We are excited to have Dani Marie, CEO of Handmade Seller magazine as our guest blogger for this post. Handmade Seller is a new publication available in digital form (with print coming soon) for creative entrepreneurs who are looking to turn their craft hobby into a business. She is sharing how great packaging can help sell your product.
Here’s Dani…
The Handmade Seller
Hello all! I am VERY honored to be writing this article for Nashville Wraps, and it just so happens that packaging is one of my favorite topics to teach about! Presentation is everything. In fact, you can sell anything if you make it look good regardless of the competition. In addition to our newly launched Handmade Seller magazine, I am the best-selling author of The Handmade Entrepreneur. My background is in marketing, branding, and just about everything related to selling online and developing a product.
Well, when it comes to selling handmade products you are selling yourself as much as the item. People are buying handmade for the experience and the quality. They love knowing that an actual person sat down and made their item with love.
However, there’s even more to it than that. Many companies have invested millions is learning what sort of things increase online sales. They look at how long people stay on a page, what emotions to trigger, what makes viewers bounce from a page, what words sell, what prices convert best, what kind of photos have the biggest impact, and more. It goes without saying that your photos must be pristine, but one incredibly effective way to boost your sales is by including photos of your products all packaged up.
Beautiful Photos Sell Your Product
In marketing one of your biggest goals is to spark an emotion from the viewer. If you can get them to feel excited, inspired, passionate, nostalgic, or even desperate, then you will most likely get a sale. Your main image should be beautiful and it should force the viewer to picture the item in their house, car, bedroom, backyard, or wherever it belongs. It’s the main image that gets them to click. (Like the baby featured on the first issue of our magazine at the top or the pretty picture above showing Nashville Wraps packaging).
Not only are Nashville Wraps products super adorable, but they feel high quality and that’s important when you are trying to impress your clients. So, why should you package your products up beautifully? Once the viewer has opened up the listing and looked at the photos, you then have the ability to draw them in the rest of the way with additional photos of the product.
Including an image of the product in attractive packaging can often seal the deal for you because it gets the viewer to imagine how exciting it would be to open up that package. Remember how excited you always were as a kid to open up a colorful package and pull out the toy? That was the best part, and even though we are all adults now, we still love the process of unwrapping a product!
Want another tip? You can use packaged photos as your main image if the item is clearly visible inside the bag or box. It’s a great way to attract more clicks and spark excitement right away rather than waiting until someone clicks on your page.
Pretty Packaging Completes Your Branding
Branding is something that many handmade sellers struggle with because it can cost a fortune, but if you sell on a platform like Etsy, all you need is a banner, a nice image of yourself, packaging that goes with your shop theme, and business cards. I know that sounds like a lot, but there are free programs out there like Canva that allow you to design a banner for free. Vista Print also has some cheap business card options, and you can check out Fiverr because there are lots of people who do excellent work for only $5.
Packaging is what brings everything together for your branding. The buyer sees your online branding, but when they receive the product inside a lovely box or bag, it brings everything together and completes the experience. If their first impression of your product is a good one (thanks to the packaging), then you have just increased the chances of them being happy with the item, leaving you a good review, and sharing your shop with their friends. The fact that they are happy also means that you can get away with putting a little note inside that asks them to tell everyone they know about your shop! You might even consider printed boxes, ribbon or labels with your logo from Nashville Wraps.
It might seem like a big expense in the beginning to order a bunch of packaging material, but the cost per item is very low and you can include that in the price of your products. Since the packaging also increases the number of people that purchase and the amount of people that re-purchase, you really have nothing to lose!
If you’d like to receive more tips and tricks, subscribe to the Handmade Seller! It’s interactive – you can watch training videos, leave feedback, download great tips, and more to help your shop increase sales! Our magazine is the perfect way to stay on top of the latest trends, marketing techniques, and get a bunch of goodies at the same time. We hope you subscribe today!
One of the reasons we put together our Packaging class is because it has so much to do with whether or not a purchase is made! The product can literally be the best on the market, but if the packaging is sub-par, it won’t move from the shelf.
This is very valuable information. Thank You very much.
What a terrific insider’s look into what Dani Marie has in store within her new publication as well as how each of us can create marketing buzz by uniquely displaying the finished product. Superb presentation will always resonate with our customers.
I also appreciate the mention of low-to-no cost online tools, some of which I’ve tried myself with great results.