More people are buying products online today than ever before. According to Statista, over 1.6 billion people worldwide purchased goods online. That amounts to 1.9 trillion U.S. dollars and projections show a growth of up to 4.06 trillion U.S. dollars by 2020. The digital marketing techniques of yesterday are starting to prove ineffective and some business owners don’t know where to turn to pick up sales to where they once were.
There are many new digital marketing techniques and technology software that are being utilized in the home furnishings industry and they are helping business owners sell a lot more product. Are you implementing these strategies in your marketing plan?
Trending Wall
What’s a trending wall you ask? It is a dynamic, dedicated page that features the products that are most popular on your website. Popularity is based on the engagement a particular piece of furniture gets. The more times it is added to a cart, added to a room planner, shared on social media, and viewed, the higher chance it has of ending up on the trending wall.
Many users like to see what others are looking at and tend to feel more comfortable buying products with high traffic. Take Amazon for example: A person is much more trusting of a product that has many people commenting on it and leaving reviews than a product with little to no engagement.
Blog Content
Writing original and relevant content is essential to increasing organic traffic and promotes trust in your brand. Think of blog content as a pathway to take readers right to your store. When you create original blog content you can drive readers to specific products, categories, landing pages, or various information on your website.
Anything that you are trying to sell can be written about and used as a gateway to a sale. The important thing is to produce valuable content that your readers will find useful and want to share with their family and friends.
When a visitor shares your blog post on their social networks it’s almost like they are becoming your own personal salesperson because now their friends and family are a click away from coming to your website and potentially making a sale.
Topic Specific Landing Pages
These pages are very useful when you are trying to direct people to a specific brand, promotion, or collection. Topic-specific landing pages also boost SEO and can improve paid advertising effectiveness.
Landing pages allow you to highlight certain things to go into much more detail and educate your audience rather than try to sell them with an ad. Large, crisp images, great copy, and effective calls to action are essential to a great landing page that converts into sales.
Visual Search
Visual search is a marketing technique that is a hot tech trend for web users. It is a revolutionary digital marketing tool that can lead to increased sales for your store. The way it works is by giving your website visitors a way to search your websites products by allowing them to insert an image instead of text.
Say that a potential customer falls in love with a new sofa on Pinterest that they think would look great in their living room. They save the picture so they can remember what style of sofa they want when they’re looking online or in store. They now come across your website and paste that photo into your search bar to find a product that looks similar.
Conversions increase because search times decrease. No one wants to spend time scrolling product pages. Visual search makes the shopping journey fast and fun.
3D
3D enables shoppers to better visualize furniture selections and seamlessly merge digital products into real physical spaces. Did you know that 60% of shoppers want to shop for furniture using Augmented Reality? From augmented reality to room planners, the furniture industry is implementing technology in a big way.
2-dimensional images are becoming a thing of the past. Shoppers are demanding a more interactive shopping experience and are likely to become bored and exit your page if there is nothing interactive to entertain them.
Implementing 3D on your website can greatly boost visitors time on your pages and lead to increased sales. The more time a visitor is on your site, the higher the chance they will convert. When 3D, product visualization, AR, and room planning are used to simulate reality, shoppers are more confident in their purchases and therefore retailers deal with less returns.
Custom draping takes advantage of 3D in that shoppers can now see what types of fabric, finishes, and colors look best on the furniture they’re looking at on your website. Many people like certain pieces of furniture but have a hard time visualizing what they would look like in their favorite color or pattern.
With today’s technology, you can give your customers the ability to visualize exactly what it will look like and that is huge when it comes to converting them. They are much more likely to buy when they see a custom draped piece of furniture that will fit perfectly in their home by matching their existing decor.
Get On-Board With Digital Marketing
If your furniture sales are starting to go stagnant or decrease from years past, the problem might be your digital marketing strategy. 3D is becoming a must-have to keep website visitors active and wanting to come back to your site. Technology is constantly changing and if you don’t keep up with the latest trends and strategies, you risk blending into the crowd. If you’re interested in finding out what you can do to increase furniture sales in 2018 and beyond, schedule a free fit assessment with one of our specialists.