Felt exists to help each of us make the most of all of our promotions. We all benefit from any traffic to each other’s Felt shops, so tying our individual promotional work back to our Felt shops gives each of us a much better chance of success that any of us going it alone.
One of the most powerful ways you can drive your own sales are to connect your Felt shop directly to all advertising and social media channels you use. Having many different promotional channels gets you in front of more audiences – which is excellent – and having all promotional channels point to the one place – your Felt shop – is the easiest way for you to manage all sales, whilst also benefiting from the promotion of all other Sellers on Felt. The more we each promote our own Felt shops, the more we all benefit!
This blog post gives an overview how you can make the most of your Felt shop address, as part of our Ten tips to promote your Felt shop series. Our next post will be covering some tips on making the best use of social media, with some general pointers as well as specific advice for Facebook and Instagram.
1. Use your Felt shop address
We’ll start with talking about your Felt shop short-form URL. A short-form URL is an easy-to-remember web address that you can use anywhere.
Every Felt shop automatically has its own unique short-form URL, which we usually call your ‘Felt shop address’. Your Felt shop address is ‘yourshopname.felt.co.nz’. If your shop name isn’t something catchy and memorable, or it doesn’t really make sense with the items you make and sell, then you might want to consider changing it. You can find out how in our Help section. When people navigate to your Felt shop address, the link at the top ends up looking slightly different when they arrive (felt.co.nz/shop/yourshopname), but the short-form shop URL works every time – so use it!
Many sellers have their own website with their own URL, e.g. www.yourshopname.co.nz. This is excellent, and it’s great to build a strong brand in this way. One of the simplest and easiest things you can do to make the most of your own website AND the collective marketing of Felt is to directly link your website’s ‘Shop’ page to your Felt shop. Many common website builders have complicated e-commerce functions that make your products only show up on your website. Many of them also either don’t work well in New Zealand, or take large commissions too. Having a menu item that leads straight to your Felt shop means you only have to list items once, and don’t need to worry about maintaining several platforms or risk limited items selling in multiple times over!
Rather than spending mega-bucks per month/year on a flash e-commerce website, consider a slightly simpler website that gives all the look-and-feel and display that you want, but point the ‘Shop’ button to your Felt shop. Easy, cheap, fast, and you get the benefits of others’ promotions also!
The best way to make use of your shop address is to use it as the pathway directly to your items for sale. This can be in lots of places:
- on your own website
- in your email signature
- on business cards or other printed material
- on social media ‘shop now’ buttons
- order customised Find me on Felt cards
Your website might include a gallery of current or past work, and each of these images can link to your Felt shop address (or to an item listing directly), or you can have a menu item ‘Shop’ that hyperlinks straight to your Felt shop address, either in the same window or opening in a new tab. In this case, you’ll want to ensure that your Felt shop description makes sense to any visitors coming from your website. If you’re trying to link your shop address to your website and having some trouble then why not jump into the Felt Sellers community Facebook group and see if anyone nearby can give you a hand.
In our next post we share tips on making the best use of social media, with some general pointers as well as specific pointers for Facebook and Instagram. Check it out here!
