14: Moving Beyond Etsy and Amazon with Email Marketing

Hello and welcome to the Product Growth Lab podcast hosted by Andrew George and Melissa Pickle. This is the podcast for creative product-based business owners who want to grow their businesses without overwhelm or massive investment. Each episode we explore actionable strategies, real-life stories, and insights from business owners and experts who know what it takes to succeed. Whether you're just starting out or looking to scale, we're here to help you grow your business on your own terms. Subscribe and join us each week as we dive into practical advice and inspiring stories to fuel your journey. This is the Product Growth Lab. Let's get started. Hello everybody and welcome back to the Product Growth Lab podcast. We are continuing our series on getting you off of marketplaces like Etsy and Amazon and over to your own site and making sales on your own terms. In the last episode, we covered how to drive traffic, which is what— the one that people are probably most interested in of this whole series. So if you haven't heard that, or any of our previous episodes, be sure and go back and watch all of them in this series. But here's the thing, traffic is only half the battle. Most people won't buy on their first visit, and even if they do, you don't want them first and once, you want them to be able to come back again and again. And email is the most powerful tool that you have in your arsenal to turn visitors into loyal buyers. So what we're going to cover today is why email is Even more powerful than social media. Feel free to fight me on that. How to grow your email list without being annoying. The must-have email sequences that every handmade business needs. And what to send if you hate writing emails, but you're not going to hate them by the time I'm done with you because we're going to make sales.

It's going to be your new favorite thing.

Why does email beat social media for sales? Basically, the kind of big overview here is that you own your email list. There's no algorithm deciding whether or not you show up in someone's inbox apart from spam rules. And as long as you are playing by the rules and follow some of the advice that we give you, that shouldn't be a risk. You have so much more high engagement rates. People actually open and read your emails instead of scrolling straight past like they do on social media.

If your stuff is even shown to your fans on social media, at least hopefully it's landing in an inbox.

It's direct, it's personal, and it helps to build relationships. When someone's on social media, it's so obvious that this content is going out to everyone. It's not very personal. When you're in your inbox, you have a bunch of opportunities to personalize that. And even when you are just sending a standard email that goes out to lots of people, it still feels much more one-to-one. Other people can't see into your inbox. There isn't the kind of community vibe that you have on social media, which benefits and drawbacks to that, but it feels much more personal. It's like having a conversation, and you can turn that into actual conversations, and that's where you start to build a relationship with your customers. And building relationships is key to being able to get lots of sales and turning people into loyal buyers. Okay, guys, into the next point. Email drives repeat sales. The real profit in your business comes from customers buying again. A lot of us focus on organic traffic, which is great, but as you grow your business, you're probably gonna start dabbling in paid media at some point. And getting that customer to buy the first time can be— break-even is lucky, and you can maybe make a bit of a loss on that first sale. So getting people to come and buy again and start to profit on the back end is key for growing business. And having email, being able to talk to the people who've bought from you before and getting them to buy again, is where real profit comes from. I know personally, and in a lot of the clients we work with, when they look into their stats, they're making far more sales from the email than their social media. Obviously those things are hard to track, but when you get into your stats, you're looking in the backend of all the software that you use. Have a look, how many of your sales are coming from social media? And if you're actively doing email, how many of them come from email? I find that in most cases, as long as you put in some sort of effort into email, that's probably where the bulk of your sales are coming from. Even if you have a tiny list, you might have, say, 1,000 followers on Instagram and like, I don't know, 30, 40, 50—

200 people.

Oh. No, I'm like, it can be super small like that. And even at that point, you can be like, okay, if I look at my traffic and my sales, it's the email that's driving it. You can have a way smaller list, but because of the kind of engagement levels that you get from email, you don't need as massive a following. You don't need to cover for all the people who aren't interested and don't see your stuff. You've got people who genuinely want to see yourself and they're being shown it in their inbox. So you can have way less followers, subscribers, and get better— or get equal or even better results.

I mean, these are much higher intent people here who are coming in who actually sign up for your email list versus like Following you on Instagram or any of the social, it's a very passive kind of thing. Like, oh, you're interesting. I want to see more of your stuff. But it's much less intense than someone who's like, oh, I want to receive emails from you. I want to get the updates. I want to know everything that's going on. It's a much more valuable person who signs up for your email list than who follows you on social.

