If you’ve been running your handmade business for any length of time, you probably already know that you should have an email list.
But you’ve never set one up.
Because there’s no time, and you’re not sure where to start, and it feels like one more thing to figure out on top of everything else you’re already doing.
But an email list for a handmade business isn’t just another marketing channel.
It is the most important one.
Less dopamine-hijacking than social media. Less hands-on than in-person selling. Less expensive than paid advertising. Less scary than PR.
But more effective at making money.
That’s what email marketing does better than anything else. It turns attention into sales. And, over time, it smooths out those sales so that they’re more consistent.
For most of us, that’s the holy grail, and yet so many makers either don’t have an email list for their handmade business or haven’t emailed them in forever.
And here’s the best bit. An email list makes all of those other marketing channels more effective in generating sales.
It takes the time and effort you spend on Instagram or at shows, and it multiplies it. And then it multiplies it again. And again. And again.
So if you’ve been feeling burned out by social media, frustrated by Etsy and exhausted from doing in-person events, please listen to me when I tell you that there is a way to make everything you’re doing work more consistently, with less effort.
And the sooner you get started, the better.
Let’s look at why.
Each channel in your marketing is doing a different job.
Each channel for your marketing serves a different purpose, and you shouldn’t treat all of them as a way to make sales.
Because sales isn’t a one-step process. Sometimes people see our thing, love it and decide to buy it immediately.
And if the world were full of those people, we’d all be selling like crazy. But it isn’t.
For most of our ideal customers, sales is a three-step process: Attract, Nurture, Convert.
They need to find out about your thing, think about it for a while, and then buy it.
Social media is great at Attraction. You have the opportunity to get in front of a lot of people for very little money.
It’s not so great at Conversion, especially if you’re not advertising.
Email, on the other hand, does Nurture and Conversion really well. That’s why it’s the most important channel for your marketing.
Because “Attract, Nurture, Convert” doesn’t work if you’re attracting tons of people, but you don’t have anywhere to nurture or convert the people who aren’t ready to buy instantly.
So why doesn’t social work well for making sales?
Because of the algorithm.
Any channel where an algorithm gets between you and your potential customers makes it tough for you to be confident that your nurture content is even being seen by the people who need to be nurtured.
Combine that with an algorithm that doesn’t really like you selling things at all and is going to limit your reach on any sales posts, and you’ve got ineffective Nurturing AND ineffective Conversion.
In general, algorithmic platforms should be used for visibility and getting in front of as many people as you can. But when it comes to nurturing them or selling to them very explicitly, you really want to do that in a place where you can be sure that the majority of people are actually going to see the messages.
In other words, social media is for exposure, and email marketing is for conversion. You use the social channels to find people, and you use email to actually sell to them.
Algorithmic marketplaces are a little bit different because they don’t penalise selling – it’s what everyone’s there for.
Etsy and similar platforms put you in front of people who already have their card out, looking for something specific to buy. So Conversion is happening here, but it’s not always happening consistently.
Why?
Because of the algorithm.
It makes you do a lot of work to get noticed, even by people who have already bought from you. And if there is any Nurture going on, then it’s Etsy getting the benefit, not you.
Algorithmic platforms can give you lots of eyeballs. Lots of attention. That’s why they need algorithms in the first place – there are too many people for everyone to see everything.
But trying to nurture and convert potential customers there is hard work and not very effective.
It also makes it REALLY hard to implement one of the most effective tactics for increasing overall sales – selling to repeat buyers.
So the best strategy is to use them for what they’re good at – visibility – but do the nurture and conversion on your email list, where it’s much easier.
It’s much easier than fighting a platform to try to get something that it doesn’t want to give you.
The thing about platforms you don’t own
When you build your audience on a platform that limits your access to the audience you are building, you’re always running the risk that this audience can be taken away from you, without warning, and without much explanation.
Accounts get locked. People get wrongly flagged as breaking the rules and lose access for weeks while they wait for a human to look at the appeal.
Algorithm changes can cause your previously successful content strategy to become obsolete overnight.
Etsy can suspend a shop while it investigates a complaint, real or otherwise. Independent marketplaces change direction, and suddenly, your business and products aren’t wanted.
