As the Holiday Season rolls in, Etsy unveiled a great new initiative to help us track the efficiency of off-Etsy marketing activities.
While the new Share & Save links are a simple tool primarily designed for social media, this is actually the first time Etsy is bringing order attribution to the stats page. Being able to understand where an order came from is a groundbreaking move for Etsy and while for now they just lump together all orders from external channels, it's a big step forward!
1. Share & Save - The basics
In a nutshell, Etsy aims to reward you for driving orders to your store through social media, email marketing, or other external channels.
The new feature allows you to generate a special "Share & Save" link to use in your Instagram bio, Facebook posts, Pinterest, etc. When a buyer clicks on one of the Share & Save links and makes an order, you will pay 4% less in Etsy fees, e.g. the effective Etsy fee on Share & Save orders is 2.5%.
It's very simple and you can read everything about how it works in this Etsy article: Introducing Share & Save.
While saving on Etsy fees is already cool, what makes us most excited is this allows us to directly track the performance of specific campaigns:
This is a major change as until this moment there was no real way to distinguish if your Pinterest, Instagram or email traffic were any good. Now that we have this, how do you make the best use of Share & Save in your Holiday Season campaigns?
2. Social media
While Etsy created this feature to stimulate sellers to direct more organic social media traffic to the platform, this is not necessarily the best use of Share & Save links. If you have successful social media accounts, the most preferred strategy is usually to funnel the traffic to your website and to save on all Etsy fees, not just the 4% from Share & Save.
However, if you have a lot of traffic, you can feature Etsy as a secondary link in your bio sections and on your website. A lot of brands do this to increase trust and to showcase their Etsy track record. This is the place where Share & Save links can come into play.
The other obvious use is if you don't have a standalone website. In this case Share & Save links become the go-to for social media bio sections and Pinterest boards.
If this is your case, the Share & Save tracker was created for you! It will show you if the time and efforts you are spending on social media content are generating the desired results. If you are getting a lot of Pinterest traffic, using the new links will actually show if Pinterest visitors are just window shoppers (what's usually reffered to as "empty traffic") or actual buyers.
3. Running ad campaigns
We come to the first big use case of Share & Save links - running Facebook or Instagram ad campaigns for targeted audiences. Share & Save makes this much more feasible than ever before because of a couple of important reasons:
- We can track actual orders and conversion rates from the advertising campaigns which allows you to compare the revenue and budget and to calculate ROI.
- The savings that Share & Save provide an additional boost to ROI - for example, 500% ROI on your social media ads budget is increased to 625% thanks to the savings which is a meaningful boost.
The big difference with organic social media is that advertising campaigns allow you to directly target Etsy fans and look-a-like audiences of your Etsy buyers.
Even if you are running ad campaigns directing traffic to your website, it also makes sense to test out Etsy-oriented campaigns for Etsy-specific audiences. In a nutshell, while with organic social media it's more of an "either-or" decision whether to drive people to your website or towards Etsy, when it comes to advertising, it makes much more sense to do both as you would be expanding your audience.
Also as you probably already know from experience, Etsy Ads do not scale infinitely because the search volume every specific niche generates is limited. Social media ads are a good way to keep increasing your budget, if you are looking to scale and now you have the data to show you if they are effective.
If you have the budget and experience with running ads for your other channels, the Holiday Season is the best time to test how well this strategy can work out for your store.
4. Email marketing
Finally, this brings us to the Share & Save use case with the highest impact, especially during peak shopping periods. Email marketing allows you to reengage your biggest fans - your actual customers who have already shopped at your store and have already experienced the quality of your product and service.
While email marketing is certainly one of the best tools to have your own tribe and to get your brand values across, the lack of revenue-tracking was keeping many Etsy sellers away from regular email campaigns. Now, besides generating engagement and keeping your audience "warm", you can also track orders from email campaigns which is very important for revenue-oriented stores.
Emails also allow you to use the full functionality of the Share & Save toolkit:
- Sharing links to flash sale promo codes exclusive to your audience.
- Sharing links to listing sections created for the particular occasion - "Halloween Accessories", "Christmas Gifts", "New Year, New Me", etc.
- And even sharing links to glowing reviews that highlight a specific message (for example that your product makes for such a great gift).
As we move into the Holiday Season, Email marketing becomes an essential channel for stores with more than 3-5,000 sales. This is your best bet for running campaigns, especially if you don't have the extra budget for social media advertising. Between the savings from Share & Save and the ability to promote flash sales and promo events, the ROI on your time and effort here is higher than ever.
Bringing it all together
Share & Save is a simple new tool that unlocks a lot of possibilities for running targeted campaigns to high-converting audiences.
The most important part is that you can finally measure if what you are doing is worth it and to keep iterating to boost your ROI with new strategies and tactics.
With Holiday Season already starting, running seasonal campaigns and promotions is the next level of Etsy marketing beyond being discovered.
Both Visual marketing and Email marketing are great ways to leverage the seasonal themes and to create an exceptional shopping experience for the holidays.
You can always check out our “Etsy Success Program" for more information.
