Etsy customer notifications are automated messages popping up both on the Etsy website and in the mobile app to keep users updated with news about your shop. But did you know that you can use these notifications deliberately to maximize your exposure and engagement and stand-out? Today we explore some of the ways you can leverage this tool to improve your Etsy conversion rate.
1. How does the Etsy bell area, aka Etsy notifications, work?
The Etsy Updates feed is designed to push notifications about your shop to buyers who have:
- favorited your store
- favorited your items
- added your items to their cart (incl. expired carts, aka ‘saved for later’)
Interestingly enough, your buyers mostly won’t receive notifications unless they have also engaged with your store via one of the above ways. That’s why email marketing remains our best approach to bring back returning buyers.
2. How to trigger Etsy notifications?
Etsy users will automatically receive notifications based on actions you are taking to market your store:
- running a sale
- listing a new item
- restocking an item
- last item remaining
- sending a thank you coupon - the only interaction aimed at recent buyers
These are everyday Etsy marketing actions so you are probably triggering regular Etsy Updates to people who are engaged with your store. But now that you understand how they work, you can use this feature deliberately in your marketing strategy.
3. How to use the Etsy bell area for marketing - best practices
To take full advantage of the Etsy Updates reach, you want to time your Etsy actions so Etsy users receive a notification of your store frequently and regularly.
- Publish new listings over several days (instead of everything at once)
Usually, we are tempted to do big launches, listing all new items at once. Sometimes you have a good reason for this - for example you are making a solid pre-launch email marketing campaign that creates awareness and anticipation for launch day.
On Etsy, it’s better to have a launch period, instead of a single launch day, publishing several new listings daily or weekly. This will keep you in the Etsy Updates feed longer and it will additionally engage customer curiosity of how your collection will unfold over time.
- Use daily sale events when you are running a sale
For many stores running long-term sales is part of the pricing strategy. Often you would schedule your sale events to last for up to 30 days and then launch them again. To take full advantage of the Etsy Updates notifications, you can actually schedule your sale events to last for a day every time and relaunch them daily.
Indeed, it will take a bit of clicking around every morning with your cup of coffee or tea. But in return this gives you two great advantages - you will be triggering sale notifications every day and the FOMO factor increases when people see “Sale expiring in 18 hours”.
- Run a flash sale when you have multiple Etsy listings with high add-to-cart numbers
Add-to-carts are the closest people get to a purchase before they click that checkout button. Running an Etsy sale event for listings with 10+ add-to-carts will deliver an Etsy bell area notification to those buyers to give them this little push they need to complete their order.
What we’ve seen to work best are 15-25% flash sales over 2-3 days, including a small number of listings with high add-to-cart numbers. This will convert some of the add-to-carts and it’s a great source of regular order boosts. This will increase your conversion rate and depending on the traffic in your store and the number of listings with high add-to-cart performance, you can run this strategy 1-2 times per month.
Now it's time to craft your own set of Etsy bell area tactics
One of the keys to Etsy success is thinking creatively about how to leverage the marketing tools Etsy provides you with. Effectively using the Etsy bell area notifications can lead to increased customer engagement and improved conversion rates. Now that you know how they work and some of the best practices our team applies, can you figure out how to make them work for you and your store?