This doesn’t happen to an email list for your handmade business that you own and run yourself.
When you spend years building a following, you don’t end up losing it and having to start from scratch.
You own the data, and you are in control of how it is managed. It’s a direct connection between you and the customer.
That comes with some responsibilities, but it also means that you control the information, and the only way that you stop being able to contact these customers is when they tell you they don’t want it anymore.
Doesn’t that seem fairer? And it’s certainly much better than having a platform just shut you down on a Thursday afternoon, 5 minutes after you left the house for a week’s holiday.
And it gets easier over time.
Every craft fair is hard work. Every week, sitting down to write your social media posts feels like a drag. Every refresh of your Etsy listings feels like time and money wasted.
You’re always starting from scratch to reach the same people.
But email isn’t like that. All the work you do on it, all the time you spend signing people up, all builds on itself until it’s a list you can turn to whenever you’re launching a new thing, or you need to make some sales.
At first, it feels slow, and emailing 20 or 30 people feels like less of a sure thing than posting to a much larger following on social media.
But your email subscribers steadily creep up as you gather ten emails at this show, a couple from each social media post, and some more from Etsy customers who signed up for a repeat customer coupon code.
And it starts to build momentum.
Sure, you lose some subscribers every time you email, but that’s okay, because your list is growing with genuinely interested people, rather than bots or people who are still doing follow for follow.
Every email address you collect is someone you can sell to month in, month out (for as long as they’re happy to hear from you) without paying for another stand fee, or another round of ads, or spending another month trying to please the algorithm.
Over time, you’ve got 200 people, then 1000, then 5000 people. And they’re a stable audience because people only leave when they choose to.
Maybe you can even stop doing craft fairs altogether. Maybe you can stop making Reels. Maybe you can sell out a collection of one-of-a-kind products without ever having to advertise.
That is a fundamentally different deal from the one you have with every other marketing channel.
Where the selling actually happens
Okay, so an email list for your handmade business makes building and maintaining an audience easier. But why does it make selling easier?
It’s because it gets read by people who have already raised their hand, in a place where they’re not as distracted.
Someone on your email list has, at some point, said: yes, I want to hear from you. They’ve put their address in a form, or written it on a sheet at a fair, or replied to one of your emails to keep them on.
When that person opens your email, they aren’t scrolling past. They’re reading, because they asked you to contact them.
They’re also not in their inbox to be entertained or to fight about politics. They’re not scrolling an infinite feed of cat videos and rage bait.
They’re in a different headspace, and that changes a lot.
Remember that making sales is not a one-step process. It’s three steps. Attract, Nurture, Convert.
Any piece of marketing content you put out is doing some combination of three things:
- Reaching new people who have never heard of you.
- Staying in front of people who know you but aren’t ready to buy yet.
- Converting people who are ready to buy right now.
Social media does Attraction well, and is okayish at Nurture. Email does Nurture very well, and is much, much better at Conversion than social will ever be.
Every email address you add makes it more likely that every email you send will result in sales, because every time you add one, you have more people to sell to.
That momentum doesn’t really happen on the social side, because the audience is rented, the reach is uneven, and the people scrolling aren’t in the mood to buy.
This is why email outperforms social on actual sales for almost every handmade business. It is the channel where the audience is warm enough to listen, where enough of the audience see the message, and where some percentage of them are warm enough to buy.
Why so many makers skip building an email list
When I talk to makers about email, a few things come up again and again.
1. Lack of time.
“I don’t have time for this. It’s too much work. It’s too much effort. It’s one more platform. I don’t know how it’s different from the stuff I’m already doing.”
Hopefully, if you’ve read this far, you now know why this is the channel that you should always prioritise over other work.
The social platforms want you to feel like it will tank your reach if you don’t keep churning out content. But that’s a never-ending workload.
This is the way you get out of that trap.
2. They hate getting marketing emails themselves
A lot of people say this, but is it really true?
Do you really hate hearing from the places you genuinely like to shop at, showing you their new things and saving you from trawling round the zombie high street when you need a birthday present?
Or do you hate hearing from people that you’re not really interested in, where you just haven’t bothered to unsubscribe?
