The Etsy Cyber Week sale is almost officially over. And It’s really important as the Etsy Cyber Week Sale is rounding up, to assess the event. Whether you reached your goal or not, you want to have an assessment of what you did that worked and what didn’t work so you can make some changes for next year and have an even better sale. So what we’re going to do is look at your stats, then answer 3 questions about them.
The first thing you want to assess is your stats. And there are two important parts of this. Let’s start with your goal. You obviously want to assess if you hit your revenue goal or not. If you didn’t set a revenue goal, I highly encourage you to do this next year so you can measure your progress and the effectiveness of your plan that much better.
I also want you to assess your conversion rate. This will give you a lot of insight into what you need to work on. The normal conversion rate is 1-3%. During the gift giving season, mine can go as high as 10% because buyers are shopping for a reason and with a deadline. I know shops that can convert even better during this time of year.
If you need help with figuring this out make sure to listen to episode 7 of The Handmade Shop Podcast which goes more in depth into conversion rates.
If your conversion rate was normal or high, but you didn’t hit your sales goal, that tells you that you need to work on traffic for next year’s sale. That can be through social media and marketing or through Etsy itself with your SEO and getting found in Etsy search.
After looking at the stats, I have 3 questions that I want you to ask yourself to assess what actions you should be changing for next year.
The first is What Worked? What actions did you take that increased your sales for this event? Did you stay consistent with your marketing? Fill out some unfinished product lines? Did you send out some emails to your list or coordinate with some gift guides? What did you do that you know had an impact on your results that you want to replicate next year?
The second thing to assess is what didn’t work? This time of year it’s so important that what you’re doing is efficient and worth your time. So what did you do in the last few weeks that was not worth your time and that you can cut from your to do list next year? What did not get you the results you wanted and you do not want to do again?
Here’s a super common one. I see a lot of sellers who add new product lines during the weeks before Black Friday. And that’s usually not enough time to get a new product line up and running and get found for the keywords you’re targeting. That’s the type of stuff you want to cut out prior to November next year.
The third and final part of this assessment is what would you change? Maybe you did something this year that worked, but could have worked better. Assess that now. Don’t wait until next year when you’ll have forgotten what you did and didn’t do. Make a list of what you want to change for next year. This shouldn’t be a huge list. Because you don’t want to change 50 things and not be able to assess what changes were effective and what weren’t. So pick a few priorities to tweak for next year and make sure to put them on your calendar so you make a plan and implement them when the time comes.
So sometime in the next week, try to take 15 minutes for this assessment. It will help you so much for next year when the Black Friday sale comes around again.
