Your creative business needs an email list.
It converts to sales way better than social media ever can you get better reach
and visibility. It's an asset in your business that no one can take away.
I'm like Facebook or Instagram or Etsy where your account can get shut down for
no good reason. And best of all, it's free to get started.
In this video,
I'll show you the simple steps for how to build an email list in your handmade
business. Hey,
my name is may and I help makers, artists,
and designers create a consistent income at selling your handmade products
online.
The first super easy way to get started building your email list is at craft
shows or any light events you do. You probably do several shows a year,
and if you aren't doing this yet,
you can start by putting out a single hen and paper signup sheet at your table
for people to write down their email addresses. So after every show,
you would then add those people to your email list.
Now your email list will have to go somewhere, right?
And we'll cover that in a little bit.
But while we're on the topic of craft shows,
one thing I recommend to get more people to sign up is to offer something in
exchange for their email address.
You have to keep in mind that these days people's emails are very valuable to
them.
No one likes getting spam or emails they never signed up for that aren't related
to them at all and it can become a problem for some people so they can be
guarded and for good reason, right?
To get them to be more comfortable with giving you their emails.
You can offer something like a free giveaway at the end of the event so people
can sign up for a chance to win one of your products.
This can also be a good idea to do because it can encourage people to come back
to your booth before the event is over,
which can in turn help drum up some last minute sales.
Now let's talk about how to build your email list online and email list usually
lives in some sort of online based software or service.
I call this an ESP, an email service provider,
and I'm not talking about an email service like Gmail or Yahoo mail.
Those are for sending personal one-to-one emails and I know you can send BCC
emails to lots of people at once,
but that's usually frowned upon and it's not the best way to manage your email
list. A proper ESP is something like MailChimp,
which I'm sure you've heard of before.
It has more features to help make sending emails easier.
You can keep track of email,
open rates and click through rates and you can't really do that with Gmail or
Yahoo mail. So Mailchimp is one option.
I don't actually recommend it. When I started my business,
I used Mailchimp and over the years I've tried almost every ESP you can think
of, and I even went back to Mailchimp not too long ago.
They claimed they had all these new features. Unfortunately,
while Mailchimp might be the most popular,
ESP doesn't really perform well.
They have almost nonexistent customer support and while they have integration
with your Shopify site,
it doesn't work well nor is it accurate and it's also not as user friendly as
some other ESPs.
And if there's one thing about technology that I have learned the hard way over
the years, if it doesn't work well and you can't trust the data it gives you,
and if it's not user friendly, you're not going to use it.
So my favorite Mailchimp alternative is actually MailerLite.
It's free up to your first 1000 subscribers and it has e-commerce integration
with your Shopify site,
which means when a customer from your shop places in order,
that information is shared with your ESP and you want that to happen so you can
segment your email list and send the right emails at the right time to the right
people.
That's a much more advanced strategy that we won't get too deep into in this
video. Mailchimp can do that.
Integration to Shopify to life tested it and it's just not accurate.
Like it'll say a certain customer has made two orders when in fact that customer
has made 10 orders.
Why this is a problem is because the kind of email you send to a customer who's
made to orders versus someone who's placed 10 orders is very different.
It's just like how you probably talk to your partner in a different way than how
you would talk to a colleague at work and you can imagine if you started talking
to your colleague, the way you talk to your partner,
that could turn out pretty comical and weird and inappropriate pretty quickly.
Right? Anyway,
the ESP that I use for tiny hands is called Claveo.
It's the best ESP for shop owners, but it can get pricey,
which is why I don't necessarily recommend it for beginners.
So with your ESP,
one of the features it gives you is the ability to create signup forms.
This is literally just a place for people online to type in their email address
and click on a signup button to join your email list. It is a drag and drop,
easy to create and design your signup forms that you can then copy and paste
onto your website. Now when it comes to your signup forms,
have them appear as high up on your site as possible so your visitors don't miss
it.
Also tried to have your form in as many logical places as possible such as in
your about page, your testimonials page. If you have one,
your checkout confirmation page, your blog and so on.
The reason you want your sign up form to appear in as many places as possible is
because your customer isn't seeing all the places you put them in.
Of course you don't want your site to look spammy and distracting,
so there is a balance,
but most of the times I've seen people not enough sign up forms around their
site. Also, another tip for you is,
well you can't ask for first names in your signup forms and this helps you be
able to address their subscribers by their first name in all of your emails as
if you were emailing them personally.
