Savvy retailers make hay with online presence
By Brian Carroll -- Furniture Today, September 24, 2006
High Point — Online marketing and advertising have moved into the mainstream media mix for many brick-and-mortar furniture stores who see more consumers using the Web for pre-shopping.
Consumer broadband adoption has made the Internet a pervasive influence in users' lives, and marketers are responding by pushing more of their budgets online.
"We believe the Web is here, that it is growing exponentially, and that we're going to be on it, in it and all over it," said Steve Goldberg, executive vice president at 60-store Raymour & Flanigan. "Every generation that comes along, the (Internet) is that much more a part of their lives."
Brick-and-mortar stores are leveraging the Internet to extend their brands, raise their profile in search findings, make shopping more convenient and, perhaps most importantly, meet consumers where they are when they're ready to buy furniture.
"People communicate via the Web as a first order of business," said Edward Audi, a partner at Stickley, which has sites both for its manufacturing division and for its 14 company-owned stores. "We need to facilitate that conversation."
Among the more sophisticated Web sites is one developed almost completely in house by Richmond, Va.-based La Difference, a single store of about 45,000 square feet. Featuring nearly 1,600 pages of hand-coded HTML, the site engages consumers with an almost-dizzying array of marketing tools. A Room Planner developed by Icovia, a 360-degree video tour of the physical showroom similar to those common on online real estate sites, and HTML e-mail newsletters are among the arrows in La Difference's online marketing quiver.
"We can't put product up fast enough" on the Web, said Brooke Ulllman, one of the store's designers and the point person responsible for the site.
The showroom tour is drawing consumers from as far away as Boston and Florida, who fly in to spend the weekend shopping, Ullman said.
What to show online is complicated by vendor sensitivities. Manufacturers are being less than cooperative wherever e-commerce threatens to confuse or dilute their distribution decisions. Retailers with Web sites, particularly those who sell on the Web, must be careful. Another challenge is the sheer amount of new product.
La Difference put only a limited assortment online at first, mainly products it could ship anywhere. The store delivers via its trucks only within a radius of 250 miles.
"Now we put everything on line, being very careful to identify what we can and cannot ship," Ullman said. "We didn't want to limit any more than necessary what consumers could see from home."
Stickley, too, is wrestling with how much to put online. Rather than overwhelm the consumer, the retailer has opted for convenience. Maps, furniture lines carried with links to those manufacturers (Stickley's stores carry lines from other vendors), and product within one or two clicks are among the content on the site.
"We want to provide anything that saves our customers time," Audi said, "anything that takes their time to do."
With time-saving in mind, Stickley is about to beta test a program that links customers with Stickley designers via e-mail. The company will begin this month with the dozen or so designers at its Fayetteville, N.Y., showroom, then roll the program out to all 120 designers in the 14-store network.
Search marketing, search optimization and search analysis also are becoming more important to retailers that are online.
La Difference, for example, utilizes Google Analytics, which enables a site owner to track from where visitors are coming. Ullman uses the data to discern which products are getting the most clicks, then to compare the "click-worthy" product with what actually sells most.
Showing well, selling best
"The differences are amazing," she said. "What shows well online is not necessarily what sells best. The data helps us make better decisions on what to put out front."
Clickstream data also revealed that quite a few visitors were coming to ladiff. com from a blog and e-magazine, Better Living Through Design. This led to a crosslink and an e-mail dialogue between the e-magazine and the retailer.
Furniture.com, which partners with brick-and-mortar stores to market and sell online, used search analysis to increase by 60% its return on investment in paid search advertising. Using a suite of software from Omniture, Furniture.com analyzed its paid online search programs.
Search marketing involves using mostly text ads that appear next to results from online searches, or buying the rights to have an ad appear on-screen when computer users type in certain key words.
Using the Omniture software, Furniture.com tracked keyword performance to see which ones worked and which ones weren't worth paying for with search engines like Google, said Betsy Harden, the online company's director of marketing.
Levitz, Harlem and RoomStore are among Furniture.com's retail partners.
Andy Bernstein, president and founder of FurnitureDealer.net, which built and manages a site for Schneiderman's Furniture, said an estimated 82% of online shoppers know exactly what they want when they log on.
Online search is "the single most important way to attract qualified visitors and furniture shoppers" to a site, said Bernstein, referring to search engine optimization.
Because most Web users don't read past two pages of search findings, getting a site to appear near the top obviously is a priority. Optimization tries to determine how to elevate a Web site in the listings when computer users look for a subject or topic.
In part due to optimization, www.schneidermans.com attracts over 70,000 unique visitors a month, said Bernstein, on a budget of $400 per month, or less than the cost of a quarter-page newspaper ad.
Search marketing and search engine optimization represented a $5.1 billion category last year, growing far faster than traditional advertising in TV and newspapers.
"No one can quantify what their site is doing for them," said Raymour & Flanigan's Goldberg, "but no one can accurately quantify what newspaper or TV is doing for them either. We know (online) enhances our 60 stores immeasurably."
Any impression these retailers have the Web figured out is false. No one claims to understand how to optimally leverage online spending, or how much money ideally to plow into online.
"It's like any other part of our business plan," Goldberg said. "We make assumptions. We measure as best we can, and we adjust according to what we're seeing. It's always changing."
Ullman agreed. La Difference is looking at marrying its consumer site with its inventory database system to give consumers even better, more current information.
"And eventually we want a site that customizes itself for the consumer," she said, describing a home page that recognizes by name the consumer who is visiting, as amazon.com does.
Why stores should be online
It clearly is in most furniture retailers' best interests to be active, even aggressive, in online marketing.
According to a June 2006 survey conducted by Pricegrabber.com, although many consumers say they are still reluctant to make final big-ticket home furnishings purchases online, they definitely are doing research online, no matter where they make their final purchases.
Approximately three-fourths of the more than 1,400 consumers surveyed said they will research online before making their next furniture purchase. Online consumers use a combination of sources before deciding what and where to purchase, with 70% of respondents indicating Web sites as their most widely used source.
Pricegrabber.com is a shopping comparison engine with more than 21 million unique users per month.
Recent trends indicate that consumers are more comfortable going online to shop for furniture, both to research and to purchase large- and small-ticket items.
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