Mm-hmm. And you also have to put out a lot less content. On social media, you need to be putting out content every day, sometimes multiple pieces, especially if somewhere like Instagram. It's like, really, you should be having some kind of static content, carousels, you should be doing stories, you should be doing reels. Like, there's a ton of different touch points over there, and you should do most of them daily. Stories, even multiple times a day. So it's quite a lot. Email, you can send as little as, say, once a week and be getting the same or even better results from that one piece of content. And I also think people, honestly, like, I see a bunch of the handmade sellers and they're scared to sell. And if you go on their social media, it, it just feels like a random personal profile and there's not a ton of product selling, which is very strange for a product-based business. But when it comes to email, people feel slightly more inclined to write an email that actually talks about products. So it's a little bit easier. You don't have— if you're not this big social creator, if you are a little bit more of a writer or AI user, you can get out an email that does— it's really great results and it's a little bit more salesy and it mentions your products. And you don't have to be able to— you have to master Canva to be able to create all these fancy graphics. You can take a template in your email software throw in a picture of your product, add some text, and it's done. Hit send. But the question I know is going to come up now is, okay, how do I actually grow my email list? And how do I grow it where I don't end up with a bunch of people who aren't interested? And the biggest mistake is only having one way to get people on your list. You need to get that email opt-in everywhere you possibly can. Use popups. I know everyone always says they hate popups and I hate, we all do, but they work. And as soon as they stop working, I will say, let's not use them anymore. But popups have this annoying thing where as annoying as they are, they also get people to the email list. For a lot of people I work with, that is where the bulk of their people are coming from. People are coming to their site, they're seeing the popup and they're filling in the email. As long as that's the case, I'm going to tell you to use popups.

I want to add to that as well from the consumer side. Like, we think of pop-ups as scammy maybe from like the seller side because we're the ones running it. But think about the consumer experience when they want to get on your email list. I was on a website yesterday looking at the products. We like, my God, I need to like make me an offer here. Going through their stuff, there were no pop-ups. I had to search the website to find where to put in my email. To sign up for their list and I didn't get a confirmation email, so I don't know if they even do anything. But if they can email me when they have a new product coming out, I am very likely to at least pay attention, even if I don't buy it. But yeah, so think about that from the consumer side. When they want to hear from you, you want that pop-up there for the person who's ready.

Yeah. Next thing though is your product pages. And not even just product pages, pretty much every page on your site. Where can you fit in a form? You can have it as part of the page, especially if you're doing something like a blog. Like when you get to that endpoint, you're like, okay, your call to action, like what you want people to do, can be, okay, fill in this form here. But you can also put it in the footer and then it's just a kind of one and done. It's on every page on your site. Embed that form, have a nice catchy headline, offer them something like get 20% off your next order, get free shipping, get a free gift, get— where is it? Get my download thing, whatever it is. Okay, I'm at 12 minutes already, but social media, that is— I feel like I've not been the nicest to social media today, but social media is a great way to get people on your email list. Yeah, social media gets people on the email list, and email list is where I get the sales. I think for a lot of people, they're directly trying to get the sale from social media. And just getting people to make a purchase straight from social media feels like a little bit of an uphill battle, whereas getting someone to give their email is slightly easier. That doesn't mean I never get people to make a purchase on social media, but for the most part, I'm telling them, get on the email list. On the checkout page, if you're on Shopify, this is super easy. It's as simple as tick a box, but have it where people can just tick a box. They can then tick a box as well that says, hey, email me with all your best stuff. There's countless other ways, but those are like the main ones. Let's get started. Do this and then come over to our Facebook group. You'll find the comment in the show notes and tell us that you've done it. Take some screenshots. I like to see them.

Because maybe I just tuned out what you were saying. I don't know. Where would you put an email signup on a product page? At the bottom?

If you do it in the footer, it's there on every page. And you can also have it where you have In your— I'm going to talk about Shopify. It's the thing we use and it's the thing we recommend. So I'm just— you can do all this on all the other platforms probably, but more complicated most of the time. But on Shopify, in your product page template, you can have it where at the bottom of that page you have a standard— say you're doing a discount and you're like, okay, want 20% off this product? Put your email in below. Discount is the one we talk about a lot because it's the easiest to set up and it's the one that most people are doing. But there's a ton of different ways to do this. You can do some sort of freebie. Do you have some sort of like download or a gift guide is another good one.

Yeah.

Quizzes. I've been into quizzes a lot lately. And if you are in the kind of industry where someone has to make some sort of decision on your product, like if it's skincare because they need a kind of specific routine. If you sell something that comes in, say, different scents, you go, okay, Do you like a more woodsy scent or a more floral scent? You can do a quiz to figure that out. Someone we know did kind of design stuff and they had their design style.

