Two makers do the same craft fair, on the same day, in the same town. They both meet around 1000 people. They both take just over £300 by the time they pack down at five.
When they come back to do the same show six months later, one of them has already had three online orders from the same customers she met at that fair. And they’re coming back to see her.
The other one has had none.
The difference between them is that one of them collected email addresses (and emailed later) and one didn’t.
If your income is unpredictable and it’s difficult to generate interest from social media in between shows, it’s worth thinking about whether you’re in the same boat as the second maker.
Working really hard for every sale. Starting every show from zero. Fighting for attention from new people and letting your previous customers go without hearing from you.
Inconsistent income is one of the most common problems for makers and handmade business owners. And the cause is often that you’re not allowing your revenue to grow by following up with the people who you’ve already met, and the customers who have already bought from you.
You’re focusing on the wrong half of the marketing
A lot of makers spend most of their marketing energy on finding new customers. Posting to social, applying for fairs, refreshing Etsy listings.
They’re constantly looking for new people to sell to.
But they’re not doing very much to keep the customers they’ve already got.
Nurturing relationships for sales later isn’t as sexy as getting a ton of views on social media. You don’t get the same kind of immediate validation (or crushing disappointment I guess).
It’s not like hitting the jackpot. It’s more like putting £1 in a savings account and watching it (very) slowly grow.
And in our dopamine-addicted world that doesn’t feel like a very exciting thing to be doing.
But building an audience and developing a strategy to nurture them until they’re ready to buy, and then maintaining a relationship with them so that they can become repeat buyers – that is what starts to smooth out your sales over the year and fill in the gaps between craft fairs.
And that is exciting.
When you can sell to your existing customers a second or third time, you’re not starting every month from zero. You’re not even starting every show from zero, because you can invite your own customers to come and see you there.
When you don’t have a way to reliably contact your existing customers and the people who’re interested but not yet ready to buy, you’re working much harder than you need to.
Every month, you’ve got a fresh set of strangers to find, to persuade, to sell to, and then you start again the next month, and the next, and the next.
That’s why it’s inconsistent. Because it’s like rolling the dice each month.
Every craft fair or in-person event is a meeting with customers that could support your business for years
This is the opportunity I think a lot of makers I talk to are missing. They walk into every craft fair, market, show, or open studios event, treating it as a chance to make some sales that day.
Which it is, of course.
But the transaction on the day is only part of the value of getting to meet that customer. The relationship that could follow is potentially a much bigger opportunity, and it so often gets forgotten in the rush to sell something now.
Any in-person selling event can give you three things, beyond just sales on the day.
- Invaluable customer research
- Audience growth
- Sales from people who already follow you and are only there because you invited them.
I can’t tell you how many times I took part in Open Studios events and had people travel from really quite far away to see me and my work. And almost no one else was doing it. A lot of the other artists were relying on footfall from the event, and sales on the day.
And I think that’s a mistake. Because sales on the day are done as soon as the event ends. The relationship with the customers and potential customers you meet can keep paying you for months and years … but only if you have a way to stay in touch with them.
Otherwise, you’re making a small sale at the expense of the truly valuable asset.
The thing that turns the meeting into a long-term asset is an email address. That’s the most reliable way to stay in touch, and the way you turn one sale into many.
The maths of repeat versus one-off
Let’s say your average customer purchase is £30. You meet 500 people at a fair, and 30 of them buy something. That’s £900 on the day.
If those 30 customers buy from you once, that’s the end of the story. £900, and you go and find another 500 strangers next month.
But if you can keep 20% of them interested enough to buy from you one more time over the next year (just one more £30 purchase from 6 of the 30 people) that’s another £180 a few months later.
Without another fair, without another stand fee, without standing all day.
Now multiply that by four or five fairs in a year and that’s the difference between sales that are sluggish and unpredictable, and a steady flow of orders running underneath everything else.
The maths gets more dramatic as you increase the number of people you interact with over time.
A maker doing eight fairs a year, with 30 email signups per fair, who can turn 20% of them into people who make one more purchase, has added another £1,440 over the course of the year.
From people she’s already met. Without doing another fair.
And that’s without accounting for the fact that many of these customers will buy from you many times over, and that you have a chance to sign up even more people at the show next time.
The only thing you need to do is sign people up on the day, and send a few emails over the year.
