We just launched our brand new https://shop.bzfurfur.com and we’ve learned a lot in the process. We are launching this five-part weekly series, every Tuesday starting March 21, as a way to help other makers on a similar journey.
Not everyone is going to be ready to order right away. Many people have questions and need a reliable way to get in touch. Sites like Etsy and Amazon have methods for customers to get in touch and ask questions. If you are running your own website it is important for you to provide methods for getting in touch.
Contact forms. You’ve seen them, you know them, and you probably hate them. Most of the time when you come across one of these you wish you could just email the person directly. But we continue to see them. This is for a few reasons. Firstly, when you put your email up on a website it is a honeypot for scammers. There are countless scammers scraping the content of websites to build distribution lists to sell. So these forms help protect your personal information. These forms also offer a selection of tools that you can use to prevent spam. WordPress allows you to use Jetpack which has anti-spam controls. Most websites will let you add Capchas or other verification tools to make sure the people using the forms aren’t robots. Be thoughtful, though. If you wouldn’t want to use the form because of all the superfluous checks then customers probably won’t either. Use them sparingly.
Email lists are a great way to stay in contact with previous customers, get people interested in your products, and keep people up to date with the things you are selling. There are plenty of sites that allow you to set up mailing lists and will often provide tools to create banners, popups, and templates. MailChimp and Constant Contact are good entry-level options.
With pop-ups and banners use them, but try not to overuse them. If they have the option to show it once and, once they close it, don’t show it again consider that. You don’t want to drive the potential customer away with incessant pop-ups. Avoid dark patterns. These are the little tricks that websites do to get you to sign up for things unknowingly. You can see many examples of these here: https://www.deceptive.design These potentially get you more leads but it is at the expense of your website’s reputation.
Conclusion
I hope this series helps you to understand some of the options that are available to you as a maker to get your product in from of your potential customers. There are a lot of trade-offs between ease of use, customizability, and price. Make sure you are choosing something that is right for you.
