The best customer for your online craft business is the one who comes to your craft website, buys something, is delighted with it and returns time and time again…

A couple of hundred of those and you’d be set for life, right?

So how come so many crafts websites leave it completely to chance? Doesn’t it make more sense to get some details from that customer so you can follow up with them?

Let’s take that further. What about getting details from people who just visit but don’t buy on that occasion. Truth is, that’s probably the majority of people who visit your site. Most people are casual browsers at first, shoppers later. It would be nice to be able to get that casual browser’s details so you could follow up with them, wouldn’t it?

Especially when all you need is their name and email address.

We call it email marketing and if you’re selling crafts online it’s one of your most powerful tools.

The good news is it’s easy to do, very time and cost efficient, and has the potential to multiply the income from your craft website. So let’s look at how you set it up.

Firstly you want to offer your customer something of value in exchange for their info. If you look top right on the pages of this blog I’m offering a free craft business “fact file” for those people who join my “newsletter”. The book is packed with valuable information, yours for free. In exchange you give me your email address so I can keep you up to date with ideas, tips, offers, whatever I find of use to people running a craft site online or thinking about starting one.

It’s something of value in exchange for your email address so I can keep in touch.

The beauty of the book is that although it took me time and effort to write it and put the information together, its a digital book so it costs me nothing to deliver whether one person wants it or ten thousand.

Could you put together something like that for your craft business? A booklet about how to benefit from your products, for example? An example I’ve given elsewhere is for a candle maker to write a booklet on how to use candles to dress a room. If you make beauty products it could be about some aspect of skin care. If you’re a jeweler, how about explaining the meaning of certain gems?

It doesn’t have to be a big book, a dozen pages will do it. Just something of perceived value.

The other option, perhaps an easier one for many, is a simple discount for people who become “members” of your site. It’s easily worth giving people five or ten per cent off future orders in exchange for their email. After all, these are people that are showing a strong interest because applying for a discount tells you that they have at least the intention of buying eventually - otherwise, why apply?

Next, you need to get the form for your craft website or blog. This is simple too. You could find a bit of code to do this yourself but then there are management issues, and the dreaded “spam”. If you send out lots of emails, however well meaning, there’s a chance that a great many of them will get caught by anti-spam measures.

The sensible alternative is to choose one of the two companies who are experts in this area, Aweber and GetResponse. For just a few dollars a month they will manage the whole thing for you.

They’ll give you the code to put on your site, they’ll gather your visitors email addresses and all you have to do is put together one email and they’ll send it out to everyone for you. The big advantage they have is that they work with all the email providers to ensure that the overwhelming majority of your emails don’t get “trapped” but get through to your customer and do the job.

At the moment both are offering a 30 day risk-free trial. Pricing is very similar so you need to check out the sites properly to assess which is right for you.

Aweber here.

GetResponse here.

The inevitable question is which I recommend. In fact as I run several sites I like to split my usage so I don’t have all my eggs in one basket. Both are extremely good and I’d have trouble choosing between them. Aweber have been around longer, GetResponse are slightly cheaper at the moment - but that can change.

Both these service providers are excellent - I wouldn’t be without them. There’s far more to their services than I’ve included here, and you really need to explore their sites to see how you can make best use of them in your craft business.

I’ll be going into the benefits and possible uses in more depth in other posts but the best thing to do now is dive in and get started collecting your visitors info. That list of names and email addresses you’ll build is a rock-solid foundation for moving your craft business forward in the future.

If you’ve got any questions, why not post a comment and I’ll see how I can help.

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