And a nice bonus is that an email list can also turn a loss-making craft fair into a profitable one.
Over the years I have had several craft fairs where I lost money on the stand fee but met a customer who went on to buy repeatedly from me.
This includes one of my top 3 worst ever events for both footfall and sales on the day, which was saved by someone I met who didn’t buy that day but did make several large purchases from me over the next few years.
Those relationships more than make up for the loss on the day.
And it works for higher priced items, for commissions, for gift items, for greetings cards, for soaps and cosmetics, and more.
Email is where you stay in front of past customers
Social media can help to get you in front of a lot of new people. But it’s email that will help you nurture and sell to them.
The customer who bought from you at a March fair is very unlikely to see your November Instagram post. The algorithm doesn’t know she met you. It has no reason to show her your latest Reel.
And she’s not searching for you. She probably doesn’t even remember your business name.
She just remembers that she bought a fabulous printed scarf from a great little fair of independent businesses.
But she will see, and probably read, your November email … if you signed her up.
Because email doesn’t filter you out if you’re not getting enough likes and comments. It doesn’t decide that you’re irrelevant and this person doesn’t want to hear from you again.
Email lets everyone be grown ups. We say yes to getting messages. We get messages. And when we don’t want to get them any more, we unsubscribe.
No one else decides for us. It’s a direct connection with the customer where everyone knows where they stand.
And it’s not just more guaranteed visibility. It also works much better for sales than social media.
Because people aren’t seeing your email while scrolling an infinite feed of dopamine hacking videos featuring people trying to flip water bottles or cut things in half.
In their inbox things are calmer. And they’re used to being sold to there. It’s not as much of an annoyance as it is in a place you go for entertainment.
All else being equal, people who have already met you in person, and have signed up for your email list are significantly easier to sell to than people who have never met you and just follow you online.
Because the level of trust is so much higher after meeting you.
They know you’re a real person, running a genuine business and if they order something they will get it. It might seem like the bare minimum but it’s definitely not guaranteed these days from someone you find online.
They know the quality of your items. They know the rough sizes and the rough price level.
All of this removes a lot of barriers to buying online later
And it’s email that keeps you in front of them long enough for them to decide they’re ready to buy.
The smallest thing to start doing today
Sign up with a mailing list provider. It doesn’t really matter which one. Mailerlite has good features and a generous free tier but the tool really doesn’t matter as much as just getting started.
Then collect some email addresses at your next show, even if you’re not sure what to do with them yet.
Put out a sign up book, and ask people if they’d like to join.
Don’t overthink it. You don’t need to offer freebies or incentives, unless you want to.
Most people who like your work and don’t hate emails, are going to be happy to give you their email address just to keep in touch with you.
Feeling shy? Here’s what you can say.
“Would you like to get my emails? They’ll keep you up to date with my upcoming shows and the new products I’ve got.”
Then within a few days of the show, email the new subscribers you collected to introduce yourself and point them to your online shop or a list of your upcoming events.
That’s it. You’ve got an email list and now you can start emailing them more regularly with new products, new events and even run sales and events.
The difference this makes.
Growing an email audience isn’t an overnight win. It’s slow, steady work, but over time it builds into something extremely powerful.
Maybe your first email goes to twenty people. The next one to thirty. The one in September to ninety. The one before Christmas to two hundred.
By the following spring, you can send an email each month and know you’re going to get a handful of orders each time because each time you email, some of the people on the list are ready to buy from you.
Add in some automation and now you’ve got emails going out every day, without any more work.
It might be slow, but the numbers get big faster than you think.
Sales is all about numbers. How many people see the thing you’re offering and what percentage of them are interested enough to buy at the time you offer it.
If your sales are inconsistent, it’s often because you’re doing it the hard way. Showing your thing to lots of people, but in a place where they’re distracted, so the percentage interested enough to buy is low.
Consistent sales come from building a smaller audience of people where a greater percentage are interested enough to buy, packed full of people who already know you, already trust you and maybe have even bought from you before.
If you grow that list of people over time, eventually there’s a good chance that enough people are ready to buy any time you send an email.
That’s how you smooth out your sales.
And if you’re not on my own list yet, you can subscribe here. I send a weekly email to makers running handmade businesses, with tips and strategies for building a profitable business from the things you make – see what I did there 😉
