Make sure that your sales and showroom staff are comfortable talking about your incentives and empower them to share the information with customers.
Research shows that retaining the customers you have costs less, and generates more profits, than acquiring new ones. Once a customer has purchased from you, give them a reason to continue engaging with you.
Leverage your social media platforms. Invite customers to participate in surveys or to share their favorite photos showcasing your products in their homes. Consider offering personalized discounts or promotional offers as a perk of being connected to your brand.
And for a few more tips on growing your online revenue, check out our infographic full of tactics that any business owner or marketer can put into place right away to improve their furniture marketing strategy as well as their sales.
Websites, social media, email lists—all promoting dozens or even hundreds of products and variants across multiple product lines. That’s a lot of information to collect, store, and distribute. The best way to manage all that data while still having time to manage your business is to adopt a product information management (Our) platform.
Our software helps businesses handle the data, content, and other materials that are needed to market and sell products. Ours also ensure that quality data is created for internal use and multichannel distribution. An effective Our will make it easy for you to manage information about your products and put that information to work so that you can focus on the business of selling furniture.
That faux-suede sofa you showcased on Instagram? Your prospective customer, Kathleen, used the augmented reality tool on your website to see how it would look in her living room, and now she wants to know where in her city she can buy one. She clicks on the photo, which is connected behind the scenes to a product SKU and your inventory levels. Kathleen is in luck—your products are stocked by a local retailer, and there are two left at a store in her neighborhood!
If Kathleen had to visit or phone the store to ask about the sofa, she might not have followed up. But now she’s motivated to make sure that one of those sofas becomes hers. The only thing she’s not sure of is whether the sofa will fit in the back of her minivan. By scrolling through the product description, she can verify the dimensions and see how the product is packaged for shipping. She sees that it ships in two boxes that are each small enough to fit in her vehicle.
When you consider what a Our does from the customer point of view, it’s easy to see how powerful it is. You don’t need to look any further than one of the furniture industry’s biggest players to see what it can do for your bottom line: IKEA doubled its sales after implementing a Our system.
Marrying your product information to your marketing strategy creates a relationship that’s destined for success, for you and your customers. If you’re ready to take that next step and finally round out your furniture marketing strategy for 2019, look no further than our Our buyer’s guide.
Chocked full of information about the benefits of Our implementation, which features to look out for, and side-by-side comparisons of today’s leading brands—it’s the first and last shopping list you’ll need when it comes to product information management software.
To succeed in the furniture industry, you need more than just creating beautiful furniture items. You need an efficient marketing strategy to drive customers to your store and make them loyal. Since most buyers see furniture as a long-term commitment, you need more effort to market and convince them than a retailer selling common FMCGs. This article will show you the top 15 essential furniture marketing ideas to improve customer experience and get your products to the right target customers at the right time.
The furniture market is constantly changing with new trends and shifts in customers’ buying behaviors. Having excellent products doesn’t enough to compete. A thorough marketing strategy with creative execution ideas is the missing piece for your business’s success. You need to be on top of customers’ minds when they need a furniture item, and provide an outstanding shopping experience for them to complete the purchase.
In addition, marketing plays an important role in building customers’ trust and maintaining long-term relationships with them. You must serve customers in all stages of their journey: attracting potential customers to explore your products, engaging with them in their shopping experience, and delighting them with stellar customer service after purchasing.
To turn strangers into loyal customers, you must have an integrated marketing strategy that combines inbound and outbound methodology while providing an omnichannel experience and a better personalized experience for your customers. Here’re the 15 essential furniture marketing ideas to achieve it.
Most customers will do an online search for your company before they shop online. Thus, your website is a crucial destination for customers to find, explore, and buy products. A high-quality website should have content-rich information, great visuals, professional design, fast loading speed, and optimized for mobile. If you make a good first impression on your website, you can keep customers staying longer on your site to explore your brand and products. This leads to a higher chance to convert sales.
