Want to sell more furniture online? Use a handful of effective digital marketing practices to get the ball rolling. Add value to your shoppers’ experience by helping them feel excited and empowered while browsing your ecommerce furniture site.
According to Statista’s Digital Market Outlook, online furniture sales are steadily climbing and expected to grow annually at a rate of 6.3% between 2020 and 2024 resulting in a market volume of nearly $320 million (U.S. dollars) by 2024.
In this post, we’ll show you six ways to attract and keep loyal customers for your online furniture store through boosting traffic, relationship-building, sponsorships, social media, website design, and new payment technologies.
1. Boost Traffic, Ethically
All traffic is not good traffic. Avoid paid traffic sites that offer impressive numbers, but little to zero conversion. Stay away from confusing navigation, clickbaiting, and other tactics that destroy shoppers’ trust. Instead, offer quality content and employ robust search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM) strategies.
Why SEO?
According to Weidert Group, a multi-industry inbound marketing firm, understanding the difference between SEO and SEM and how to use them as leverage can help generate solid results over time. You can use SEO elements such as social sharing, focused metadata, and selected keywords in your product blog and marketing content.
What is SEM?
SEM simply refers to the use of paid ads. Often referred to as pay-per-click (PPC) ads, they are employed on sites like search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing. New to SEM? Check out this explanation of Google Adwords.
2. Build Relationships with Interior Design or Lifestyle Bloggers
Seek out popular interior design or lifestyle bloggers and send out an olive branch. Explain your brand and goals. Find out what makes them tick to begin forging a relationship of mutual respect.
Requesting a non-biased furniture review may give you an opportunity to view your products’ strengths and weaknesses. It also gives blog fans a chance to learn more about your brand through links to your site from a blog they already trust.
3. Offer Sponsorships or Furniture to Web Shows
Yes, shoppers still frequent brick and mortar stores, but the world keeps changing. As shoppers practice social distancing and turn to online furniture sellers for convenience, it helps to have your furniture offerings front and center on web programming like “Red Table Talk” on Facebook Watch. Be a show sponsor or work out a deal to provide furniture in exchange for a brand mention.
4. Use Social Media Ads to Promote Your Online Furniture Store
Statista reports that, in 2019, social media usage was at a global average of 144 minutes per day, per user. If you’re not using ad campaigns on social media, you are neglecting an established paid traffic stream. Some popular sites set up for social media advertising include Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, and YouTube.
You can begin at any budget and start seeing results, but there is a learning curve and necessary split testing to create effective ads. Before you spend a dime promoting your furniture online, check out these social media tips from Content Marketing Institute, a business with a mission to advance the practice of content marketing.
5. Craft Your GUI with Interactive Furniture Shopping Options
Do you have a 3D view of your furniture on your site? What about magnifying tools to allow your shopper to see the furniture up close and personal? Have you thought about offering a virtual room planner where shoppers can select and place your furniture in a concept room?
Roll out every tool that helps your shopper visualize how your furniture will fit into their life to enhance the user experience. Work with a seasoned graphical user interface designer to ensure the changes are optimized for all devices.
6. Promote and Offer New, Flexible Payment Technologies
Give shoppers a choice of payment options in excess of the usual suspects of credit, debit, Web payments, or financing. Consider offering a nozero application, instantquick approval option like Splitit. Splitit is the only alternative payment method that invites shoppers to buy furniture now and pay over time without interest or fees through the power of their existing Visa or Mastercard.
They get to enjoy their furniture faster and stay on track with budgeting for large purchases and you get the benefits of increased average order value (AOV), guaranteed payments, and omni channel flexibility for online and physical locations, if needed. Request a demo today to learn how Splitit can help you sell more furniture this year.
Bottom Line on Selling Furniture
If you use a variety of ethical techniques to attract shoppers to your online furniture store consistently, you will build a bridge of trust. Trust and sales go hand in hand. Contact a Splitit team member today for a demo and start gaining sales momentum.