How to Promote Your Etsy Shop
by 
Lina Thorne • Updated · Posted in Marketing
Etsy is visited by around 500 million people every month. That number includes not only shoppers but sellers, too. It’s an extremely popular marketplace and as you can imagine, the competition is only getting higher and higher. Don’t get discouraged by that, though! It’s perfectly possible to build a successful business on Etsy.
Say, you’ve already gotten pretty good at your craft and the quality of your handmade creations is rather astonishing. But if you decide to turn your hobby into a business, you’ll need to pick up a few marketing skills. For a beginner seller, producing beautiful and good-quality products isn’t enough. Naturally, it will help you gain regular customers and build your brand in the long run. But right now you need to attract your first customers and get your first sales. Etsy’s market is quite saturated. You need to know how to cut through the competition and reach your target audience.
Marketing is all about being creative and experimenting. You need to try out different tactics to see which one works best. If you want to get noticed by potential customers, move your listings up the search ranking and increase your sales, you’ve come to the right place! This article will teach you how to promote your Etsy shop. You will learn several marketing tips and tricks, find out about the importance of photos looking good in your listings and how exactly you need to optimize them.
How to Promote an Etsy Shop: Tips and Tricks
Okay, let’s get right into it. This is what you need to do to promote your Etsy shop.
Switch to Customer Mentality
Try to take a look at your Etsy shop through the eyes of your potential customer. You’re not a seller all the time, right? You buy things for your daily life or for your business. When you buy something, what do you tend to hate? What annoys you? Maybe there was this one time when a seller ignored your questions and took forever to ship an order? Think of any bad customer experience that you’ve had. Ask your friends and family if they had any bad experience when shopping online. Then learn from this bad experience. Avoid these mistakes in your business.
For instance, don’t keep your customers waiting. This is true for both communication and order fulfillment. Try to answer any questions that a customer has as soon as possible. And once an item sells, don’t take forever to pack and ship the order. Be transparent about the quality of your product. Communication and respect for your customers are keys to building a successful business.
Niche Down
Etsy’s algorithm pays attention to keywords relevance in titles and descriptions. Your keywords should be accurate and spot-on. A proper title with all the relevant keywords will help you boost the visibility of your listings. If you type in “Bath bombs”, you will get the most popular listings at the top, plus the overall number of search results will be much bigger. A new seller won’t be able to compete with that. But if you search for “natural bath bombs” or even “natural strawberry-scented bath bombs”, there will be fewer search results. Thus, you need to be specific when writing your titles and descriptions. This way, there’s a higher chance of you getting noticed by customers that want to buy what you have to offer. If you don’t niche down, it will be extremely hard for people to come across your listings.
It’s crucial for every listing to be fully optimized – keywords, infographics, SEO, photos, etc. How can you find effective and correct SEO keywords? Well, when doing product research, you should pay attention to the keywords that your successful competitors use. Analyze your competitors’ listings, get some keyword ideas. There are also online tools like eRank and EverBee that can help you determine which SEO keywords might be of use to you.
Keep in mind that hundreds and hundreds of new listings are created on Etsy every single day. And newer listings are usually placed higher in the search ranking. If you want Etsy’s algorithm to view your listings as new ones, you need to repost them and thus keep your product more or less higher in the search results.
Go the Extra Mile
If you’re just starting out it’s crucial for you to really wow the customers and earn their trust. If you include something extra in your packaging – and if the packaging itself is very nice – this will make your customers feel special. And people love that! Sit down and brainstorm some ideas. Remember that people love gifts, freebies and discounts.
You can leave a free sample of another product or a flyer with a discount code for their next purchase. If you are selling handmade jewelry, put your product in a nice pouch or a pretty paper jewelry box. In addition to this, people shop for gifts on Etsy, so if your packaging looks beautiful there’s a higher chance that people will buy from you.
Positive Reviews Matter
As a beginner seller you need to focus on getting your first customers and making your first sales; earning money is secondary at this point. A new Etsy shop has a zero feedback rating and, thus, zero social proof. This needs to be changed as soon as possible. Etsy will promote items that are making sales and getting positive feedback. If there’s some traction, some sales, this will communicate to Etsy that people are interested in your products and thus Etsy’s algorithms will push your listings higher, so more people could see it.
