#87 - Why Handmade Sellers Who Skip Email Marketing Leave Thousands on the Table

Imagine waking up to new orders before you’ve even posted on Instagram or checked your Etsy stats. Sounds dreamy, right? That’s exactly what happens when your emails do the work while you sleep.

In this episode, Steph dives into why skipping email marketing is one of the biggest (and most common) mistakes handmade sellers make and how even a list of 100 subscribers can become a steady income stream.

You’ll learn:
💌 The simple maths behind email ROI (and how it adds up fast)
📉 Why relying only on Etsy or Instagram is risky
🌟 The hidden benefits of email marketing no one talks about
💬 Real stories from makers who built small lists and saw huge results

By the end, you’ll see exactly why email isn’t just another task - it’s your secret sales system.

🎁 Don’t forget to grab your course mentioned in this episode: The Maker's List Kickstart Kit & Course
👉 https://www.handmadebosses.com/offers/KM79eUH7/checkout

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🎙 Welcome to the Handmade Bosses Podcast with Steph 👋

If you’re dreaming of starting your handmade business or knee-deep in Etsy listings and feeling stuck - you’re in the right place.

I’m Steph - handmade business coach, Etsy seller since 2016, and founder of Handmade Bosses. I help makers go from overwhelmed to consistent sales (yes, even if you’re just starting).

🛍 Learn how to:

• Start and grow on Etsy

• Turn browsers into buyers

• Master SEO, branding, pricing

• Find your niche and ideal customer

• Scale beyond Etsy to your own website

💸 I’ve helped thousands of makers build profitable 4 and 5-figure shops — and in this podcast, I’ll show you how too.

✨ Free starter resources: handmadebosses.com/freeresources

🎓 Deeper help? Explore the HBSA, the SMS & more: handmadebosses.com/paidresources

📅 Join our Facebook group for free workshops: facebook.com/groups/handmadebosses/events

📸 Follow us on Instagram for tips and inspo: instagram.com/handmadebosses

Hit follow, grab a brew, and let’s grow your handmade biz.

Love, ...

Transcript

Picture this, it's Monday morning, you've opened your laptop and you've already had three new orders that day. You didn't post, you didn't chase the whole hashtag thing, you didn't even look at your phone yet, you haven't even opened social media. Now you might have done the doom scrolling in bed before you wake up, but you've not actually really begun work yet. That's what happens when your emails are doing the hard work whilst you sleep, okay?

And what happens is, is that most handmade business owners, they will think that social media is the be-all and end-all when it comes to, you've guessed it, marketing your shop. But today, I'm gonna show you exactly why that is costing you money and how a tiny list of just 100 people can completely change your handmade business. Now here's the problem, when you rely on only Etsy or only Instagram or only Facebook or wherever you kind of rely on driving your own traffic, when you stop posting, sales just dry up, they just vanish. You guys might have kind of experienced this before where you've had a break, you've been on holiday mode or maybe, I don't know, you've been poorly, something's happened and you stop posting and the sales just kind of dry up.

and it's not it's not that you're lazy right it's just that the system is almost kind of built against you and it's built to make sure that you are posting all the damn time now even a hundred really engaged subscribers can honestly become a potential consistent income stream when you know how to build that and what on earth you're doing. So I split this video into four bits. The first bit is we're going to be talking about the maths of email ROI, the maths of your email return on investment.

A quick stat here, the average return on a £1 email spend, whatever that is, that can be a pound of your time, that can be a pound on ads that you spent, that can be £1 in you investing in email, the likely return of that is going to be £36. So that is insane, right? That's a 36 return on investment, return on spend, okay?

So for every £1 you spend, the average is that you are going to get 36 back. But let's break that down into real numbers, okay? If you have 100 email subscribers and 20 of those people open your emails, which is a low open rate. To be honest, our emails get between 50 to 60, but let's just keep it conservative.

And let's say 10 click. Out of those 10 clicks, you're going to get two buyers. Now, you probably want to work this out for your own conversion rates, your own pages, your own listings, but what you have to basically keep in mind is that people who are on your email list are already going to be warmed up to you. They're already going to know about you.

They are already going to be like aware of what you do. So your conversion rates are going to be so much higher than that of social media because you are doing the email thing. Okay, now I'm not saying you have to stop posting on social media because you have to get people to your email list in the first place. And don't worry, we're going to be talking all about that.

