Promotion tip #3, 4 and 5: engaging your supporters

Felt wants the world to run on high-quality, locally made items, rather than poor-quality factory made stuff from big box shops. It turns out that a large chunk of society wants that also, and we all know a lot of them!

Your sales on Felt are part of this movement, and your existing supporters are too. If we can each mobilise our supporters a tiny bit then we can all benefit from the huge waves that happen.

This blog post is part of our Ten tips to promote your Felt shopand gives you some ways of engaging your (existing or future) crowd of supporters. See the previous post on making the most of social media here, and the whole series here.

3. Keep your Felt shop up to date

Imagine going to the supermarket and all the shelves are empty. Do you take the single banana, or the packet of sugar? We know that having options to choose from makes us more likely to buy something, which is a big driver behind Felt doing things like the Christmas Gift Guide and Christmas Catalogue.

Related to this, here at Felt we try to showcase items that come from your well-stocked shops because we know that the featured items will sell – and we want prospective buyers to find alternatives when this happens.

It’s worth always having multiple items in your shop. Our best performing sellers have pages and pages of items, and they sell!

  • List items as “Made to Order” – and provide a clear time-frame for completion after purchase
  • List variations on an item using different materials or colours.
  • List items at different sizes – e.g kid table or adult table; A4 Print or A2 Print

Having only two variation types, such as three colour options and two sizes, immediately gives six different product options, and it might be that you’ve only actually made one of them.

Keep on top of your shop by always adding items as soon as you make them or periodically adding old/sold items that you could make to order.

4. Engage with Felt on social media

Felt.co.nz attracts around 70,000 visitors per month, with 20% of them coming from our social media presence. All of those thousands of visitors like items just like yours, so engage with Felt on social media! Optimise your social media and then share, like, post and tag Felt whenever and wherever you can. Tag us in your posts, comment on our posts, share our posts, share other makers’ work that you love. The more activity there is the more that other people see it, and the more likely they are to buy (if your Felt shop is linked!).

  • Follow Felt on whatever channels you use
  • Share Felt posts
  • Tag Felt in your posts
  • Comment and tag others

When significant things happen for you, share it with Felt. e.g. if you end up in the newspaper – let us know so we can shout it from the roof top! If you’re going to a market, take a Find me on Felt card and tag us in your photos.

5. Ask your existing customers to help you promote

Your existing happy customers are already your most supportive crowd – how can you make it easy for them to support you? Consider ways that you can ask them to help you promote your Felt shop:

  • Send follow up messages after a purchase asking for any feedback and a plug/recommendation
  • Include a thank you note in their delivery, so they understand what their purchase means for you
  • Ask them to share a photo of their purchase and do a social media shout out to your Felt shop
  • Include flyers or business cards in their delivery, asking if they can drop them in their workplace or local café

Engaging with previous customers can be a really good way to develop new items, or improve existing items. Consider, for example, following up with past customers several months down the track, asking them for any feedback on the item or to some photos of it being used on your social media pages. Ask if you can use their quotes on social media or in item descriptions for similar items.

In many ways we can draw on the work we’ve already done as a way of creating more content and more sales for ourselves. The mantra ‘work smarter, not harder” stands true here!

There is a growing movement of people who want to have locally made items woven through all areas of their life, and if we all do the things listed above then we can each add to and benefit from this movement.

Stay tuned for our next post, looking at how to be part of the Felt community and the benefits that come from it!