Etsy allows creators to sell unique, vintage, and handmade products, and as people witnessed the first-ever digital holiday season in 2020, the platform recorded humongous sales growth. Around 2.5 million sellers like you joined new on Etsy, out of which 2.1 million were incessantly active online. Even though the Pandemic Situation has hit the world, the Etsy sellers have never slowed down their pace creating the extraordinary. When it was unable to get raw material for production, the home-based businesses utilized whatever was available to them. Even after the festive season, Sellers are planning to Increase post-holiday sales of their stores.
While hundreds of thousands of merchants like you pioneered through the underlying opportunities, shoppers, on the other hand, did not let Covid-19 affect their festive celebrations. Surprisingly, holiday shopping began their shopping way before, i.e., two weeks before the festive season. As a result, Etsy too extended its cyber week sale from 8 days to 10 days so that smaller businesses find a platform and flourish by increasing their sales. Even you can plan and increase Post-holiday sales, on Etsy with good tactics.
How did the Holiday Season 2020 Go on Etsy?
You must have wondered if your sales might get affected due to Pandemic across the globe at the very beginning of the holiday season. But compared to the early months of 2020, the holiday season months took a real hike in sales. Even Sellers like you have open-heartedly launched offers, coupons, and much more fascinating things to your buyers. Shoppers were delighted to see 60% Discounts on unique gifts, home decors, personalized jewelry during the festive season. The online sales on Etsy jumped to 15.1% on Cyber Monday 2020. According to Etsy, just the face mask recorded $264 million in sales reported that a vast number of searches were made for gift cards, charms, t-shirts, and household items.
What Shoppers Loved the Most?
Unlike the previous years, In 2020, people had small celebrations, distant gifts but more family times. While apart from friends and loved ones, there were increased searches based on buying personalized products and meaningful gifts for faraway people to feel more connected.
The most sold items during the holidays season range from:
- Cooking Items
- Decorative items
- Personalized gifts
- Masks
- Home Appliances and Gadgets
- Craft and supplies, and
- Handmade Jewelry
Shoppers were more likely to buy gifts for loved ones and decorative items for their homes. The transition of work-life into rooms created an increased demand for electronic gadgets, supplies, stationery, and office furniture. Now that you had a successful holiday sale, what to do next? It is undeniable that there would be lower sales and less traffic altogether, but now It is time to find some alternatives to grow your Etsy Store’s sales. As a merchant, you need to keep motivating buyers to shop and make them happy with your after-sale services. When everything is coming back to normal, you should mind that you do not lack in stocks, provide faster delivery and meet the requirements beforehand.
Best Etsy Selling Strategies to Increase Post Holiday Sales
This year Sellers have used optimum creativity into products to sell on Etsy. You have to be very active to find the reason to create the new sales. Buyers always love to have the after season sale.
There are various strategies, following which you can retain the buyers on your Etsy store :
- Review Your Shop’s Performance and update
- Upgrade as per Customer’s need
- Provide timely Coupons and Discounts
- Increase Shop’s Visibility
- Promote your Etsy Store
- Update Product as per the Trend
Review Your Shop’s Performance and update
If you want to succeed or improve your Etsy store’s sales, you should review your store’s performance. By visiting the Shop Manager on your seller’s panel dashboard, you can check the statistics showing your store’s performance. Reviewing your shop’s version lets you grab information about your totals sales, profit margins, and even consumer behavior. You shall take out the data of your buyers who have purchased the most from your store during the festive season, post which you can reach out to them and offer them various discounts and offers. You may also get the data of your most sold products or most liked products amongst buyers.
Collect statistics that show traffic coming to your shop through channels like social media and Etsy Ads; this enables you to optimize your listings to increase sales and make strategic decisions about the way you invest in marketing. Exciting enhancements are coming to your Etsy Stats dashboard soon, so keep an eye on your Shop Manager for more updates.
Upgrade as per Customer’s need
It would be best if you kept on communicating with your buyers. Make it a habit of sending information regarding offers, new arrivals, and items you are listing via social media, email marketing, customer support, and Etsy Ads. Keep a continuous track of your most active buyers during the festive season sale. Consider them, especially by notifying them about what’s new in trend, giveaways, and offers. It would be best if you also had to be very responsive on social media to address your target customers’ desires, complaints, and expectations. Freshen up the trends in products as per what your customers are searching for. Make sure you contact your frequent customers to grab their reviews on your products and ask them to suggest what changes they expect from you. You have to work on your listings as per your Customer’s choice.
Provide timely Coupons and Discounts
Always seek a chance when you can provide offers, discounts, and coupons to your buyers. This motivates the buyers to purchase more and more. Offering specific coupons for repeat customers is always a good idea, especially when the festive season is over. For all those customers who share their useful feedback on your products, try offering them some rebates.
