From Crickets to Profit

This wasn't my first holiday season on Etsy, but this was the first time I actually had a holiday season. Look at this! My little Etsy shops did this much business in just one day and I am not particularly "seasonal." Needless to say, I got my rock star mail lady a nicer-than-usual Christmas treat for all that bending over she did. I'll bet she wonders what happened. My home-based, online business used to be the one business on her route that she could count on to not vex her during the December package rush. The deafening sound of crickets used to fill the space outside my door where the Priority Mail boxes are stacked. What happened to change that? I did the smart and right thing and repaired the titles, tags, and listing content in all of my Etsy shops and then ran Etsy Search Ads to maximize that effort. Will the trend in increased sales continue after the holiday merriment ends? Yes, it will. I can say that with confidence because I paid attention in the integrated marketing communications course I am finishing today. After I press "submit" to turn in the final assignments, I'm logging onto Etsy to discover what all of the data I collected informs me about the next direction to take.

Etsy, as a company, has such an intimate relationship with data that, in September, it acquired Blackbird Technologies, a Big Data company, to be able to apply Deep Learning and Artificial Intelligences, especially to consumer searches. The idea is be able to provide an enhanced shopping experience which is unique to the buyer (Armstrong, 2016). I want to take advantage of these changes, and, fortunately, Etsy provides me with data relevant to the daily activities of my shops in addition to data generated by my ads. I also have data from Twitter and Pinterest, which are my social media networks I use most to promote my shops. For having a tiny business, it certainly seems I have plenty of numbers. That's good because I know, that no matter the size of the business, evaluation of marketing campaigns is beneficial. In a way, I am reverse engineering research. My goal is to more deeply understand my customer and discover the messaging to communicate better in the future. The better I align my goals within the Etsy strategy, the better my results will be, and the outgoing boxes will continue piling up. I have to be able to understand what happened until now and data can tell me that.

At first glance, when I started running and paying for the ads, I felt like my efforts made a good example for the marketing concept called marginal analysis. The spending on ads seemed to have a limit to profitability (Clow & Baack, 2014, 103). Plenty of clicks seemed to generate an underwhelming amount of sales. On one hand, the increase in traffic was desirable, but conversion was elusive. The process short-circuited at the listing level and that becomes my first focus when creating an integrated marketing strategy that works better. There were sales. There also was a product-specific awareness determined from keyword searches that included exact words from item titles and listing content. Affective responses, "hearting" items and shops, increased. The short-term successes are indeed noteworthy achievements in evaluating a simple ad campaign (Clow & Baack, 2014, 413). Evaluating the metrics will help me make decisions about tailoring future ad spending to conform better to results already observed. However, I must exercise caution about my judgments since online shopping, especially for one-of-a-kind items, suggests a Cinderella's slipper situation. A poorly performing ad might simply indicate the right shoppers have not yet searched for the item. 

Doing everything I can possibly do to increase the visits to my shops is only part of the plan. The messaging, which I use in my shop content as well as the messages I create on social media networking sites to promote my shops, is also ripe for evaluation. My online metrics will provide some insight (Clow & Baack, 2014, 421). However, getting to better know the customers who were motivated to add items to the cart, can shape future communications. I have ZIP codes and the A C Nielsen company has narratives that describe, with amazing accuracy, persons living in every ZIP code in America (A C Nielsen, 2016). Knowing to whom I am speaking can guide the words I write and the images I create. Being specific optimizes effectiveness of the futuristic technology Etsy now owns. Similarly, care must be taken to avoid alienating other market segments by being too specific. Finding the balance becomes the challenge as I attempt to address what I think my customer thinks about my content and how the customer thinks that content applies to a want or need. Applying inferences about thinking as derived from generalities is beginning to sound suspiciously like the realm of cognitive science. Lucky for me, the next course I will study, beginning in January, is cognitive psychology. And, yes, I will be playing along at home.

References

A C Nielsen (2016). ZIP code look up. In My Best Segments. Retrieved from

    https://segmentationsolutions.nielsen.com/mybestsegments/Default.jsp?ID=20&menuOption=

    zipcodelookup&pageName=ZIP%2BCode%2BLookup&filterstate=&sortby=segment_code&

    prevSegID=CLA.PZP

Armstrong, P. (2016, December 15). What you don't know about Etsy (and its 2017 strategy). In

    Forbes. Retrieved from http://www.forbes.com/sites/paularmstrongtech/2016/12/15/what-you-

    dont-know-about-etsy-and-its-2017-strategy/#40cd9e3b4d90

Clow, K. E., & Baack, D. (2014). Integrated advertising, promotion, and marketing communications 

    (6th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education, Inc.; 103, 413, & 421.

Thinking About Priority Mail

As an Etsy seller, and because I do 100% of my shopping online, mail is important to me. I don't want to put pressure on Terri, my rock star mail lady, especially at the advent of the holiday package delivery season, but she will be more likely, than not be, the person who will confer my diploma someday. Why not? She's my biggest fan and most important business and personal support system. My mail carrier as well as mailboxes locked far from porch-pirate-thieving-hands securely inside this building are reasons why I chose my current home. It was a sobering revelation, in the midst of celebrating the important Etsy milestone of 100 sales in my QualityJunk shop this week, to realize that meant Terri bent over 100 times to pick up those packages. Every single one of those packages was a United States Postal Service (USPS) Priority Mail package!

