Let’s start off with a story - everyone likes stories right? Back in October I went to my first internet 
marketing conference with one of the top internet marketers in the country and the people from his team. The price of admission was $2500 for three days - yup I’m serious about this stuff. The marketer is Joel Comm, author of a New York Times best seller and co-owner of a multi-million dollar marketing company.
So at the event they had a hot seat where they did live critiques of attendee’s web sites. I was lucky enough to be chosen and we ripped one of my sites apart. The first suggestion was to eliminate a page where visitors choose one product or another. He said to lose that page and just send them directly to the page most visitors went to anyway. This is something I had been thinking about and it made sense.
The second suggestion was to change all the fonts to sans-serif from serif. So if you don’t know sans-serif fonts are fonts like helvitica and arial that don’t have the little flairs on the tips of the letters. Serif would be a font like times new roman. On the surface the suggestion makes sense because studies show that on a computer monitor sans-serif fonts like arial are easier to read. The reason I went with serif fonts was that the audience to this web site is older, more suspicious of buying things online and serif fonts look more official and they are more used to reading those fonts like the fonts that would be used in a newspaper.
So you’re probably saying to yourself this is stupid. Changing the font certainly wouldn’t affect my buying decision and most people would probably say the same thing. If you have a website - not a blog - Google has a service where you install a small piece of code on several pages and they will send half of your visitors to one page and send half to a duplicate page you’ve made a change to. By monitoring how many people make it to the goal page you can determine if the change makes any difference. Cool huh?
Well as it currently stands almost 500 visitors have run through the serif/non-serif test and the serif page is converting 12.9% better than the non-serif page. Now all of the studies that say non-serif works better are true, but not on my site. You see those studies don’t know a damn thing about my site or my customers. Was it a valid test to try? Absolutely, but the real problem here is if you can’t test like I did how would you know when someone says you should do this or that?
Not having any sort of analytics is a major issue I have with Etsy. You have no idea what words visitors used to reach your listing, what time of the day you get the most traffic etc. On eBay I used to subscribe to a service and by putting a small piece of code on the listing page I could tell all these things plus what part of the world they were in, if they returned, how long they stayed for and much more. On Etsy it’s almost impossible to tell anything about shop visitors.
The point of this article - if I have thoroughly confused you - is you have to filter any advice you get about marketing based on you knowing your customer. The things I suggest work for most sites but only you can determine if it works or not for you. You also need to be careful about whose giving the advice. I have seen an Etsy marketing guide - not mine 
- suggest you pay for traffic from Google to get visitors to your Etsy shop. This is just simply reckless advice. Buying traffic can get real expensive real quick and if you can’t tell if that traffic gets additional sales you might as well just burn your money.
Now I’m not implying you shouldn’t try new things. You should, try new ideas even if your not sure if they will help, but you have to watch and listen to what your customers say and do because that’s the only thing that really matters.
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
Great article. I totally agree with all you had to say. I would love for etsy to have or allow us to track more stats. For me I try to target my audience that I know well because I am one of them. Most advice that I get just doesn’t do diddly for me but I have learned what works and what doesn’t by trying. And sadly I have burnt my money on many experiments.
I must say that is very intriguing and interesting to say the least, I might try to change my font on some other sites and see how it pans out. Thank you.
I think one of the key things that we have to do at the moment is find a workaround - I think part of the reason we don’t get stats with etsy is that engineering hasn’t figured out a way!
Sage advice! It can be so easy to get caught up in what others say you should or should not be doing. I wholeheartedly agree that you have to make your decisions based on what will or won’t work for your site. I am also frustrated about having no stats on Etsy. I use google analytics for my other site and that little bit of knowledge helps to save heaps of wasted time and money!!!
Norm, I couldn’t agree with you more. I sell genuine vintage beads, so I am in a real niche market. There are some beads that are “Grande Dames,” there are the more rugged trade beads, there are weird and wacky beads, there are the “girly-girl lovelies,” ad infinitum. I would love to use the font that works for me, my old tried and true from eBay.
Believe it or not, I got my best results with Comic sans MS!! Across the board, it brought the most buyers. Eventually, I ended up using it all the time. My analysis of why it worked? Well…comic sans MS has a slight visual “wobble” as you read across the words, which gives the illusion of being a bit fancy, but it is an open and friendly font. It draws people in and makes them feel safe, a good thing in a market that is rife with reproductions and rip-offs. In larger sizes it is very easy to read, which is very important to me because a large part of my mission is to educate. In addition, I love working with it. It stimulates me probably in much the same way it seemed to stimulate the customers.
When I first started on eBay, I got immediate letters telling me that my descriptions were waaaay too long and that people did not need to know what I was telling them. Soon I realized most of the people who were advising me to cut short my decriptions were sellers whom I considered dubious. They wanted me to go away.
As a serious vintage bead collector myself, I’d often longed for some history or provenance…..or at least for the seller to say he didn’t know what something was rather than making stuff up. As the years went by, I did a great deal of research and got comfortable making my own decisions as to what a bead was. So once I started selling, I decided to give my customers what I had longed for. I developed a very loyal base and wonderful lasting friendships. A few of my customers became sellers themselves, honest sellers. There is plenty of room for honest sellers.
I just know if I had Comic sans MS, my sales would be a bit better, crazy as that may sound. I find the Etsy fonts boring and constricting.
I also freakin’ hate that gawdawful washed out blue aqua that is used everywhere. I wonder how many other people feel that way.
As far as the other bells and whistles, it would be nice to have them.
I may have to suck it up and start my own blog….lol.
Thanks so much for all the valuable information you shared!
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