Selling Crafts Online

If you're selling crafts online you probably keep in touch with your customers via email, right? Somewhere on your computer you have a list of everyone who has bought from you, their name and their email address. If you're not using a mailing list to help sell your crafts online you're letting money get away. Someone who has bought your crafts once could well do so again.

If you can keep customers up to date with new products, special offers, etc., you make money much more easily selling crafts online to previous customers than if you have to keep finding new customers. Right?

But what about those people who visited your site but didn't buy? They visited and now they're gone. You can track numbers of visitors easily enough but you have no idea who each one was.

What if you could find out? What if you could get those visitors to give you their email address so you could keep in touch with them too. Wouldn't that be a good idea?

Of course it would - potentially very profitable too! A mailing list can be a very useful tool to help you sell handmade crafts online.

You can't do it for everyone one of the visitors to your craft website, but you can do it for some, and those that will give you their details have great potential because they've already proved that they're interested - otherwise, why would they bother?

So how do you do it?

This site has an example up on the top right of each page (the Craft Business Newsletter). You can use something similar on your blog or website. I offer a free newsletter and a very useful fact file, "Craft Success Online". You would offer a newsletter too (or you might like to call it "email updates").

It's also a good idea to offer an incentive. It doesn't have to be much but it needs to have a good perceived value. You could create a downloadable booklet, or you might want to offer a discount on a first order. It's well worth a few dollars to get a new customer who might end up buying time after time.

Now, if you're thinking this might be a bit difficult to set up, and that getting it on your blog or website might involve coding and stuff that you just don't understand, I've got some good news for you. For just a few dollars a month there are several service providers who will handle it all for you. They focus on the technical side, so you can focus on your customers and on selling crafts online.

You sign up for an account and organise your settings once, then after that it's all automatic. Your prospective customers fill in their details and are automatically added to your list. The system can also redirect them to a page where they can get their download if that's what you?ve offered, or give them a welcome message.

When you want to send everyone a message you just go to your email marketing service provider and write it once, then they send it to everyone on your list. It will personalize it to each individual name too so it looks as if it came straight from you. It's all done online so you don't have to worry about installing software on your computer either.

So what does something like this cost? Well it depends on the service but you can start some with an introductory free offer and then pay anything from $5.00 to $20.00 a month and upwards, depending on the provider and the number of people on your list.

If you're not using a way of collecting people's emails and keeping in touch with them on your website or blog you're letting opportunities to sell your crafts online get away. If you consider the small investment could be recouped by just a single new customer, it would be silly not to do it really.

Guest author, Bob Beacham, is the author of Complete Craft Book Publishing. Bob writes about craft blogging, writing and publishing your own craft book, and selling crafts online via your own shop or one of the craft malls at sellingcraftsonline.com. Whatever your craft question, SellingCraftsOnline aims to provide you with the answers. You can also get a free copy of the acclaimed ebook "Craft Success Online".