Priority Mail is a magnificent product that allows me to provide a superior customer experience as well as provides me with peace-of-mind that the package arrives at its destination safely and quickly. That is such a simple concept and one would think that simple concept would be simple to communicate and simple to understand. I was astounded, from the point of view as a long time user of Priority Mail, that the feedback about one of the earliest commercials for the Flat Rate variety of Priority Mail had mixed and mostly negative feedback. Apparently,"If it fits, it ships" is open to a wide range of interpretations (Audit Field Financial - West team, 2010). When thinking about that, I remembered spending significant time failing forward while learning how to use Priority Mail. When visiting the USPS web site, a user can't find one cached file of everything necessary to know about Priority Mail. I'll admit it. I get "warm fuzzies" from watching Priority Mail commercials because of my experience with the product, my wonderful mail lady, and how easy Priority Mail makes living the Etsy shop dream. However, when trying to visualize how someone who has never used Priority Mail might perceive it, the effectiveness of the message is quite different.

Currently, as I am pursuing an online education, I'm studying a marketing topic called Integrated Marketing Communications, which essentially involves creating uniform marketing messages to strengthen the impact of marketing campaigns (Clow & Baack, 2014). The first thing I notice about Priority Mail is that there is absolutely nothing to be integrated with those lovely commercials. If a viewer is inspired to explore the product, there is no next step to take except for trying to navigate the USPS website (USPS, 2016). I learned firsthand that will yield confusion more often than relevant information. I do believe research would help USPS understand this consumer dilemma. After all, important reasons that motivate marketing research include centering business on consumers and focusing on consumer needs. Additionally, research allows businesses understand target markets better and can help improve messaging and communications (Fletcher, 2013). At this point, any messaging and communications would be better than nothing. Spending the time to interview focus groups could help shape a plan for developing a Priority Mail resource that provides both information and support. Not everyone is willing to spend the time I did to learn how to use Priority Mail and not everyone learns in the same way. What would be the best marketing tool? Is it a dedicated web site or a social media site or a collection of how-to videos? Research can, and should, determine that. I do believe that improved marketing strategies would convert potential first time users into loyal customers, and it's my wish that the USPS will soon make their Priority Mail product easier for everyone to use.

References

Audit Field Financial - West team (2010). What do you think of the Priority Mail advertising 

     campaign? [web log post]. In Products & Services. United States Postal Service Office of 

     Inspector General. Retrieved from https://www.uspsoig.gov/blog/what-do-you-think-priority-

     mail-advertising-campaign 

Clow, K. E., & Baack, D. (2014). Integrated advertising, promotion, and marketing communications 

     (6th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education, Inc.

Fletcher, B. (2013, April 25). Five reasons why market research matters (and five tips for using it).

     In MarketingProfs. Retrieved from http://www.marketingprofs.com/opinions/2013/23874/five-

     reasons-why-marketing-research-matters-and-five-tips-for-using-it

USPS (2016). USPS web site. Retrieved from http://www.usps.com

Difference Does Make Us

Etsy. Sometimes I live it, breathe it, and sleep it, but still feel everyday I am operating my shops within an ever-evolving larger context that isn't completely known to myself or much of the world. All I knew in the beginning was that "Etsy" was a nonsense word coined from transcribed dialog from Federico Fellini's film 8 1/2. The characters were saying "eh, si" a lot and Etsy evolved from that (Etsy, n.d.). Etsy didn't even have a business plan when the site launched, and the intention was to evolve the site as circumstances dictated (Walker, 2007). Interestingly, the trials and tribulations of building the Etsy brand closely emulate the process of rebranding, because a more universal understanding of Etsy has been revealed, the market is constantly being evaluated, underlying issues are being addressed, and new strategies evolve (Geyer, 2016). As a result, I have struggled with resulting changes in the Etsy algorithm that guide search, considered consumer traits when creating listings, and reassigned product categories. I have sided with Etsy in the controversy surrounding the evolving the definition of the handmade business and welcomed public trading of the company. Having flexible intentions for growing into its destiny spared Etsy the pain of reevaluating and starting fresh. All of the hard work is an ongoing process for Etsy and its loyal sellers. However, Etsy isn't simply just an online global marketplace for handmade and vintage items as well as craft supplies. What Etsy needs most is a clear, concise, and consistent statement to communicate what Etsy is to consumers. The careful crafting of a tagline seems to be the missing part of the Etsy brand.

Etsy recently launched its first global online advertising campaign called "Difference Makes Us" (Klara, 2016).  To me, the operative word in that statement is "Us." The most identifiable element that distinguishes Etsy from all other marketplaces is its strong sense of community. There is little to distinguish buyers from sellers in our internal social network and we participate together as members of special interest teams. The phrase, "Whoever you are, find whatever you're into," currently invites visitors to initiate a search for products. Melding the idea of individuals with diverse interests with belonging to a community would yield an ideal message that perfectly describes Etsy. The current commercials focus on the wide array of merchandise, but a human element drives the content. Ads are constantly edited to include new items posted by sellers. Viewers see different commercials every time they watch (Klara, 2016). Etsy CEO Chad Dickerson is acutely conscious of the human element in the business and emphasizes that each transaction ends with a real product from a real person. He calls it "existential satisfaction" (Etsy, n.d.). "Difference Makes Us" is certainly a step in the right direction toward a tagline and there is certainly more to consider. The biggest challenge seems to be squeezing many positive attributes into few words that perfectly describes Etsy.

References

Etsy (n.d.). In Wikipedia. Retrieved from https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Etsy

Geyer, F. (2009, March 24). Four best-practices for renovating your brand -- before its too late. 

     MarketingProfs. Retrieved from

     https://www.marketingprofs.com/9/best-practices-for-renovating-your-brand-geyer,asp

Klara,R. (2016, September 14). Etsy's first global campaign is an expression of individuality, just like      the stuff it sells: Here's what makes it and its everyday items different. Adweek. Retrieved from

     https://www.adweek.com/news/advertising-branding/etsys-first-global-campaign-expression-

     individuality-just-like-stuff-it-sells-173404