How to Create Customer Conversations Via Email This Autumn

Your website is your online shop and there are many ways you can recreate online the methods you would use to sell your craft offline. In this article, we are going to look at how you can make your online shop more of a hub of communication and a place customers want to return to!

One aspect of selling arts and crafts is that it is personal, and getting out and about to fairs and shows brings with it the pleasure of meeting lots of lovely people who appreciate and want to purchase your beautiful handmade items. But how can you replicate this personal aspect of your trade online?

Well, there are various methods you can use that enable you to open up that communication with your audience and one of the best is via email. Creating a list of addresses of the people who have shown an interest in your products is a great idea as it will be yours to keep. Your website can help you to nurture and grow your email list so that you can continue to have conversations with your customers, long after they have left your online shop. This means that they are much more likely to come back to you and consider buying from you again.

Think about it, if you had a shop in the high street, then bumped into your customers regularly and chatted about how business was going, how they were doing and the latest news, they would be most likely to come to you if they wanted to buy a special gift or a handmade item. That’s how an email list works. You can have those conversations regularly with the people who have already visited your website.

But how do you obtain the email address of someone who has simply visited your website?

Well, the answer is that you have to give them something of value to obtain an email address. On arrival at the home page of your website, your visitors will be pleased to find that you are giving something away for free that might help them, and they certainly won’t mind giving you their email address to receive it. That’s how the conversation starts.

So the first thing to do to build your list is to:

Create an attractive lead magnet on your website

A lead magnet is something you offer in return for contact information. It could be a “how to”, a pattern, a cheatsheet, a discount code or even an ebook. The visitor then gains access to your free resource by giving their email address. You send them the resource automatically and they are added to your email list. When they receive the free resource, trust between you starts to build which allows you to begin a relationship with your subscribers.

It’s a good idea to position the free resource on your homepage or one of your high-traffic website pages in the form of a pop-up. You can time the pop-up so that it doesn’t appear immediately – it’s up to you to set the number of seconds before it appears. In the same way that you would not leap on a customer and start talking to them the moment of entering a shop in the real world, most people don’t want a pop-up appearing before they have had a chance to look at the website page. In a real shop, you’d want to give them a few moments to have a good look around at your well-crafted items before politely asking whether you could help or if was there something specific that they were looking for..? Pop-ups too can be polite and less obtrusive!

Now you have your lead magnet on your website housed on a high-traffic page (often the home page) in an attractively designed pop-up. Your customers are starting to leave their email addresses because they all want to know ‘How to…….”

So let the conversations begin!!

It’s entirely up to you how you choose to engage with your email list. Many people create a newsletter to give people regular value related to their products. Depending on how busy you are, you could send out an email weekly, fortnightly or monthly with insights, updates, stories or discounts around the times of year when people are most likely to be looking to spend with you.

Then once you have shared a bit about yourself, let your audience have their say!

Host an online webinar!

Webinars are the go-to learning platforms today and offer an excellent opportunity to build your email list. As an expert in your field, you can host a free webinar on your area of expertise. Imagine being able to show a demonstration live online, as you would at a craft fair, of the wonderful time-proven process you follow to produce your amazing crafts.

People love to be let into the secrets behind what goes into creating a thing of beauty (you don’t have to reveal all your secrets of course if your process is part of your USP!) Furthermore, these days you can even buy webinar software that allows you to host live events with attendees, and it will all run seamlessly without a hitch.

Not only this, your participants can comment in the live chat, giving you invaluable insights and the opportunity to answer and engage with them in a way that you would not otherwise have had.

The best part about hosting a webinar is that people don’t mind signing up for them since they’re free and require little to no investment (except of course of their time, but this is time well spent, learning).

As long as you provide enough value in your webinar, people will have no issues giving you their email address in return. 

• Plan the details of your webinar—topic, platform, date, time, and duration.
• Create a landing page mentioning all the details for the webinar with a sign-up form. Make sure to include a short form with fewer fields—best to have the name and email address only.

When you have done all of the above you can promote the webinar via social media and spread the word in your network. Then, as you now have the email addresses of the participants, you can set up an automated email series to send them your event link, a reminder on the day of the event, a thank you email to the participant for joining, and then another email to say thank you once the event is over.

Finally, once you have created all of this new business, don’t forget to make sure that you have your insurance for artists and crafters in place! If you are new to selling arts and crafts online, why not give us a call and Naomi or Sam will talk you through the insurance for artists and crafters that we offer. Craft Insurance have been providing insurance for artists and crafters for decades, so please do get in touch and we’ll help you to find you the correct insurance tailored to your unique requirements.