Last fall my grandmother asked me to sell some of the mittens she was knitting. She is in her 80s and doesn't have much concept of how the Internet works. She assumed that I'd be selling them to friends or co-workers. I knew I'd be trying a site like Etsy.
Getting set up with Etsy is easy. Driving people to the Etsy site is not. Just about the only "free" publicity to be had on Etsy is when you list new items because they appear in a feed. (Once you're a popular seller Etsy may profile you, which is also free, but that's kind of tough to get at the beginning.)
From the beginning I created a Facebook page and also sold mittens on eBay to gain brand awareness. I sold a pair of mittens on eBay for about 60% off the regular sale price. The buyer was so happy with them that she came back and purchased 8 more pairs at the regular price. I'll call that a good investment!
More eyes needed to view the mittens on the Etsy page in order to turn into sales. Etsy has its own ad program that is similar to Google's, but is for the Etsy site only. In a familiar model you can set a weekly budget and choose keywords.
I picked some keywords and set a modest budget of $7 per week, the price of a pair of mittens at that time. The ad wound up costing me around 50 cents a day. Views increased by a factor of 7 and sales increased by about 75%!
Some pros of Etsy ads:
I carefully calculated the cost of the Facebook ads I experimented with and found I lost money. Because I hate math I'm not going to do that here, but I know that the Etsy ads were a great investment. They cost just cents a day and were more than paid for as long as I made just one sale per week (or even one sale per two weeks).
Of course, in some cases it may be "okay" to lose money in this way. Say exposure, for example, is more important to you than being profitable right now. Then an ad scenario like this may work for you.
Check out my last blog entry to read more about the Facebook ad experiment!
This post was first published on another blog on 3/13/2013 - it's now only found here on the Marion's Mittens blog!
Getting set up with Etsy is easy. Driving people to the Etsy site is not. Just about the only "free" publicity to be had on Etsy is when you list new items because they appear in a feed. (Once you're a popular seller Etsy may profile you, which is also free, but that's kind of tough to get at the beginning.)
From the beginning I created a Facebook page and also sold mittens on eBay to gain brand awareness. I sold a pair of mittens on eBay for about 60% off the regular sale price. The buyer was so happy with them that she came back and purchased 8 more pairs at the regular price. I'll call that a good investment!
More eyes needed to view the mittens on the Etsy page in order to turn into sales. Etsy has its own ad program that is similar to Google's, but is for the Etsy site only. In a familiar model you can set a weekly budget and choose keywords.
I picked some keywords and set a modest budget of $7 per week, the price of a pair of mittens at that time. The ad wound up costing me around 50 cents a day. Views increased by a factor of 7 and sales increased by about 75%!
Some pros of Etsy ads:
- Setup is simple.
- It's cheap.
- It improves traffic and sales, at least it did in my case.
- The ads can be turned on or off at any time.
- You cannot segment by audience.
- The ads only display on Etsy.
- Not much information is provided about people who click on the ads although you can plug Etsy into Google Analytics.
I carefully calculated the cost of the Facebook ads I experimented with and found I lost money. Because I hate math I'm not going to do that here, but I know that the Etsy ads were a great investment. They cost just cents a day and were more than paid for as long as I made just one sale per week (or even one sale per two weeks).
Of course, in some cases it may be "okay" to lose money in this way. Say exposure, for example, is more important to you than being profitable right now. Then an ad scenario like this may work for you.
Check out my last blog entry to read more about the Facebook ad experiment!
This post was first published on another blog on 3/13/2013 - it's now only found here on the Marion's Mittens blog!
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