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.