The people who have signed up to your list WANT to hear from you. They’ve signed up for it. If they don’t want to hear from you any more or they just need to take a break, they can unsubscribe.
Don’t assume that their preferences are the same as yours. If you can contact people in this way, then you should, because it benefits your business.
Let people decide for themselves if they want to hear from you or not. And definitely don’t worry about being salesy.
3. They don’t understand how it fits into their marketing strategy, or they don’t have one
A lot of makers aren’t recognising how email fits into a marketing strategy and how it’s actually the most important piece.
And as a result, they are working too hard for mediocre results, without realising that there is an answer right in front of them.
4. Social media is more comfortable
It’s what you’ve always done, you’re (somewhat) comfortable with it, and there are loads of people showing you how to do it. Email is unfamiliar, so it gets left until later, and the familiar work expands to fill the time you’ve got.
Plus, a lot of makers create social media work that is unintentionally aimed at other makers. Other makers get it. They like our work. They share our posts. They reply to our stories.
Talking to each other is something that’s much more comfortable for us than talking to customers.
So our social media posts start to include behind-the-scenes content other makers find interesting, the in-jokes other makers laugh at, the language other makers use. It feels productive because there is engagement. But the engagement is coming from the wrong people.
Of course, some of them might buy from us one day, but most of our peers are more interested in talking to us about business than they are about buying something today.
It’s harder to do this via email. You don’t get the same validating feedback, and the sense that all that engagement is worth something.
Most emails feel a bit salesy. Because we’re talking to people as if they are potential customers. It’s one of the reasons it gets put off. And also one of the reasons it works so well when you finally get around to doing it.
Start now.
Setting up an email list for your handmade business is like planting a tree. It can’t start growing until you do it.
Don’t wait for another algorithm change to make you kick yourself that you didn’t do it sooner.
You will have shows and fairs that you are attending in the next few weeks, where you can start collecting emails and building your list. So start there.
The good news is that there is much less to figure out than you think.
Start with the simplest version of an email tool you can find. (Most of them have a free tier that covers a list of a few hundred people.)
I think Mailerlite is a great option for people just getting started with email. It has a generous free plan that includes automated emails, has a lot of features for product sellers, and is very simple to use.
The good thing to remember is that with an email list, you own the list of subscribers. If you pick the wrong tool, you can export your list and move to another one, so no need to agonise over the decision.
Start signing people up at your next event and, when you have time, create an online form so that the people who find you online can also sign up.
Then send an email. Show one thing you’ve got for sale, and go from there.
What to do if you collected some emails ages ago and never sent anything to them?
It really depends on how long ago you collected them. Would these people remember that they signed up to hear from you, or would they immediately run to unsubscribe or report your email as spam?
If it has been over six months, I think most people would, so I would draw a line under it and start from now.
Anything under six months, and they might still want to hear from you. If it’s just a few email addresses, I would send them a personal email, reminding them that they signed up for your list at an event, letting them know that you haven’t been emailing regularly, but you’re going to start and asking them if they still want to be included.
Tell them what they’ll get – reminders about shows and events, first dibs on the new things and maybe even a cheeky discount or two – and then give them a link to your online form and ask them to sign up again if they’re still interested.
That means you avoid the spam complaints from people who can’t remember who you are, and people who are still interested can sign up again.
A small thing you can do this week
If you want to see how the email side of this works in practice, the simplest thing is to be on the other end of someone else’s list and watch what they do.
Sign up for emails from some retailers you like, and some makers who you look up to, and pay attention to what they put in their emails.
If you don’t like getting lots of email, you can always filter them into a folder and read them when it’s time to write your next email.
I also send a weekly email to my own list, with practical things for makers running handmade businesses. You can subscribe here.
The work I do on Instagram, on my blog, and through advertising is the visibility job – getting in front of new people.
The email is where I get to tell you what I have that can help you to achieve the things you want to achieve with your handmade business. The shortcuts, the tools and the systems. I also do that on the platforms I don’t own, but it often doesn’t work as well.
That, in the end, is why your handmade business needs an email list. Now more than ever, because the platforms we have all been borrowing audiences from are getting less reliable, not more, and the only channel that no algorithm can take away from you is the one many makers still haven’t started.
So start the list. Send the first email. And go from there.