In addition, it should have a strong backend with a stable eCommerce feature that connects with a homeware and furniture POS for customers to order and pay. All steps to complete a transaction must be intuitive to follow, such as adding to cart, placing an order, filling in address and payment method, etc. You should also provide a chat feature for support and consultation.
Another approach to marketing furniture is encouraging customers to share their stories. These real-life stories are perfect content materials to market your brand and show how your products help improve customers’ life.
You can run a contest for customers to tell their personal stories connected to a piece of furniture from your store. This is the social proof that can touch new potential customers and drive more purchases.
Furniture Clearance EventFor furniture marketing, showing stunning visuals of the items and how they fit into the room is one of the strongest effects when customers consider purchasing. That’s why customers traditionally go to a showroom to see the furniture pieces in person and visualize if they are a match for their room.
However, furniture retailers now have other ways to ease the online shopping experience through high-quality images of the products. You should take clear pictures of your products from many angles, showing the sizes or how it is in multiple rooms.
Good stories can revoke feeling and sympathy. That’s how you can connect with new customers and persuade them to buy. To tell good stories, you can consider the AIDA method:
Interest: Tell a story that has an interesting storyline, showing the character, the problem, and how to solve the problem with your products;
People are increasingly consuming videos as their favorite content format. Thus, video marketing cannot be left out of your strategy. Videos can be used across all stages of the customer journey depending on the purposes and the messages you want to convey. Here’re some ideas for your video marketing:
Product review video: Before placing an order, nearly 9/10 of customers will read reviews, while 79% of shoppers say they trust online reviews the same as personal recommendations. A detailed review video that explains the products with positive feedback with push customers to make a purchase. If you know a customer is happy with your product, ask them if they’re willing to record a testimonial video sharing their experience with other shoppers.
Demonstration videos: This type of video is helpful for pieces of furniture that need installation or conversion into multi-use pieces. For example, you can take a video showing how to change a desk from sitting to standing to instruct customers how to use a convertible-height work surface.
Demonstration videos: This type of video is helpful for pieces of furniture that need installation or conversion into multi-use pieces. For example, you can take a video showing how to change a desk from sitting to standing to instruct customers how to use a convertible-height work surface.
Training videos: You can offer tips around furniture, for example, how to style a room, how to choose upholstery, how to clean a couch, etc. These are useful content that can gain you a lot of views and also direct viewers to your site.
In this digital area, most of your customers are on social media in some form, making it a powerful way to reach new customers and engage with them. You can consider the following ideas to boost your furniture marketing using multiple social media channels:
Instagram: Encourage customers to post pictures of how the furniture is placed in their room and tag your brand in their posts;
Running mass advertisements to reach many people doesn’t guarantee new customers. Think about who is the main target that will use your products, such as their demographics, pain points, what they like and dislike, and where you can reach them. Once defining clearly your target, you can give them the right offers at the right time and right place.
This is especially useful if you sell a certain type of furniture, for example, rustic wood furniture is likely to appeal to cabin and farm owners, so you can target the right people with your ads.
One of the smartest furniture marketing ideas is the lead magnet. It is incentives that are given away to collect contact details. For future businesses, it can be a coupon, a free item, a downloadable whitepaper, a consultancy video, or anything perks that add value for customers and build trust with them. Once you have their contact, you can send them more materials and suggest product offers personalized for them. Therefore, you can drive them to your store and boost sales.
Advertising furniture via paid digital ads on Google and social media is one of the most popular outbound marketing techniques. There’re many forms of ads, just to mention the most commonly used:
Paid search: Promote your brand through keywords to appear on engine result pages. You should have a plan for target keywords that customers are likely to search for and place an ad for the keywords. This allows you to capture customers early once they have an interest in furniture.
Display retargeting: Show ads to customers who’ve left their shopping cart on your website. You can also show similar items they may like but didn’t add to their carts. This method reminds customers to complete their orders, thus bringing you more sales.