But the thing here that I really need you to take away from this is that do not sleep on email. Trust me, for a long time I was just like, email's dead, like whatever, like social media is the way forward, we need to all be doing video, blah, blah, blah. But then I actually sat and I worked out what my return on investment was for my email list. and I was shook because I was looking at it and I was thinking this is something that we've not even really put that much effort into and yet it's bringing us in consistent traffic, it's bringing us in consistent sales.

I'm going to be going over like the pros and cons and all that kind of stuff but like the biggest one that I want you to know now is that when someone signs up for your email list they are opting in to hear from you whereas on social media. They're kind of not. They're kind of just shown whatever the algorithm wants to spit out at that time.

And that's when you don't really get a lot of comments, a lot of hearts, a lot of anything because they're just kind of being served up whatever the algorithm, Instagram, Facebook, whatever, kind of things you need to see. But with email, people are actually opting in. Now that's the first thing. The second thing is that you don't have any competition in people's inboxes.

The likelihood is that they've only signed up to one person who sells jewellery, one person who sells crochet stuff, one person who sells mugs. They're not really going to sign up for five or six different places. They might, but it's very, very rare. The competition is so much lower.

Whereas, on an algorithm, If you click on one t-shirt maker shop, the chances are that you're going to get shown a bunch more. So let's just go back to those numbers real quick. Let's say your average transaction value is £30. That means that for your 100 subscribers, your 20 opens, which is low, your 10 clicks, you're going to get two buyers.

So if your average transaction value is £30, that's £60 per email. That's not bad going, right? And let's say you do four emails a month, roughly one a week. That's £240 a month, £2,880 a year.

That is absolutely crazy, right? Now, the second part of this is that I really want to talk about why social media alone is not enough. And I have got some notes here so if you see me looking I just want to make sure that I stay on topic and I don't really want to start yapping on about something else. But what I really want to talk to you about is the fact that if you post on Instagram and you're having a good day, you know what I mean, where it's like a lot of your followers are online maybe it's a good time for you to post.

Maybe one post might reach 3% of your followers, okay? Now, I would say that that could be up to 5%, it could be up to 10, it really depends on what time of day you are posting, right? But we know that organic reach on social media can really differ depending on the day, the time of day, your target audience, the time of year even. If your target audience are parents and you're posting at like 3pm on a Tuesday, you can imagine that people just are not really going to see it because they're doing the school run, right?

And we know that with Facebook, if you're doing the same thing, your posts are only going to get shown to a very small amount of the people that already follow you. And it's a bit like renting your audience. Now, The comparison that I like to have here, it's a bit like having Etsy versus your own website. People go, oh, your own website, we need to be doing that because it's ours, we own it, it's this, it's this, it's this.

But you have to work really hard to get the traffic sent to you. Whereas Etsy, it has the built-in traffic, but the fees might be a little bit more. This is how I view social media versus having your email list. Your email list, it can be tricky to start because of the tech stuff.

Not impossible but it can be a wee bit tricky and don't worry I've got something coming up which is going to show you exactly what you need to do and it can also be tricky to get people to your email list, get subscribers to your list. Whereas social media can feel easy because you look on your stats and you're like, oh, my reel got like a thousand views, 2000 views, right? So that's where I like to kind of like look at them differently. Some people have one or the other.

Some people have both. And it's really up to you kind of how you're feeling about it. Really what I need you to understand is that social media is fab. And once you've cracked it, it's really, really good because your audience is already on the platforms.

They're using the platforms. So it makes sense for you to be in front of them. However, social media alone is not enough. because as you've probably figured out already, one week you could be getting a lot of views.

The next week, not so much. The third thing is the hidden benefits of email. They are so, so good. The first one is trust.

You are in their inbox, not shouting into a feed. And I feel like with email, you don't have to do the clickbaity weird sort of stuff that you have to do with social media. Does that make sense? You know, like when you do like the dancey reels and like the lip syncing and all that kind of stuff with email, it's plain text.

and an image. So that's great because if you are someone who's like, I find taking photos really hard, I find videos so weird to make, I don't really want to show my face, I feel like I just don't really understand what I'm doing, what I'm saying, then email is like the golden ticket because it's text and maybe an image or two and that is it. The second thing is control.

You decide when you want to promote, how you promote it and what you want to say. It's not like, oh, Instagram doesn't want you to put a link here, it doesn't want you to use hashtags, it doesn't want you to do this and this and this and this. You feel like you have to have a social media degree half the time to get what's going on right now. But with email, it's very simple.

