5 Tips to Supercharge Your Online Jewelry Sales
1. Create an Ecommerce Website for Your Jewelry Business
It doesn’t matter if you’re selling handmade jewelry, fine jewelry, custom jewelry, ceramics, or other creative products. One thing is for sure, your business must have a robust online presence. It’s how your independent jewelry business will survive and thrive in this “new normal.”
Even if your in-person shows get canceled, your wholesale customers stop buying from you, or your Etsy shop shuts down, you’ll always have your website to fall back on.
These days, it’s super simple to create a website or Shopify store.
Sadly, many independent jewelry designers, makers, and creatives procrastinate putting up a website for their jewelry businesses. They’ve grown accustomed to primarily selling on third-party platforms like Etsy, and they find it unnecessary to have their own ecommerce store online.
There’s nothing wrong with selling on
third-party marketplaces, like Etsy, but be warned that you could be jeopardizing your business if you rely on them.
One of our students encountered a tragedy when they relied on Etsy as their only sales platform.
They were earning six figures on Etsy, until a hurricane hit their town, leaving them without power or the ability to fill orders for a week. Despite their previous stellar reviews and reasonable explanation, Etsy still shut down their jewelry business almost overnight.
There are more horror stories about putting all your eggs in one basket by relying on one selling platform for your business. In fact, I’ve been there myself.
Back in 2008, my jewelry business primarily relied on wholesale. That’s why when the recession hit, my first jewelry business was wiped out, along with the wholesale companies I did business with.
With the pandemic and current economic uncertainties, having a jewelry business can feel very daunting. But if you ride the e-commerce trend and persevere, you will eventually experience financial security doing what you love. And it’s absolutely fulfilling!
2. Develop a Success Mindset
Before you can begin to supercharge your online sales, you must conquer your mental roadblocks. Your money story could be fuelling or stiflinge your success.
You don’t need to reinvent the wheel, just follow what successful jewelry brands are doing:
- Invest in growth
- Approach problems with curiosity
- Never give up
Let me tell you the story of one of our students, Emily Johnson. She started her jewelry business by selling fine jewelry through in-person shows and selling pieces in her studio.
She wanted to make sales without needing to be physically in front of her customers. She tried selling online, but she failed because she had this mentality that fine jewelry can’t be sold online.
She got frustrated and reached out to Flourish & Thrive Academy
Emily overcame her online sales challenge using the tools we gave her and by learning about The Desired Brand Effect methodology.
After taking action and implementing our strategies, she grew her sales from $2,000 per year to selling $60,000 the next year!
All entrepreneurs will experience frustrations and challenges along the way. So you have to develop a success mindset, push through, and find a way to hit your goal.
At Flourish & Thrive, we have the tools, community, and programs specially designed to help jewelry designers and makers.
You can also listen to our free podcast, Thrive by Design. Every week, I drop in-depth marketing strategies, interviews with experts, and actionable insights straight to your earbuds.
3. Look at Your Numbers
Don’t be afraid to look at your numbers and evaluate your business.
When you start making decisions based on data, you’ll stop wasting time on marketing and sales tactics that aren’t working for your business.
The common problems for of jewelry designers, makers, and other product-based businesses regarding online sales are:
- Their audience is not big enough, and they don’t know how to attract new customers to their website
- They have no strategy on how to make consistent jewelry sales online
- Their sales aren’t growing quickly enough to make up for their costs and expenses
- They hit a growth or sales plateau
- Their online sales are declining
All these problems boil down to this: They have no metrics to identify what is or isn’t working in their online business.
As for others, they simply avoid looking at their numbers because they believe that they’re not a numbers person. Or they think analyzing
data takes too much time. But mostly, they just don’t know what the key metrics to supercharge online, and e-commerce sales are.
You need to know these three essential metrics so you can save time and focus your energy on what moves the needle in your online business:
- Traffic
- Conversion Rate
- Customer acquisition cost
Website Traffic is the number of unique visitors your website gets per month. Knowing this will give you an idea of how many people are
intrigued by your brand and products. And we’re not just talking about website sessions; we’re talking about new visitors that visit your website at any given time.
Conversion rate is the number of visitors buying from your store or taking a
desired action. The standard industry conversion rate is 1%. So if you’re aiming to have one sale a day, you must get at least 1,000 unique visitors per month to your website.
Customer acquisition cost is associated with attracting and converting a new buyer. The more pieces you sell to someone you’ve already paid to attract, the more you spread out the customer acquisition cost.
4. Nurture Relationships With Your Existing Customer Base
It’s 10x more expensive and 80% harder to sell to a new customer than to an existing customer, so you must build relationships with your current customers.
In fact, many established businesses aim to only break even on the first sale to attract customers. Then they start making profits on follow-up sales from the same buyer.
When you’re buying someone’s attention or paying for ads, it’ll cost you more every time you want someone new to pay attention to your brand. You need to scale desire and get more of the right kind of people ready to purchase from you.
Here’s how you can get more of the right people to buy from you:
- Develop your collection and brand assets so that they speak to your ideal customer
- Clearly define your dream client avatar
- Understand your dream client’s buying behavior, so you’ll know how to attract them to your website to shop
5. Leverage on Email Marketing
One of the best ways to drive traffic, increase conversion and nurture your customer relationshipss is through Email Marketing.
Unlike social media followers, you ‘own’ the email addresses on your list while those people are engaged and active. You can simply email or message someone directly whenever you want because they’ve opted-in to receive messages from you.
In fact, statistics show that email marketing yields $44 for every dollar you spend. That’s a 4400% ROI!
Want some ideas on how you can build your email list? Here are a few to get you started:
- Develop a lead magnet or quiz where people opt-in to your email list where they get incentives in return
- Post links in your social stories to invite people to your list
- Have your audience from retail events and pop-ups sign-up to your email list
- Drive your social media followers to sign-up for your VIP or Insiders Community
- Encourage your customers from third-party platforms to sign-up to your list through gift cards
And if you’re still wary about sending emails to your list, thinking you might be bugging them… here are more email marketing stats you need to embrace:
- 61% of consumers still prefer to be contacted by brands via email. (Statista)
- 60% of consumers say they’ve made a purchase due to an email marketing they received. (OptinMonster)
Now, let me introduce one of our students, Alex Camacho, and tell you
how she supercharged her online sales.
When Alex came to us, she had already built a fairly successful business, had 35,000 Instagram followers, and projected annual sales of $65,000.
But despite the many followers, her sales didn’t increase at the same rate. Through Flourish & Thrive, she learned how to leverage email marketing and shifted her focus to developing her VIP email list.
She refined her strategy to give people incentives for being on her VIP list, including early access to her new collection. This enticed many followers to sign-up, and she started emailing these subscribers regularly.
When Alex launched her new collection, it immediately sold out within her VIP list. Her Instagram followers couldn’t get in on her pieces, and it created a serious FOMO in her followers. As a result, more of her Instagram followers started to joinget into her list, so they too could get first dibs on her collections.
Alex used our proven system to supercharge her online sales and ended the year with over $330,000 in sales!
And it’s important to note that Alex did not have a big team behind her to achieve this.
So if you want to get the exact strategy that Emily and Alex used to grow their jewelry sales online… Join my free Masterclass!
