Let Us Teach You How to Sell
When my business partner and I founded CraftRanker, we wanted to use what we’d learned selling for a decade on Etsy to help other sellers succeed as we had. It all started when we decided to write a book – The Ultimate Guide to Selling on Etsy – which became an audiobook and a series of video courses.
Originally, we decided to sell online using ClickFunnels software to create a sales funnel – offering a basic product at a steeper and steeper discount as the customer added on upsell items. “Like the book? Get it for 20% off by buying the video courses as well!”
A sales funnel is LOUD. It’s in-your-face, pushy marketing that takes advantage of impulse purchasing and works best with products that people need to purchase more than once, like supplements or toiletries.
I felt our book, video courses, and individual consults were not a good fit for a sales funnel, but after some discussion, I agreed to try it as long as I was could create a minimalist version of the site as well and conduct some A/B tests. ClickFunnels does have an excellent platform for A/B testing, and I planned to take full advantage of it.
A/B Test
Original Site (A):
When I began designing our webpage, I discovered that the ClickFunnels web editor made it very difficult to build anything but a sales-funnel style site. The first version of our site was busy and bright. Here are a few images:
Here are some captures of the site taken during the design process. The site ended up looking like this, not horrible, but very busy.
I actually used this image as a header for our “University of Etsy” page on our original site. On top of the orange (a teensy bit darker and redder than Etsy orange) and teal, it hurt my eyes. You don’t want to see it, trust me.
Oh…and this – the default design for upsell text.
Minimalist Redesign (B)
It was the default styling for the upsell box that convinced me to do a redesign. I felt the style we were being pushed into by ClickFunnels was going to hurt our brand – to me, the in-your-face design diminished the actual value of what we had to offer. It screamed that our product needed flashy marketing because it was too insubstantial to sell itself.
And I knew that wasn’t true – our book had taken off on Amazon, and our email accounts were full of sellers thanking us for getting them started on Etsy and telling us their stories of success. Our video courses and consulting were just as valuable, and we needed a site that reflected that.
An image of the learning portal home page.
ClickFunnels had a wonderful A/B testing tool that would track how far customers traveled through your funnel and which products they ended up purchasing, and I used this tool to test a minimalist redesign of our homepage, about page, and course options page.
After just three months, it was clear that the minimalist design was working for us. Customers were 17% more likely to continue to the video course sales page from the minimalist main page, and video course sales were 2.7% higher through the minimalist funnel than the original design.
I was pleased that the A/B testing had been so successful and paid off - it had made the entire ClickFunnels experience worth it, although I also realized it was time to take the plunge - ditch the web editor and build the site from scratch.
Designing, Building, and Deploying our Custom Site
The real problem was that the minimalist redesign had been extremely difficult to do using ClickFunnels web editor, so I decided to take what I’d learned and build a site from scratch. I'd felt confident a web service would offer us more than I could do on my own, and was pleased to find I was wrong about that.
Our current site CraftRanker.com is very similar to the minimalist redesign. Here's what it looks like:
I made our current site using a Python Flask server, a Vue3 frontend, and a SQLite database and deployed it onto a Digital Ocean droplet. It's been quite successful. Our book has been a bestseller on Amazon in its category for over two years now, people who buy and like the book also tend to purchase the video courses to go along with it.
And to top off our success, the decision was excellent for our bottom line. We were able to save hundreds of dollars a year by building and hosting the site ourselves instead of using a web service.