It’s okay to ask for reviews. You can include a Thank you note into the package and in this note you can tell a customer a little bit about business and ask for a review. You can message a customer and kindly ask them to leave a review. Remember to be respectful, though. Don’t annoy your customers. Don’t bombard them with tons and tons of messages. Also, you can ask your customers if they have any constructive criticism, if something can be improved. This will help you provide a better customer experience. But it’s better if this constructive criticism will be in your private messages or email rather than among Etsy’s public reviews.
Promote on Social Media
It’s okay to be quiet about your hobby. But your business? As many people as possible need to know about it. That’s the key to success. So, promote your Etsy shop on Facebook, Instagram and especially on Pinterest as people often go there for gift ideas, decorations ideas, etc.
It might be a good idea to create a Facebook group for your Etsy shop and invite as many people as you can there. In this Facebook group you can do some giveaways: ask people to share a post or give a shoutout to your group, tag other people in the comments and in exchange for that they can get a product for free. The best thing that you can do is to ask people to invite their friends to join the group. This is how you can spread the word about your business.
You can connect your social media accounts with your Etsy account. This will make it so much easier to promote your Etsy shop and share important updates. On social media, you can tell people about the latest listings that you’ve added, positive reviews, and important milestones like selling your first 100 items. Share some behind-the-scenes content – for instance, show people a short video of you working on your next handmade creation. Share discounts, coupons or information regarding an upcoming sale. Also, provide various tutorials or tips related to your niche. This will help you establish yourself as an expert and drive traffic to your Etsy shop.
It’s definitely a good idea to participate in various online communities. Join online forums, social media groups, or Reddit communities related to your niche. Offer advice, engage with potential customers and share your products.
Think About Collaborations
First of all, you can try collaborating with influencers. Think whether you have someone with a bit of a following among your friends and acquaintances, then offer a free item in exchange for advertising your Etsy shop. If you don’t have anyone like that in your social circle, go on social media and look for some local influencers with some small, yet active following. Then offer them to collaborate.
Also, if you happen to know some other sellers on Etsy, you might offer collaborating with them. Yes, the competition is pretty high, but you can surely use that to your advantage. Collaborate with fellow sellers on giveaways or even joint social media posts. You can do cross-promotion or create some products together. It’s perfectly possible to tap into each other’s audience and build relationships within the Etsy community.
Take Amazing Photos for Etsy
It doesn’t matter whether you want to sell products on eBay, Etsy or any other online marketplace, your listing photos need to look good because this is how you can catch customers’ attention and convince them to make a purchase.
You don’t need to be a professional photographer to take amazing photos. But you need good lighting as your images need to be well-lit. You can invest in some professional equipment or use sunlight. Don’t shoot under direct sunlight, though. It will create deep and sharp shadows. Buy a light diffuser or get some greaseproof paper that will help you diffuse the sunlight.
Make sure to take multiple photos and use different angles. Show some important details. People tend to trust listings with multiple photos from different angles as they can see the product properly. Remember that online shoppers can evaluate a product and decide whether they want to purchase it based only on photos.
Your product photos should be crisp, sharp and clear. In addition to this, all the focus needs to be on the product – this is both literal and figurative. If you are using a digital camera, don’t use a super shallow depth of field. It’s okay if the background is blurred, but all the details of your product should be in focus.
And speaking of background – it shouldn’t be busy or cluttered. There shouldn’t be any distractions. You can have a monochrome white or black background, but it’s not essential. Lifestyle photos are quite popular on Etsy as they help customers visualize using items in real life. For instance, if you are selling wall art, your listing photos should show your wall art hanging on a wall. Take a look at the listing photos of highly successful sellers and get some ideas from them.
Here’s a tip. When shopping online, it’s not always possible to determine the size of a product. Surely, you can add measurements in the description. But if your customer thinks that your product is bigger than it is, there might be some disappointment and confusion once the item arrives. And you don’t want that. Include a photo that communicates the actual size of an item in your listing. You can put a ruler next to your product, for instance.