Yeah.

Yeah.

If you were to talk to an interior designer, how to figure out what your style is, what you like so that they actually understand you when you talk to them.

Yeah. If you're doing anything that you can have that say, okay, if you're struggling to decide if you need the What is it? Dry skin, oily skin, other types of skin. Like, take the quiz and we'll figure it out, and then I'll recommend here are the 5-step routine that you need. And not only have you given them better advice and made it easier for them to pick it, you've also just told them to buy 5 products instead of the one they came for, which I like that.

If you're like, and here's the bundle deal for all of them.

How can you build them for you? And you can also, when you're doing things like launching a collection, having things like waitlists where you promise, uh, things like early access, first access to stuff. If you are creating demand in your customers, if you have stuff and you launch it and it's a bit crickets, this might not work as well. But if you have stuff that sells out as soon as it comes out, and there's ways to make it where that happens If you start talking about, hey, get on the waitlist for this collection, or for Black Fridays where we talk about waitlists a lot, that can be enough of a draw in itself, and you can have that as well. So there's a ton of different ways to come up with lead magnets, and I'm sure that's an episode that will come out at some point where we dig into these in more detail. Okay, so the next thing I want to discuss is the must-have email sequences. People think that email comes down a lot to like the newsletters and having to send things every week, but if you look in the back end of any of our clients' stats, it's the automations that make the money. The one non-negotiable for any person with any sort of business in the world with an email list is a welcome sequence. Even if your welcome sequence is one email long for now, I'm like, you need something. Like Melissa mentioned that she didn't get confirmation when she sent someone's email list. She sent no information. They don't have a welcome sequence. Even just, hello Melissa, thanks for signing up, Andrew George. Like that's a better welcome sequence.

That's the thing.

But obviously we want to do a bit more there. And I have a ton of templates around this. Like I have a 5 email long sequence. I have a double that sequence. Like there's A ton of ways to do this, and again, that's a whole episode in itself. But the main things to include are a little bit about your story, why you start your brand, thinking about talking about benefits to the customer, not just, uh, here's how— like, I want to talk a lot about my business and me and why I'm so special. We don't want that. Um, kind of why that matters.

It's in it for them.

Yeah, I saw that there wasn't enough Brands out there who are making products for people with dry skin. It's why I started my business and it's against Sue because it's, oh, I have dry skin and I've noticed that too and I'm desperate for someone to do something about this. You want to mention your best-selling products in that sequence somewhere and give people a chance to buy them. You want to deliver whatever that freebie is with a discount code. If it's a download, whatever it is, be sure and make sure you actually give them it. And it's always good to put in a reason to take action now. Normally that's because the discount you're giving them is expired, it is going to expire, so there's not a lot of reason to take action. And you can do all sorts of stuff, countdown timers and things make that really effective. The next one, like our second most important, but I feel again it's a real non-negotiable, I'm like these all are equal to me, are an abandon cart sequence. So whenever someone starts to check out and then suddenly disappears, you want to get them back. 70% of people who come to your site are going to abandon their cart. And if you can recover even a tiny fraction of those people, that can be a massive difference. If you're making, uh, frequent sales, that can be tens, hundreds of extra sales a year just on this one sequence. These are also really simple. You want to remind them what they've left behind. It's good to try and answer any questions that you think they might have. Sometimes it's just, I couldn't be bothered going downstairs and getting my card. But sometimes it's, I couldn't find information about shipping on the website. Making sure those questions are answered in that email. Things around if you sell t-shirts, having a link to a sizing guide. Things like that, like whatever kind of potential objection. And sometimes it can be questions they have. There's also things like objections. If people are— say it's— say we'll go back to the skincare example. The customers are focused on things like natural ingredients. I want it to be cruelty-free, it can't be tested on animals, and you haven't made that super clear. Put that in that email. Say, we are the company that makes dry skin. Every single ingredient is natural. We have— it's cruelty-free. We don't test on animals. It's an eco-friendly packaging. Like, how many of the different objections that are kind of put in there? It ships next day. And like, how many objections can I possibly crush in that email? And it makes it much more likely to sell. I'm putting a little bit of urgency in there. You can be a little bit advanced and complicated to be able to say there's only 2 left in that email, you might want to hurry up and get that product. And you can add some extra emails to that sequence over time. You can try and offer them a discount to get them back. I normally do that once I've tried a couple emails first. And even if you don't have an actual email kind of system software set up yet, there's ways to turn that on in most ecommerce software. Shopify has it. Even if you're like, I don't email market yet, turn that sequence on because you're going to get some extra sales from it.

