How Marketing Your Shop More Effectively Can Help to Offset the Volume Bonus Changes
Hi everyone,
In light of the upcoming changes to the Volume Bonus I am posting some things I have learned about driving traffic to your shop rather than just relying on the Marketplace. I’ve been with Cafepress since August 2001, the Marketplace didn’t exist then. In fact, it’s actually only been fairly recently (relatively speaking) the the Marketplace has become a factor in the volume of sales we all make. Personally, I’ll be losing money after the Volume Bonus change and no I’m not happy about it. But I don’t feel hopeless about it either. Because with the lower thresholds and higher percentages, it will be possible to make up that money or even exceed it as long as you’re willing to put in the work to drive traffic to your shops.
Below is a list of the things I have learned (most of them the hard way LOL) from my time at CP and from other very generous shopkeepers who have shared and continue to share tips on how to make selling your designs at CP as successful as possible. Disclaimer: I am not claiming to have all the answers. This is what has worked for me and for other people that I know. But you must be willing to experiment and find your own way – a lot of this is trial and error.
Focus on Niche Markets
Let’s face it, we can’t compete with the big box retailers. I found it more helpful to think of myself as a specialty boutique. In light of that – what I have done is open several different stores all focusing on certain niche markets that I felt were not being served as well as they could have been. I use google to research potential markets (for example dog lovers) and find out how many other stores – if any – are out there selling similar products to that same market. From there I will likely narrow it down even more (for example pug lovers). Try to be as specific as possible. So instead of having one giant store with a whole bunch of all over the place designs – I have a lot of stores each of which are focused on serving one particular market.
Target Your Audience
This is critical. You need to find out who your audience is in order to be able to speak to them effectively. I could use a lot of marketing babble to explain this (use personas to increase your persuasion architecture – yeah my brain turns off reading that too) but really all that really means is talk to your customers in a way that is meaningful to them. You wouldn’t necessarily speak to a dog lover in the same way you would speak to a music lover. You need to use language that is familiar and meaningful to the group you are trying to reach.
Product Descriptions – Google can’t find you without text
This is one of the most neglected and overlooked ways to increase your SEO and get higher page rankings on Google and the other search engines. Search engines need text – they can’t figure out what your website is about without it. Writing meaningful product descriptions and titles (it’s not a white t-shirt! It’s an Adorable Black Pug White T-Shirt) is an easy and effective way to drive traffic to your shops.
Quick Tips on How to Write Product Descriptions
Start with a “Call to Action†and then state the benefits of purchasing your product. Here’s the thing. You need to help people decide what to do. (Not - Here’s my adorable pug design - Try - Looking for the perfect gift for the pug lover in your life? An adorable pug t-shirt is sure to keep them smiling.) You’ve just made things really easy for the customer – you’ve told them that your adorable pug design is the perfect gift for that hard to buy for person in their lives who just happens to love pugs.
Organize by Design
This is part of niche marketing. If you are trying to serve a certain market then you have to let them know that you are carrying what they are looking for and you have to make it extremely easy to find what they are looking for once they get to your store. People who come to my pug lover store aren’t looking for t-shirts. They are looking for PUG t-shirts. They are looking for BLACK pug t-shirts. They are looking for black pug PUPPY t-shirts. And they can find that perfect and very specific design in my store because I’ve clearly titled all my designs and organized them into categories that make sense.
The side benefit to this is that a lot of affiliates organize their affiliate shops by design also. And they aren’t going to bother linking to your designs and promoting your products if you haven’t made it as easy as possible for them to do so. I’m an affiliate and I link to shop sections (using cpshop) so if I sell one of your products you will now get volume bonus on that sale.
Raise Your Prices
My markups are fairly high already. I will be raising them another dollar to offset my lost income from the Volume Bonus changes. I’m not worried at all about losing sales from this and I’ll tell you why. I know it seems counterintuitive but people simply do not shop by price. They really don’t. I didn’t believe it at first either. But every time I have raised my markups (and I do so regularly every year) it has only resulted in more sales not less. That’s right. Raising prices increased my sales. The reason is perception. In most buyer’s eyes – higher prices = higher quality. People place more value on higher priced items. They believe they are worth more – not just in cost in dollars but in value to their lives. I put a lot of work into creating and marketing my designs. The time and experience I put into my CP stores has value. So does yours. Why should your customers value your designs if you don’t? Never undersell yourself. You DO deserve to make a living at what you love. Act accordingly.
Constantly update
It's not enough to optimize your shop for google and then just leave it. One of the ways google decides how high to rank your shop is by keeping track of how often you update it. If you're not paying attention to your shop why should google? So it's very important to keep constantly updating your shop - add new designs, add breaking news, have sales, etc. It's not "build it and they will come" it's "keep constantly building it and they are more likely to come."
This is literally a volume business – the more choices you offer the more sales you’ll make
People like choices. If you have one black pug design they may look at it and go "That's nice. But I think I'll shop around at other stores and see if they have something I like better." And then they will leave your shop most likely never to return. But - if you offer 20 black pug designs they are most likely to go "Oh! Look at all these great black pug designs! Which one should I buy? I'll take this one!" You've satisfied their urge to shop around but kept them in your own shop!
Link Backs
Google likes to see people linking to you. The reason is because google figures if other people think you are worth linking to then you must be important and you go up in their estimation. But the kind of link is important. Preferably you want people who are relevant to your site (other pug related sites for example) who themselves have high ranking sites in google to link to you. There is a lot more to this that I don't have the time or space to go into here but I encourage you to investigate this on your own.
Press Releases
These are really easy to write and can have great results. I encourage you to check out the tutorials on prweb.com to learn how to write an effective press release. One of my most successful ones (it was written about the addition of plus sizes to my product line) was picked up by blogs all over the place and gave me lots of good links back to the shop.
Reaching the Press
There are all kinds of ways to do this and I don't have time to cover it all here but one of the things that helped me the most was this piece of advice - start local and work up to global. My first press was an article written about me after I sent a press release to my local small town paper. An editor at a larger regional paper read that and wrote another article. Suddenly I was an expert in the budding POD world (I wasn't LOL) but I got a couple of more articles in other papers out of it because the editors called to ask me questions about what it was like to sell t-shirts online.
Cultivate relationships with the editors of relevant sections of each paper. If you're sending a press release send it to a specific editor - not just to the paper in general.
I realize this is just the tip of the iceberg, but these are some of the things that helped me. When I first started at CP I met a few Shopkeepers who went out of their way to help me and I wanted to pay it forward. :-)
Mary
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I hope other SKers who are struggling will heed the advice.
