How to measure email marketing performance in high end furniture retail
Only this week, I found myself tell a few lovely people that sales is not the most important goal for their email marketing.
It's always a hard message - everybody wants to know that the marketing channels they invest in bring a healthy return - email marketing is no different.
Some businesses are however built in a way that email will simply not show how much it contributes to overall sales.
High end furniture is a perfect example. Even more so when there is a bespoke element to it!
In the high end furniture sector a lot of the purchases happen offline; even more if the pieces are especially designed for each client and require a conversation to ensure the spec is right.
The factors that will make attributing sales to email activity tricky in bespoke furniture businesses are the following:
⛔ it's always harder to connect the offline transactions with the email software
⛔ it takes much longer for the customer to make a decision about their purchase and finalise it
⛔ high end furniture is often purchased by couples and sometimes the tracking is simply lost between the partners - one person registers interest, the other puts down the card
With this in mind, some brands think that email marketing simply doesn't work for them, and they couldn't be more wrong.
We've worked with many furniture brands and have seen first hand how email marketing helps:
💚 inspire the customers during the time they're considering their options
💚 reaffirms that your products are of best quality and that they'll be well taken care off
💚 prove that they're in good company and many happy customers chose your products before
💚 make it easy to contact you - remind them of ways they can get in touch without having to visit your website
💚 keep your brand font of mind while whey might be shopping around
In this case they way to monitor performance of the email channel would be to keep an eye on the following metrics:
✍️ Open Rates
✍️ The size of your engaged segment of the database
✍️ Clicks and traffic to the website
✍️ Conversion to brochure requests, phone calls, and sample orders
If furniture brands monitor engagement as the key metric, and conversion to other demand indicators such as phone calls, email inquiries and store footfall, the channel will deliver many more actionable insights and help build a more complete view of sales attribution in the long run.
At KDV we have had the pleasure of working with some of the most amazing furniture brands in the UK, like sofa.com, Raft Furniture and Naked Kitchens - if you’d like to speak to us about your business and how to make the most of your email channel, drop us a line and we will be super happy to help!
