There are quite a few email marketing services available. They are all quite competitive in price and provide similar functionalities.
Here is what I would suggest you look for:
These are the ones that have good functionality, reasonable pricing and good deliverability. I suggest testing out their free trial and see how the interface work and whether it’s easy to use. Also send out test email and see if the emails end up in the main inbox. One time I used a company called AWeber and all my emails ended up in spam.
AWeber integrates directly with Etsy, and can help you send out emails directly to your customers. Keep in mind that you still need to ask customers to opt in to your email list; it's against Etsy rules to send promotional emails to your customers without them opting in. In other words, the benefit of integrating with AWeber is that it automates the process of you asking your customers to sign up to your email list.
However, in my experience and from my research, AWeber has a relatively low deliverability rate, which means that sometimes the emails end up in the spam folder instead of the inbox. So I can't recommend it based on this reason.
But feel free to try out AWeber yourself if you'd like to give it a shot. At the time of writing, you can have up to 500 subscribers in your free plan.
Most email marketing services let you create different subscriber lists so that you can divide your subscribers into smaller groups based on their behaviours, needs, etc. This is called segmentation in email marketing.
For Etsy shops, the two main subscriber segments are customers and shoppers. And for customers, you can segment into different lists for different product categories, but I wouldn’t advice that for small- and medium-sized shops.
Segmentation helps you target your messaging better to different groups. For example, to a customer, you can ask whether they are enjoying the product and ask for a review. While for shoppers, it makes sense to tell them more about your craft and your brand to increase the chance for a sale.
Although segmentation has a lot of benefits, it’s still optional. I had success on my email list for my jewelry shop with only one list to my customers. If you choose to keep it simple and don’t segment your email subscribers, then only focus on customers to build good long-term relationship is the best idea.
Now it’s time to let people sign up to your list.
For that, we need to create a landing page. It is a page that includes a sign up form where people can put in their email address and other information to subscribe. And you will have a web address that you can send to people who are interested.
Don’t worry, most email marketing service makes it easy to set up a landing page with a sign up form.
It’s a myth that the landing page needs to be fancy and beautiful in order for people to subscribe. Instead, a clean, simple page works best most of the time.
Elements to include on your landing page:
A note on the sign up form. Think about what information do you actually need. The more information you ask, the less likely the person will follow through with signing up.
Do you really need to know their last name? Or how old are they? Or their country of origin?
In most cases, I would suggest only needing “email address” and “first name” in the signup form. Even the “first name” is technically optional.
Now that people can sign up to your list, let’s deliver our promise of the lead magnet to them when they sign up.
In cases like a coupon code, free shipping code, giveaway, or other lead magnets that is text based, you only need to include it in the automatic message to subscribers when they sign up.
But if you have a lead magnet that is a file like in PDF format, then you need to attach it with the automatic message. Most email marketing services let you do that, but if that is not possible, you can attach the file to your Google Drive and send them the download link instead: