Knowing Your Customers Archives : The Maker's Business Toolkit

How to manage your handmade business in a recession

This year there has been not one, but two shocking election results that have resulted in the world stock markets moving sharply downwards. These shocks have caused people to be very concerned about the economy and, in some cases, fearful for the future. You might be one of those people or you might not. This post is not about politics. It does not matter if those people fearful for the future are right or wrong. It does not matter if their predictions become reality or not.

Why you want your customers to say NO.

One of the best pieces of business advice I ever got was to get my customers to say no more quickly and more often.
Don’t worry, I was really dubious too. I mean, don’t we want our customers to say yes? Yes to buying our products, yes to joining our mailing list, yes to following us on social media, yes to telling all of their friends about us. No really isn’t the outcome that we’re looking for.

How to handle customer complaints with grace

How you communicate with your customers is a vital part of your branding strategy and it’s so important that you get it right. When people reach out to you with a problem (or even a complaint), it’s an opportunity for you to improve your processes and make your sales...

IT’S NOT YOUR DAMN PRICES: Five Reasons Your Products Aren’t Selling

Do you ever feel like you’re working your butt off and just not getting anything to show for it? When your products aren’t selling and the things you’re trying just don’t seem to be working, it can be easy to blame your pricing. Your relationship with your pricing is...

What you need to know before considering ANY advertising for your art or craft business

Advertising is very mysterious to most of us. There isn’t a great deal of information out there about what it should cost or what we should expect to get from it, and it can be tempting to just “give it a go.” And while to some extent it’s true that the best way to...

The Customer Journey

For the most part, unless you are selling very low priced, impulse purchase products, your customers are unlikely to buy from you the very first time they see you. This is especially true if you are selling expensive or very large sized products. Your customers may...