Furniture shopping has never been more complex – and neither has furniture selling. Consumers shop across multiple channels, have little brand loyalty, and a staggering 81% have already done extensive research online before they even step into your store.
However, there is good news. With a stronger housing market, sales are increasing. In research by Satista, revenue in the “Furniture & Homeware” segment in the US is expected to reach $65,122m in 2018. Revenue is also expected to show an annual growth rate (CAGR 2018-2022) of 11.3%, resulting in a market volume of $99,877m in 2022.
REVENUE
ONLINE AND OFFLINE SALES
In the “Furniture & Homeware” segment, 33% of total market revenue will be generated through online sales by 2022.
Furniture Shoppers by Age
In 2017, almost 30% of furniture consumers were between 25-34 years old.
While the outlook looks positive, furniture retailers will need to adjust to a changing landscape as more consumers shop online, the demand for personalized experiences increases and generational shifts force marketers to reevaluate target audiences and messaging.
As a trusted partner to leading furniture brands, here’s a look at acquisition and retention strategies for furniture retailers.
Target In-Market Furniture Shoppers
With Porch Group Media Signals, furniture retailers can target and acquire in-market furniture shoppers who have recently rosed online for furniture or visited a furniture store.
Case Study: National Furniture Retailer Uses Porch Group Media Signals to Double Their Response Rates
CHALLENGE
In an effort to boost customer acquisition in an increasingly competitive retail landscape, a national furniture retailer turned to Porch Group Media to help them target and acquire in-market shoppers. With brick-and-mortar locations, the client had been using traditional mobile targeting techniques including geo-fencing and beaconing to try and attract new customers into their stores. Large investments in time and resources were allocated to launch these programs however ROI and lift in acquisition remained flat.
SOLUTION
The client leveraged Porch Group Media Signals™, a proprietary mobile location solution that identifies in-market shoppers. The client used the program to track shoppers at competitive locations within proximity to each of their stores. The client then implemented an omnichannel approach to market to these shoppers.
RESULTS
Of Porch Group Media Signals™ shoppers identified, our client saw more than double the response rate compared to other mobile acquisition programs they had previously used.
Target New Movers and Consumers Experiencing Lifestyle Changes
Targeting new movers and consumers experiencing other life changes represents a lucrative acquisition opportunity for furniture brands. Consumer life events, such as getting married, buying a house, or having children, provides furniture marketers with a reason to engage with a consumer and increase the likelihood that a consumer may purchase.
Highly personalized mailings based on these trigger touchpoints can produce significant improvements in response rates, up to 10 times higher when compared to traditionally-timed campaigns.
Personalize Your Outreach to Millennials and Other Key Demographics
Consumers expect retailers to know their preferences and interests. A recent Infosys survey reported that 78% of consumers are more likely to be repeat customers if a retailer provides them with targeted, personalized offers.
For example, a consumer may share their contact information including their interest in a specific piece of living room furniture but they may not be ready to buy. Using this data, additional demographic data can be appended, and a highly personalized nurture program can then be deployed.
Personalized acquisition campaigns can also be created based on a best customer look-alike profile. For example, your furniture brand may cater more to millennials or luxury shoppers. Data elements including age, home ownership, occupation, gender, estimated income, telephone number, ethnicity, credit card, hobbies, purchase behavior, lifestyle interests, and many more can be used to create tailored messaging across the purchase journey.
In MyBuy’s Personalization Consumer Survey, research showed that consumers purchase more from brands that:
- 53% – Suggest products based on browsing or buying behavior
- 49% – Personalize online ads that promote offers and products
- 48% – Send personalized emails based on past browsing and buying behavior
- 48% – Personalize the shopping experience across all channels
Delivering this level of personalization requires that consumer data is connected at a very granular level. Apply analytics to create customer profiles and segmentation and use solutions to update profiles in real time. Collecting and analyzing data is the foundation of good personalization, but your customer data is constantly changing and must be maintained and updated frequently to ensure relevant customer connections.
Target Consumers Researching and Shopping Online
E-commerce is on the rise and more people are buying furniture online. An even largest percentage of furniture shoppers are researching online before heading to a brick-and-mortar establishment to purchase.
Almost half of millennials research online before heading to a furniture store, with the next largest population being Gen X. Porch Group Media provides you with the flexibility to create customized audiences.
A study by Perq, a maker of retail software solutions, surveyed more than 9,000 consumers shopping on 30 retail furniture websites between May and September 2017. The research indicated that:
- 70% of consumers shopping for furniture begin the process online.
- 39% of online furniture shoppers are in the middle of the purchase process and “narrowing options”
- 17% are ready to purchase
- 49% of those shopping for sofas online want to buy within two weeks
According to the National Retail Federation, more than 57% of furniture shoppers buy at a physical store. This shows that consumers are largely going on-line to research to make a decision on which location to purchase from.
Furniture brands must target these in-market shoppers with digital ads while they are still in the decision process. Porch Group Media offers a range of customized furniture audiences to make sure you don’t miss a single opportunity.
Sample furniture audiences include:
- Home Décor Buyers
- Home Improvement Buyers
- Value Hunter Buyers
- Interior Decorating Interest
- Country Lifestyle Interests
- DIY Interests
- Millennial New Movers and Pre-Movers
- Baby Boomers New Movers and Pre-Movers
In addition, we apply digital profiling to analyze aggregate customer attributes to form a detailed composite of the “ideal” buyer. Our analytics capabilities allow you to understand purchasing behaviors, target unique segments, build application-specific models and prioritize opportunities to optimize marketing spend on just the right audience for each campaign.
Bring All Your Data Together to Get to Know Your Customers and Target High-Performing Audiences through a Customer Data Platform (CDP)
Consumers produce mountains of data every day as they shop across a myriad of channels and devices. This data is fragmented across many systems and marketing platforms — obscuring customer behavior.
A Customer Data Platform (CDP) is an evolution of something all modern marketers (should be) familiar with – a marketing database. In this case, a CDP is a marketing database purpose-built for the API-driven world, and ‘pick and mix’ marketing technology stacks in mind, while also allowing for the integration of offline sources and legacy database and infrastructure.
At their core, CDPs have three primary functions:
- They pull in customer data from the disparate data systems of your choice
- They match, merge and cleanse this data into a unified record for each customer
- They make these records visible to your other marketing tools to ensure the consistent treatment of customers
The Porch Group Media CDP harnesses the power of multiple data sources and blends it with our suite of industry-leading 3rd party data assets to create one single version of the customer truth. Using a CDP, a marketer is better able to get to know their customers and prospects and develop actionable insights to deploy unified customer journeys.
Successful customer acquisition requires having the right marketing data to develop your own unique mix of audiences, channels, and messaging. And with the right mix, you can power your company’s growth with masses of loyal customers.
Learn more about Porch Group Media’s entire suite of customer acquisition and retention solutions for furniture retailers.
Learn how Porch Group Media can help you get to know your customers better and reach them across channels to boost your marketing success. Contact us to get started!