The whole premise of the mechanics behind email hasn't really changed. Again, it's just a text image, a video link maybe. You might see a GIF or a poll or something in there. But it's very, very simple.

Very, very basic. And you get to control how your message comes across. Now the other thing is that you can test really really well with email because with testing on social media it's kind of that thing where no two days are ever really the same so testing can work and it does work and I'd recommend you do it but it can be quite tricky to have that fair test whereas email you absolutely can.

One of our makers actually, she sent a email out about her new Christmas ornaments and added a line at the end that said, PS reply if you want a custom color. And that one sentence in her emails turned into six custom orders in a day. I find that email gives you feedback loops that social media never really will. And it's just really, really cool.

Now the fourth part of this is that I really want to go over like the common mindset things, the common blocks, I guess the common excuses that people have for not starting an email list. Because actually a very small percentage, when we polled our audience, actually have an active email list. Maybe they've got one floating around somewhere, they kind of started it up a little while ago, didn't really do anything with, didn't get any subscribers to it, so just kind of like gave up on it. Now, the first thing is I don't know what to say.

Well, I have actually created for you a really low key, easy breezy course that's going to show you how to do everything I've just said in such a simple, easy way. In fact, you could get through it in two, two days, three days max and get your list up and running and get your first subscribers in ASAP. And it's called the Makers List Building Course and Kit because I'm actually giving you a shed ton of stuff in there that is going to make this whole thing easy. So for example, going back to that thing of, I don't know what to say, we have templates, we have things that give you that, that literally walk you through, change this, change that, send, done.

Something that a lot of other people say is, I'm not techie. I don't know how to set this thing up. Like I've heard now you have to have this and this and this. I don't really understand that.

A lot of the tools are drag and drop now. It's so, so easy. And plus, in the Maker's List building course and kit, I'm giving you the tech walkthroughs that you need to be able to get this done. Alright, so just get it done, get it out the way, within an hour it's going to be set up and done.

Okay, now the other one that I hear a lot is, I feel like this is just something else on top of my list, I feel like I just don't really have time to do the whole email thing. Well, this is the interesting thing, is that just one hour a week of dedicating to your email list, and to be honest, it takes me probably 15 minutes, if not 20, to write an email, so an hour is kind of overkill really, but let's just call it an hour. That can replace hours of daily posting without seeing anything.

You know what I mean? So it's kind of like, okay, let's look at the return that we get for our time from social media versus email, okay? Now let's do a little comparative character thing here, okay? And I would love for you to just kind of like recognize which one you're leaning closest towards.

So Sam posts daily on Instagram. She follows trends. She refreshes her Etsy stats hourly because she's like obsessing over that result. One month she gets one big sale week, then followed by three to four really quiet weeks, like there's no consistency at all.

She feels exhausted and she's almost like convinced herself that Etsy's like turned her shop off, something's not right or she's missing that secret source. Now Lydia took three days, she took this course and she was like, right, that's it. I need to know exactly what I need to do and that's it. And I just, I'm going to put aside three, three days.

I'm going to get this, this thing done. And she created her freebie. She just, she really just completely nailed it. She built a free Canva landing page, and do not worry, I'm going to show you exactly how to do that.

I promise you it's so much easier than it sounds. Then she added her link into her Instagram bio. So now she's got email and Instagram working for her together. And then she got 97 subscribers, new people, into her business in just six weeks.

Now that's absolutely crazy, right? And the big picture thing here is building your email list is something that you own. It's a part of your business that will forever be yours, unless people unsubscribe, of course. But building your list, it isn't busy work, it's a safety net, and it honestly, honestly is.

Because when you think about it, with your email list, wherever you decide to sell, let's say next year you're like, I don't want Etsy anymore, I want my own website. Those list of people are going with you wherever you go to sell, right? And it means that the next time Instagram glitches, or the algorithm slows down for whatever reason, know, whatever happens, you still got people absolutely ready to buy from you, okay? Now, next week I'm going to be sharing with you exactly how to grow those first 100 subscribers to your list without tech headaches, overwhelm or anything like that.

So, I really, really hope that you will stick around for next week because I'm really going to be digging into that. And do not forget to hit subscribe wherever you are consuming this, YouTube, podcast, wherever, and leave me a comment if you can. It really means the world. I really, really hope that you have enjoyed this and do not forget the Makers List Building Course and Kit.

It's going to be so, so amazing for you. But for now, thank you so, so much for watching, listening, and I will see you all real soon. Bye everyone.