There is a cost to that as well because now there's one more extra field for
people to enter. The more information you ask of them in your signup form,
the lower your conversion rates are going to be. So to me,
I personally don't ask for first names,
even though I do love being able to personalize my emails with people's first
names. To me,
I would rather grow my email list and make that my priority because I can create
a deeper connection with my subscriber in other ways than using their first
thing in my emails.
And I don't think it's that big of a benefit and you wait to be able to see hi
first name like hi Cecilia in your email.
Now there are lots of different types of signup forms you can make.
There are landing pages which should only have the signup form as well as one or
two sentences max talking about why someone should join your email list.
Landing pages convert really well because there's only one thing to do which is
to sign up. And if people don't sign up, they leave the page all together.
I guess that's two things they can do,
but the point is you don't put your regular site navigation or social media
rings anywhere on this landing page.
You want to keep it as simple as possible and without distractions and that's
why it converts so well.
Landing pages usually convert at 30% or more and landing pages were really well
for sending social media traffic to, or if you're doing a paid ad or a giveaway,
other sign up forms like popups and sticky headers or a slight and animated
forms convert lower usually at around five to 15% if you do it right,
so how you do it right?
Let's talk about popups because I know people can be hesitant to use them
because they can be annoying, right?
We'll consider that popups are annoying because they're not shown to you at a
time. That's not annoying.
Usually popups appear right away after you go to a website and you haven't even
taken five seconds to browse around yet.
You don't even know what the website sells and you've already got a pop up in
your face.
What I recommend you to do is to configure your pop up and your ESP should be
able to do this so that your pop up appears either X number of seconds after
website is loaded or after your website visitor has clicked on three or more
pages on your site. Um, for how many seconds?
It kind of depends on how long it takes their site to load.
But I would do something like 20 seconds after your site loads.
So if it takes your site five seconds to load fully,
then I would make the pop up show at 25 seconds.
Popups convert really well.
I have mine convert between nine and 15% depending on if it's desktop or mobile.
So we highly recommend you use them once you've got your signup forms all over
your site,
something that can add a huge boost of conversions and grow your email list by
10 times more. It's by offering an incentive,
like how you might offer to do a giveaway at your craft show.
You can do something similar for your online signups.
My biggest tip for you is to just keep it simple.
There are so many people out there telling you you have to create a PDF or a
guide or free training like a style guide or a quiz and I am telling you that
those don't work as well for you unless you're an information based business and
if you're watching this,
you're probably a physical product based business and the best kinds of
incentives are the ones you've seen over and over again. Everywhere else.
I know that there can be this creative or artistic ego that wants to do
something different than what everyone else is doing,
but please don't overthink this.
I stress myself up over this at one point and I know many handmade shop owners
do the scene. There's a reason everyone is doing it and it's because it works.
These incentives that work are a discount code, a free shipping offer,
a gift card, which is basically just a fixed dollar, not coupon code,
or you can even do a monthly product giveaway.
I know that these sound basic and uncreative, but trust me,
they work really well. I did this experiment awhile ago,
but I wouldn't be surprised if this was still true today.
If you don't offer any incentive at all,
you can just expect your list to grow a lot more slowly.
Free shipping was just as attractive as a 15% discount code.
So if I were you, I would choose whichever was cheaper for you to do it.
And of course,
doing a ongoing monthly giveaway was the best at bringing in new subscribers,
even if you didn't do a monthly giveaway that was tied to your signup forms.
Because as we all know,
doing giveaways too often trains your customers to expect them and you can't
attract a percentage of people who are just freebie on burgers.
Having said that,
doing giveaways a few times every year is healthy and fun for your audience,
and if you do this in conjunction with my giveaway funnel,
you could potentially build up your list quickly while simultaneously making a
few sales. Once you've got all of that set up,
you'll need to send traffic to your email list, sign up forms,
your email list will not grow without tracking.
So watch my other videos on my channel for how to get traffic.
I recommend pitching your products and I have a great guide on how to do that.
Just remember, it takes time. He patient growing.
Your email list has a direct correlation to growing your handmade business,
and I've seen people take an average of one to three years to go to a full time
income with their business, assuming they put in a full time effort into it.