Image Optimization Is Important
When promoting your Etsy shop, one of the key things is to make sure that all your images are optimized. This is probably as crucial as taking amazing photos. Because what’s the point of pouring so much work into creating amazing images if they are going to look blurry and of poor quality after you post them? Yes, this can happen if you don’t optimize your images.
First of all, the size of your image should meet Etsy’s size requirements:
- Mini shop banner - minimum 1200 x 160px
- Big shop banner - recommended 3360 x 840px
- Profile photo - 500 x 500px
- Shop icon - 500 x 500px
- Listing image - recommended around 1500 x 1500px or 2000 x 2000px
- Team logo - 170 x 100px
- Thumbnail - 570 x 456px
If your photos have a different image size, you’ll need to resize them. For instance, you have an image that’s 450 x 450 pixels, and you want to use that image for a listing. That size is too small. But with the help of a good image resizer you can easily upscale an image and turn its image size into 1500 x 1500 pixels. Don’t worry about its quality getting worse. Thanks to AI technologies, when an image is upscaled, its quality can be not only maintained, but also improved. Your images will be clear, sharp and meet the necessary size requirements.
What if your image doesn’t have the right aspect ratio? For Etsy’s shop icon you need a 1:1 aspect ratio. For a listing your image can be 1:1 or 4:3, but 1:1 aspect ratio is preferable. And what if your image is 2:3? In this case, you’ll need to change the aspect ratio by cropping an image. What’s more, in some image croppers, for instance, Watermarkly, you can choose the necessary aspect ratio and change the image size at the same time. For instance, you can turn a 4000x6000px image (2:3 aspect ratio) into a 2000x2000px image (1:1 aspect ratio) within a couple of minutes.
Here are some free online cropping tools:
It’s important for your images to have not only the right image size, but also the right file size. File size is how much space an image takes up in memory storage. If you upload an image with a big file size, it might take a while for it to load, when your listing is visited. Nobody likes waiting. So, if your product images won’t show up in the blink of an eye, people will close your listing and go elsewhere. To avoid this, you need to compress your images to decrease their file size drastically: you can easily turn a 10 MB image into a 1 MB image. There will barely be any quality loss. You won’t really notice the difference. Your listing photos will load lighting fast, while looking sharp and clear.
Here are some free online compressing tools:
Lastly, make sure that images you want to upload are in the correct format. Etsy supports JPEG, GIF and PNG, however, there shouldn’t be any transparency or animation as they aren’t supported. If your images are in a different format, you’ll need to convert them. For instance, if you took your photos using iPhone, they can be in the HEIC format. So, you’ll need to convert HEIC to JPG.
Promote Your Etsy Shop With a Watermark
Watermarks are usually associated with protecting images from unauthorized use. And surely, they can deter some lazy thieves. You can also utilize watermarks to promote your Etsy shop. Here are some tips on how to do this:
- Design your watermark properly. When brainstorming some watermark ideas, remember that your watermark should contain your logo or your shop name and be visually appealing, but not too obtrusive. Your watermark shouldn’t distract from the product in your photos.
- Position your watermark correctly. It should be visible without obscuring the item in your photos. At the same time, it would be better for your watermark to cover at least a little bit of your product. Don’t place it on a monochrome background, otherwise it will be super-easy to remove it.
- Be consistent. Don’t design a new and entirely different watermark every time you want to add it to your photos. A watermark can promote your shop only if it’s consistent and memorable. It’s better to use your brand logo as a watermark as people will remember it better, which is something that you want. Use the same watermark or a couple of similar watermarks across all your product images to create a cohesive brand identity. This way, customers will recognize your products and your brand easily.
Watermarking your product photos can really help you effectively promote your Etsy shop, protect your intellectual property, and build a strong brand identity.
In Conclusion
Etsy might be a highly competitive marketplace, but it’s still possible to build a successful business there. You just need to be a good marketer and employ a few marketing tactics and techniques. Remember that in marketing it’s crucial to experiment and adapt. What doesn’t work for others might work for you and vice versa. Now you know how to promote your Etsy shop in several different ways as well as how to optimize your listing photos. Hopefully, this article has given you some ideas and tips that you’ll utilize in your marketing strategy.