking a catchy and memorable shop name that reflects what you sell, your values, and your identity.
It also means making sure your shop is visually appealing by being strategic about your Etsy shop logo and banner design. You also need to craft a clear and informative shop announcement that showcases why you’re selling your fashionable outfits. That’s how you’ll entice customers to explore your Etsy shop.
Don’t forget the most crucial part – using high-quality photos. For your fashion brand, leverage natural light and a cohesive background made with carefully selected props to illustrate your product and appeal to your target market. To learn more, read Etsy’s How to Make Your Photos Publicity-Ready.
Leveraging Etsy SEO for Your Listings
When you wish to learn how to run a successful store on Etsy, you cannot underestimate the importance of Etsy SEO. While there’s a possibility your products will receive immediate attention when you launch, you must ensure that it’s the customers you need that are seeing them. That’s why you want to help Etsy understand everything you do.
So, what is Etsy SEO? Etsy SEO involves optimizing your product listings and entire shop with
relevant keywords that potential customers are searching for. This means you need to find those relevant keywords connected to your brand using tools like Etsy search bar, Pinterest, competitor analysis, or other keyword research tools. Always ensure to consider the intent behind particular keywords before choosing them. When you have that done, you need to place these keywords in the right places.
Here’s how to place keywords to optimize Etsy listings
- Titles: Craft clear, concise, and keyword-rich titles that accurately describe your products with the most important keywords at the front. Also, keep your titles under 140 characters since Etsy truncates them.
- Tags: Use a mix of broad and specific tags for your products to boost your discoverability. Ensure to avoid tags that are generic and irrelevant. Always use tags that reflect your product and its attributes.
- Product descriptions: Write compelling and informative product descriptions that highlight the unique features, benefits, and materials of your products. Your product description on Etsy should have bold or underlined texts strategically to emphasize important product details or calls to action (CTAs).
- Optimize images: although you should use high-resolution images, you should also optimize them for web use. That way, they load faster and maintain that visual connection between customers and your brand to increase Etsy sales.
Don’t also forget to avoid the trap of using generic keywords for your Etsy shop. For instance, if you sell vintage clothes, you might be tempted to only use words like Vintage gowns. Instead, be more focused by using keywords like “vintage black gown for women”, and “vintage halter dress”.
This helps buyers who are specifically looking for the clothes you have to find. That targeted search also means you are more likely to access customers who are indeed willing to purchase now instead of those simply browsing for inspiration through Etsy’s collection.
Ship your Products in Practical Packaging
How you package your products, also improves the positive experience your customers enjoy. While you don’t want luxury packaging that eats into your revenue, without adding much, you want a package that’s durable and stylish enough. That way, you can show your customers that you care, while also making sure that their items don’t break in transit.
We recommend choosing eco-friendly packaging that would appeal to your environmentally conscious customers, why showcasing your brand’s values. Thin materials like custom stamps, hang tags, and an old-fashioned calling card.
Remember practical packaging also means you fulfill orders at a faster pace by also speeding up your order processing time. It also means you can look forward to fewer returns which would positively impact your shop’s performance metrics.
Leverage Analytics and KPIs to Monitor Growth
Your Etsy shop promotion isn’t a set-and-forget-it event. You need clarity on the goals and milestones you want to achieve. This also demands understanding how to use Etsy’s analytics dashboard to track metrics like how many listings were viewed, the number of clicks, favorites, and more. You need to also keep track of where your traffic is coming from. That helps you double your marketing efforts by prioritizing the channels that are working for you.
Also consider integrating Google Analytics with your Etsy Shop stats to gain deeper insights into your traffic sources, customer behavior, and conversion rates. Even when you have a small shop, always compare your performance against industry benchmarks and competitors. You might not match up yet, but you’ll be able to uncover opportunities your competitors are not taking advantage of that might work for you.
How does MakeOutfit.com Help Etsy Businesses?
Your Etsy SEO and listings alone aren’t going to be enough to boost sales. Before now, these were more than enough because the competition was a lot less. Now, you need more marketing efforts that would better position your brand.
MakeOutfit.com collaborates with small Etsy fashion shop owners like you to promote their products uniquely. Specifically, we provide users with the means to quickly, mix and customize their outfits and fully grasp how they would look in them.
This is a fantastic alternative they enjoy to simply picking clothes randomly. We also create lookbooks and blogs that carefully curate stylish outfits using your designs in a manner that sells your gear. All these aim to invoke an emotional response from the buyer by providing more value out of your own images. By doing all this alongside directly linking to your Etsy shop, we aim to help improve traffic and sales for your brand.