If you’re selling crafts online you probably keep in touch with your customers via email, right? Somewhere on your computer you have a list of everyone who has bought from you, their name and their email address. If you’re not doing that, you’re letting money get away. Someone who has bought your crafts once could well do so again.

If you can keep them up to date with new products, special offers, etc., you make money much more easily than if you have to keep finding new customers. Right?

But what about those people who visited your site but didn’t buy? They visited and now they’re gone. You can track numbers of visitors easily enough but you have no idea who each one was.

What if you could find out? What if you could get those visitors to give you their email address so you could keep in touch with them too. Wouldn’t that be a good idea?

Of course it would - potentially very profitable too!

Well you can’t do it for everyone one of them, but you can do it for some, and those that will give you their details have great potential because they’ve already proved that they’re interested - otherwise, why would they bother?

So how do you do it?

This site has an example up on the top right of each page. You can use something similar on your blog or website. We offer a free newsletter and a very useful booklet, “The Craft Success Crash Course!”. You would offer a newsletter too (or you might like to call it “email updates”).

It’s also a good idea to offer an incentive, as we have done. It doesn’t have to be much but it needs to have a good perceived value. You could create a downloadable booklet, or you might want to offer a discount on a first order. It’s well worth a few dollars to get a new customer who might end up buying time after time.

Now if you’re thinking this might be a bit difficult to set up, and that getting it on your blog or website might involve coding and stuff that you just don’t understand, I’ve got some good news for you.

For just a few dollars a month there are several service providers who will handle it all for you.

We call the systems used for collecting the information and delivering the newsletters “autoresponders” and delivering up to date news to your craft customers is just one of the things they can do (we’ll go into that in detail in another article).

For now, all you need to know is that you sign up for an account and organise your settings once then after that it’s all automatic. Your prospective customers fill in their details and are automatically added to your list. The system can also redirect them to a page where they can get their booklet if that’s what you’ve offered, or give them a welcome message.

When you want to send everyone a message you just go to your autoresponder and write it once, then the autoresponder sends it to everyone on your list. It will personalise it to each individual name too so it looks as if it came straight from you. It’s all done online so you don’t have to worry about installing software on your computer either.

So what does something like this cost? Well there are three top providers and, to be frank, I wouldn’t consider using any of the lesser services. Two of them will charge you $19.95 a month which, given the features, is not a lot.

However the third, EmailAces, will charge you virtually nothing for the first month - just $2.95 - and then a very low $8.95 a month after that. That gets you management of a list of up to 2500 people which is more than enough for most craft businesses. If you do eventually need more, they have very competitive upgrades.

I thoroughly recommend them - but then I would because I use them. They’ve got the same services as the others and less than half the price. Excellent support too.

If you’re not using an autoresponder on your website or blog you’re letting customers for your craft business get away. If you consider a small investment of $8.95 a month could be recouped by just a single new customer, it would be silly not to do it really.

For Email Aces website click here. If you need any help with it drop me a line here.

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