Furnitureland South revamps Web site
By Brian Carroll -- Furniture Today, March 13, 2005
High Point — Furnitureland South has unveiled a Web site redesign that aims to project its lifestyle-based branding campaign as well as better reflect the way consumers have been using the site.
The new design enables targeted, database-driven e-mail marketing and it automates how sales associates receive consumer inquiries, distributing them on an "up" system similar to that used on the store's floor.
"More people visit us online than do in our stores. We wanted to update and upgrade the site to better meet their needs and expectations," said Jason Harris, executive vice president of the Top 100 store. "We wanted to move our advanced search functionality, which we believe may be the industry's best, more to the forefront of the site."
Furnitureland South's in-house site development team also added a Google-like quick search option.
"We saw in the data that consumers wanted to be able to quickly get to, for example, sofas, without wading through several query pages," said Terrie Silver, director of marketing for Furnitureland South, which is on the Web at www.furniturelandsouth.com.
The site's search engine allows searches by style category, room, item, collection or quality level.
A button for best sellers
"We've also added to the home page a button that takes people to our best sellers," Harris said.
A new application on the site switches the color scheme and dominant visual a user sees each time the site is visited, scrolling through four lifestyle-oriented vignettes. Using Flash and site style sheets, the color schemes toggle between eggplant, peach, khaki green and slate blue, each tied to a focal point object (artichoke, bee, bowl and flowers).
Using the theme, "Life is full of inspiration. Style is what you do with it," the site now projects the marketing and advertising campaign FLS is using in print, TV, billboard and fleet advertising.
"What we're doing is unifying all of our merchandising, in all of our advertising and in our stores," Harris said. "The new color schemes and branding philosophy is online, in all of our advertising and it's on our post-sale brochures and in our (store) displays."
More than 100,000 unique visitors shop Furnitureland South on the Web per day, according to the retailer's Web Trends site data, averaging more than 13 minutes per visit. That duration is exceptional. Most e-commerce sites report average visits between two and three minutes.
"It shows people are using our applications," Silver said. "Our data also shows people are using our Room Planner and our Design Folder applications."
Both were enhanced in the site redesign. The Room Planner allows more precise designs. The Design Folder now links with the e-mail marketing database, allowing the store to query the database and send targeted e-mails.
"If a collection is being discontinued, for example, we can send those people with pieces from that collection in their Design Folder an e-mail notifying them that perhaps they should think about buying those pieces they've been thinking about."
FLS used the targeted e-mail function to announce the site's redesign and saw site traffic jump by about 50%, Silver said.
The site was redesigned with plans for a robust online catalog, which will debut in the spring. The online catalog will mirror the print catalog the retailer plans to mail out in the spring, a first for the company.
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