Competition in the furniture industry is tight. Today’s consumer has more choices in furniture styles than ever before. So, what makes the modern furniture store successful? By offering customers value and great customer service.
Improving Your Brand
To ensure a great customer experience, furniture businesses need to constantly improve their operations, while promoting their brand. Below are five ways to generate more sales through best practices that are proven.
1. A Distinctive Image
Embrace what is unique about your store. A good starting point is to look at how many years you’ve been in business. Customers will want to buy from an established business.
There are other qualities to embrace, if you haven’t already, such as unique furniture styles or an environmental mission. These separate your business from the crowd, offering potential customers a new and valuable experience.
Once you have your image set, be consistent with every piece of advertising and marketing material you have. This begins in your store and extends to your website and everything that relates to your business.
2. Inventory Control
Out-of-stock items cause delays and poor customer satisfaction. Plus, the slower your inventory moves; the costlier it becomes, eating away at your margins. The best way to control inventory is through point of sale analytics.
The right furniture retail software has flexible reports that allow you to select different criteria specific to your business needs. These reports can give you the tools to balance the right amount of merchandise with customer traffic.
3. Search Engine Optimization
Google dominates the search engine market with 77% of all searches performed. How does your store stand out on Google? There are many ways and they can positively affect the other search engines.
Google thrives by delivering the best experience for their users, which means they crave data. Using Google My Business improves your local search ranking, because the details of your business are more complete in their database.
WordPress is a free website development software that has plugins, like Yoast SEO, to help you optimize your site, making it easier for search engines to find your business. These plugins provide an SEO score for each page on your site and include suggestions for improving your search rankings.
4. Keep Website Content Fresh
In 2015, Google added websites that are sticky and frequently updated to their search parameters. A sticky site is one that holds the users’ attention for longer than a couple seconds. Engaging content is a great way to do this.
Your website is a digital storefront, where potential and returning customers (your target audience) come to shop. Adding images with descriptions, blogs and other resources for your customers will keep them in your “store” longer. Plus, you are educating them with solutions to any problems they might have.
It’s important remember that 65% of consumers shop online before going into the store.
5. Building Loyalty
A referral program will bring new customers into your store, and keep old ones coming back. Why? Because 80% of consumers ask for recommendations and rely on word of mouth for positive reviews. This saves your furniture business even more money on the cost of acquiring new customers.
Rewards programs are geared toward frequency and amount of purchases. That’s hard to implement for a furniture store. But, it is still something you should consider for your more regular customers. And the right furniture retail software will take care of most of it for you.
Make Customers Feel Special
With everything else that you do, it’s very important to make your customers feel special. These tips are simple ways you can improve their experience. If you haven’t already implemented them, then it’s time to build a strategy and make this your best year on record.