The Big Launch

After creating around 50 branding templates and setting up the listings, I prepared other areas in my shop, like shop policy, about section, shop banner, shop announcement, message to buyer after purchase, etc.

I also let some of my friends and family know about the shop. Some of them purchased a few designs and left positive reviews. This is a great way to greatly boost customer confidence for a new shop. It’s hard to get sales for a new shop with no reviews.

Getting Initial Sales With Etsy Ads

One of the best ways for a new shop to get in front of Etsy shoppers is by Etsy ads. Ranking organically for keywords could be difficult even if you do everything right with titles and tags (Read more in my Etsy SEO course).

I turned on Etsy ads for all my products once I got my positive reviews. I set a budget of about US$5 per day and let it run for a week.

After a week, there were some stand out listings that got some sales (keep those in minds for future design ideas). I turned off the ads for listings that have a lot of views but no sales. 

Even if Etsy ads is not bringing you a big profit, it’s worth it in my opinion to get initial sales and reviews.

How I Chose The Next Batch Of Designs

From previous steps, I have some product categories that I haven’t had the time to create.

I also have some other methods to figure out what to create next:

• One of the most direct ways to get new product ideas is to look at your target customers’ favourites on Etsy. Pay close attention to people who buy or favourite from your shop. Their favourite list usually reveals some product ideas that are related but you haven’t thought of.
• Browsing label printing services online - A lot of them have done the market research of what customers need. They have a list of uses for their different label shapes. So I can take those product niches to research whether they are viable on Etsy. From this, I’ve got ideas to make coffee bags labels and clothing price tags. SCREENSHOT
• Looking for trending products and create templates for shops selling them. One of the biggest trends during the pandemic is face masks. Because of that, I created a care instruction/usage guide template for face mask. So sellers can print it out to include in orders

Some of those designs, like the coffee bag label and face mask instructions, have generated quite a good amount of sales for my shop.

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Trying Social Media (Setting Up And Results)

I also created some social media accounts: Instagram and Pinterest, two of which that are quite popular among Etsy sellers.

I didn’t have too much success on them yet. The reality is that each of the social media platform needs a lot of attention and time if you want to succeed on them. I chose to invest my time to create new designs that serve my target market.

That being said, social media is something that I will work on and visit again in the future.

Achieving Steady Sales

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After about a month, I start seeing steadier sales. In about 2-3 months, my shop was making about 10-15 sales per day, which was a pretty amazing results.

One of the biggest contributing factors is that I didn’t stop researching new products and creating designs that my target customers are looking for. I pushed really hard in the first 6 months and constantly making new templates. The shop has about 350 designs at the moment. 

The more designs the Etsy shop has, the more opportunity that you can target new keywords to reach more customers. A wide range of long-tail keywords is a key factor for fast growth on Etsy.

Another recommendation is to provide exceptional customer service, and follow up with customers’ requests and questions. 

To speed up my day-to-day customer service tasks, I’ve come up with a number of message templates. After getting many messages, I see that most customers have questions on a few topics: template resizing, printing issues, custom orders and not able to find the order email. So I wrote an appropriate response template for each of those topics and tweak them for each customer. This works well and saves time in the long run.

I also end most of my messages with ‘Feel free to let me know if you have any questions or if there's anything else I can help :)’ which lets customers know that I’m always happy to help with their problems. This in turn help improve the chance of them giving positive reviews like this:

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