And these are like set it and forget it kind of things. Go in maybe once a quarter or whatnot and see what the stats are. And if something is not performing, you go in and look at it. But otherwise you get these flows, these sequences going, you set them up to go and you hit the run button and then you don't need to look at it again. These are easy.

Yeah. And the third one I want to cover is a post-purchase sequence. This is number 3. It definitely is the third down the list. But this is one that really helps you build that relationship and get those repeat customers. You're welcome. Are, when they place an order, they get the confirmation email. Hopefully they get some sort of shipping email. There's a lot of businesses that don't do that, tell you when your thing is actually shipped. Really?

Wow.

Don't be one of those people. Yeah, like tell them it's shipped, give them a tra— if you have access to a tracking number, give them it. That is a massive, to get people to come back again, they want to know that stuff. That, we'll stop there. The, hey, you've got your thing, that's it. Include more stuff. Give— say thank you. Say thanks for coming for the first time. Say thanks for coming back. Doing that split, super easy to do if you're using something like Klaviyo. Shopping online is a lot— it feels risky. It's that kind of— our brains are not that smart, really. And it's— even though it is, it's just, okay, what do I lose? This much money? Like how much of a loss is it really? But your brain doesn't know the difference between that and being like attacked by a bear.

So it feels like loss is loss.

So you want to do— yeah. And it's already taken up— people take action when the risk of not doing something feels worse than the risk of doing it. So it's like my— the chance of my— of getting rid of this dry skin is worse to me than the risk of losing the $20, that'd be really low priced, but it's $20 I spent with Andrew George's skincare brand to get rid of it. Like, I need to get over that point. But even when I get there, it's okay. Have I lost this money? Have I lost this money? Are my, are all my details being sold in the black market to Chinese hackers? Like, I want to know this business is legit. And following up and building a relationship does that. And then once I finally get it, I'm like, okay, Andrew's Dry Skin Skincare. Not only was he so good and offered me such good advice, the stuff came, it worked. I will buy this forever. Get me a subscription. But doing like a thank you email, offering some, okay, here's how to use it, here's the order to do them in, here's how to do them, here's what you should do in the morning, what you should do at night, and all that kind of stuff. You can also start talking about other products and get people to make their next purchase. Hey, you got that 5-step thing, but here's another product that would do well. Or maybe it's, okay, I know you got this stuff and I know my stuff is good and you're going to love it. Why don't you save a bit of money and I will ship these to you every 60 days? Because I know you're going to do that. You can get them into a subscription. So having really strong post-purchase email sequence, Encourages repeat orders and it makes people happy. Even if they never come again, maybe you get them to leave a review. And even if you don't get them to do that, you make it where they don't tell all their friends that you suck. There's no drawbacks to making a good post-purchase sequence. And so get that set up and that should be easy enough to do for pretty much anyone. But if you hate sending emails, what is it that you need to send? And I'm going to say something controversial here. You don't necessarily have to send emails every week. The point of having those other automated emails in the background is even if I get sick, I like, I get hit by a car, I'm probably gonna be able to ship anything out. But I know I'm in the wheelchair packaging up the orders and I can get to the door for someone to come and pick them up.

That's a fantastic email.

