Journey to a Successful Etsy Shop - Part 3

If you haven't read Part 1 and Part 2 - please view the earlier posts on the blog.

Because my Facebook, Google Adwords and Etsy promotions had all failed, I decided to take the advice I had read about in my research:  capture repeat customers by allowing them to sign up for a newsletter once they have visited your site.  It sounded easy and harmless enough so I decided to give it a go.

Newsletter with Mailchimp
I signed up for a free account with Mailchimp which allows you to establish a form that will allow customers to sign up for your store's newsletter.  I consider myself relatively computer savvy and I can assure you that Mailchimp is not for the faint of heart.  It's almost as bad as Google Adwords.  It's just not user friendly for those of us navigating the terrain for the first time.   Long story short, you set up a form that customers can fill out with their email address and it is then emailed to you to be added to your 'list'.  When you sent out a newsletter, you send it to everyone on your list.  Sounds good, right?  Except you can't use any old email address for your customers information to be mailed to.  The free ones:  @aol @gmail and @yahoo won't allow the emails to come through so you are expected to have your own business email.  For example:  info@sehosas.com.  To do this, you have to have your own domain name.  So, I spent $12 and bought www.sehosas.com. But adding email capability to this costs more so I signed up for an email address for $5/month.   I used the templates and set up a Welcome email to be sent to my customers once they signed up for the newsletter.  However, I can't figure out how to create a clickable link in Etsy to allow customers to easily click on the link and sign up for the newsletter.  Instead of seeing Sign up for Sehosas Newsletter, they see http://eepurl.com/cd_oG1. Let's be real here - that's not pretty and doesn't entice anyone to manually copy and paste the link into a new window.  To date, I have had 0 people sign up for my newsletter.

Pinterest
I have a Pinterest page with several followers and often post my items on Pinterest and that does garner a sale here and there.  It's relatively simple to do and doesn't cost anything so it's a winner in my book.

I haven't given up on promoting my Etsy store and will continue reporting on the things I try and do or do not have success with.  Clearly it can be done as there are thousands of successful Etsy stores out there.  I just haven't found the right way to get the word out about mine.

Sehosas on Etsy