You can also provide coupons to the new buyers, asking them to join and avail of the surprise. In the competitive era, if you are selling at less price and still making a profit, there is no good thing than that.
Increase Shop’s Visibility
Just owning a store and selling is not enough; you can only make a sale when your store is visible to the buyers. You can easily make your listings visible by working on the keywords used to name the product and its description. The most searched keywords put an impact on your sales graph. Ensure that you write the “About Us” section of your store with the perfect keywords used in it. Your product photography has to be very attractive and renamed with the use of the right ranking keywords. You can also increase your store and products’ visibility by promoting and advertising them on social media platforms from time to time. Also, keep in mind that you should have plenty of products listed, as buyers are happy to see the varieties. Adding an accurate attribute to the listings is also essential, as these attributes allow Etsy to show your listings to the buyers during filtered searches or specific searches.
Promote your Etsy Store
If you want to grab people’s attention and attract traffic towards your store, promotion is all that you need to do. Etsy’s new advertising platform drives much more traffic on and off-site.
Etsy Ads is providing you the platform to promote your listings and attract more traffic to your store. Etsy Ads enables you to set a daily budget, select the listing to promote, and the campaign begins. Etsy Ads enhance your store’s visibility and increase sales, as they optimize when and where to promote your listings. Etsy has also come up with a new power of marketing by introducing Etsy Offsite Ads. You need to pay only when you make the sale via the advertisement; all your budget will promote your Etsy Listings. So it’s an excellent chance for you to sell on Etsy tension-free.
Update Products as per the Trend
You cannot continue with the same product listings every time; change is always required. Going with the trend is all that Etsy needs. If you want to retain your Buyers on your Etsy store, you should keep yourself and your products updated. For example, you can utilize trending memes, hashtags, slogans based on recent events. You can hop onto printed mugs and even T-shirts. If you haven’t updated the description and product photography for long, try placing your product image by using innovative ideas and their creative description.
Here is an exclusive (Q & A) session with a successful 6-figure Etsy seller, Anna Beck sharing some crucial insights around the holiday season. Her experiences can be an eye-opener for many existing and aspiring sellers like you. Get the inspiration as you prepare and kickstart your festive season sale 2021.
Etsy 2021 Planner: First Quarter
There is never a lack of opportunity until you find it. After the hectic festive celebrations, Households are in a relaxed mood. Winter is at its peak, and they intend to buy more cleaning products and winter necessities. You have to focus on room heaters, handmade quilt, covers, and more such relaxing products.
Apart from that, you can have sales before coming occasions such as Chinese New Year, Valentine’s week, and Women’s Day.
Chinese New Year
The Chinese New Year is going to begin from 12th February 2021 onwards. It is an immense belief in China, a 15 days festival also known as Lunar New Year. During this time, people decorate their homes; they wear traditional outfits, hats, caps. The Chinese new year is a year celebrated with family and friends and welcome good fortune. Most consumers will begin shopping one or two weeks before the New Year; consumers are willing to spend more during this time. If you are one of the creators who deals with decorative items, you have such a great opportunity. If you are a dress and Jewellery creator, even you can make use of this chance. You can be more creative and smart to make more sales by providing free mask matching to the dress, freebies, coupons, and jewelry combos. Sellers from all around the world take part in this grand shopping festival. Decorative items, gifting items are the most sold items during this period of CNY.
Valentine’s week
Valentine’s week begins on 7th February; people are more likely to shop for their loved ones during this time. What Can You Do? As an Etsy seller, you have moments to enhance your listings with Jewelry, Charms, scented candles, soaps. If you deal with POD products, then you might get a flood of buyers to your store. You can sell Customized Mugs, Bracelets with name engraved, personalized couple T-shirts, pillows, and much more, depending on your creativity. Handmade Cards can also add Frames to the cart.
Women’s Day
Women’s Day is celebrated on 8th March every year. Since Women are much into shopping, you can provide a sale and offer on occasion. You may provide POD Products with the theme focusing on Women empowerment, women hood, and Selfless love. You can provide Charms, Giftings Cards, Theme based garments, Handmade Jewelry, Quotation frames, etc.
Conclusion
The New Year has brought a new Start where you can be even more creative and full-fledged with the plans to delight your customers. Many new sellers like you used to have their Shopify store only, but looking at the abundant possibilities on Etsy, they took the multichannel way to increase sales by two folds. It’s your time to seize this chance of integrating your shops, which gives you plenty of time to engage with your buyers, work on your store SEO, and make a global presence. Seek for the upcoming events and make yourself ready beforehand.