This will still go out even if I'm just busy or want to lie in today. I know that there's some automated emails going out, there's some processes going on in the background, an email that's still going out. Still send a newsletter at least once a week. But for those times when that just isn't going to happen for whatever reason, knowing that you have those systems set up in the background make this really easy. And you can have systems all over the place. Like if you have things like scheduled social media, so you know that there's some people getting your email list and that's building traffic. People are going to your site, they're getting a Band-Aid card. There's all sorts of things. Having things like ads set up, they run in the background to grow your list. So it's part of a whole ecosystem of stuff. But knowing that the emails are there, you know that some stuff is going to go. I get a report every week of my email sending and it will tell you like the total number of emails that have been sent from my email account. And if I'm being really active with my list, that can be like 6,000 emails or something. Then there's a week where for whatever reason, if I get sick or I'm really busy, I'll see I didn't send an email, but there's still 1,200 emails went out because people are doing things in the background. There's confirmation emails for people who sign up to my list. People make purchases and that sends out emails. There's other automated things like people have been interacting, so there's a sequence to try and win them back even when I don't physically send out a newsletter. And I know that my business can still run and still make some sales without me having to take any direct action. So that's why I'm like, those automations really are key. But when it comes to the newsletters, the tips are really just to think about what are you doing in your business? If you're launching new products, tell people about those products. Think about the views that you're getting, customers who send you their stories. Like, I often have conversation with customers. I think it's easier for me because my stuff is personalized and people want to talk about it like a good bit before they order. Sometimes some people just order and it's fine, but some people are like, okay, this is for someone's wedding and I need to write, and I end up knowing all about like people and their weddings. Like, uh, someone did like bridesmaids' gifts, they were going on a skiing break, and I knew everything about this person's wedding until like bridesmaids' thing. I know that I probably wouldn't go and share all her details, like, hey, Jane is going to this place on this date, this is where she lives normally, this is a good time to rob her house. I'm not going to do that. But I might say, hey, last week I was speaking to someone who's getting married, and I might tell a little bit of a story around it, anonymizing the details. Yeah, I thought about them a little bit afterwards and I thought, I wonder if that went ahead, because I think it was just before COVID so I don't know if they ever got to do this, Brick. And I kind of went to— but even now I'm gonna be like, okay, that's 5 years ago probably. I can still tell that story. It's like still within me and I can build it and tell me it seems like your stories don't ever expire. Um, so feel free to like think when people leave reviews, you can turn those into stories, you can share those reviews. Think about behind the scenes in your emails and on your social media too. People love to watch you making your stuff. Pretty much every single person on the internet has been like slowed their scroll and sat to watch someone making soap. Or candles or something. You just get sucked into the process. Watching someone knit something or crochet, it's the, it's that type of content. It's like that hydraulic press thing. I've watched a million of them for no good reason.

Color mixing, color mixing videos get me all the time.

So you have so much content there. The stuff that you think is boring is not boring. Like your sewing stuff, embroidery machines, obviously I know that. Set up a camera and let people watch it do its thing. They get mesmerized by the motion and stuff. And especially when you're trying to position yourself as this kind of expert and this person who knows what you're doing and your products are really high quality, being able to show, hey, here's me using that really good quality ingredients, here's me like hand stitching the leather with the finest threads from India, like you can show this, like you actually can dig in and zoom in and show, hey, here is it really. And then you're like the especially at Etsy, like Etsy just now, there's a lot of businesses that you're like, okay, should have seen them in their shop, and there's no way that you're making them for that, but they're dropshipping from China. You can tell that there's a lot of trust gone there because Etsy hasn't done a good job of stopping that. If you can, in your emails and across all your different channels, social media, and like in images on your site, or Etsy has a space for those images and stuff and videos, and actually showing, hey, I am Andrew, I am a real person, and I am doing this process. The people who genuinely care about getting a handmade product can see that you are doing that. And I often get asked about the— how much of your stuff should be value and how much of it should be promotional, and And the ideal number of emails that people send in a week is 3, which I know is like an extreme when they hear me say that. But I'm like, okay, if you send 3 emails a week, 2 of them are a bit more value, and that third one is where you go in for the sale. If you're only sending 1 a week, I would say split the email itself. Because you don't want to go— say you're like Build with 60/40 or something like that, right? Like they kind of advise to be like, okay, send 3 emails that are value and then send 1 promotional. That's— you're only selling tier list once a month, which I don't want to wait that long. So I would just like stack the email where it's like, okay, here's some value, here's a free thing, and hey, here's my paid thing. Like you can split the email itself.. And I think that's a better way to think about it when you aren't sending a ton of content out there. Go through your inbox, go onto sites like Really Great Emails or Mail.com and look for inspiration. You can load those into places like ChatGPT and say, hey, how can I use this for my business? That is everything we wanted to cover for today. If you want to use email, to get more sales, you are going to want to go ahead and grab our flash sale in a snap guide. That gives you everything you need across email, social media, and the whole plan of it to do a flash sale that you can run this weekend. If you want to grab that, go to theproductgrowthlab.kit.com/. Look at that I think the whole— I don't know what I did, but the whole lab site is done now. The membership one, like, it works, but like the plain website is just gone.

But I also think it adds extreme entertainment value at the end of these episodes when we're like, all right, thanks for tuning in to the Product Growth Lab podcast.

We hope you found today's episode insightful and inspiring. If you enjoyed the show, leave us a review. It helps us to reach more creative entrepreneurs just like you. Follow us on your favorite podcast platform and don't forget to join our community for more resources, tips, and support. Until next time, keep growing and creating. This is the Product Growth Lab signing off.