10 Tips From Domain Home Fashions For Successful Furniture Merchandising on the Internet

Furniture World Magazine

Judy George, CEO and Founder, Domain Home Fashions At Domain, we have always believed that the Internet provides a wealth of opportunity for merchandising furniture. In just the short time since we have launched our Internet site, www.domain-home.com, we have found tremendous success in both driving customers to our stores as well as establishing an on-line dialogue with our customers. Each month thousands of people enroll at www.domain-home.com line to become Domain Preferred Customers. Below are 10 tips I would like to share with my fellow retailing executives in helping them to successfully merchandise the their products and stores via the Internet. Tip 1. The Store You should run your Internet site no differently from how you run your physical store. On the Internet, you have just a few seconds to impress your visitors, or they click away. Consequently, the visual cues on your home page are just as important as the visual cues in the windows at the front of your store. They need to entice consumers to stop, look and enter. At domain-home.com, we start with a single picture of a hot new furniture collection. We also add promotional banners (this month’s offer, special sales, etc.) to catch their attention. We know that selling is a fine mix of "image" to draw the customer in, and "offer" to give her a reason to make a purchase now. And we never forget that the whole reason for our website is to drive incremental business to our stores. Tip 2. The Goal You have a consumer visiting your website. What do you want her to do? Just look at pictures of furniture and go away? Or do you want her to take action? At Domain we have two clear goals for our site: we want visitors to enroll as a Domain Preferred Customer and we want them to make a purchase at one of our 22 stores. Our web design firm (Market Loyal) artfully designed our site to drive customers toward the enrollment page and a "this month’s special offer" page from every other page of the site. Consequently, we enroll thousands of new Domain Preferred Customers each month, and a large percentage of visitors go to our "this month’s offer" page which then gives them a reason to visit our stores. Tip 3. The Reward Reward customers for starting a dialogue with you. They provide you with valuable and potentially profitable information, so you should reward them for doing so. We do this instantaneously. Enroll at domain-home.com and within seconds we’ll send you a $50-off certificate towards your next purchase. It may sound like an expensive promotion, but right now it’s our most profitable marketing program based on the average ticket of our enrolled customers and the response rate to-date (in excess of 10%). In addition, a qualified e-mail customer list adds a valuable asset to your company. Rewards should also extend over time. Provide benefits and services to your on-line customers not available to the general public. Try sending invitations to customer-only events, such as house tours, receptions or seminars. Consider a VIP or preferred customer program for your on-line customers that will encourage your store visitors to join. Give enrolled customers occasional, unanticipated rewards, positioned as "thank you’s." These unanticipated rewards can be more powerful than structured rewards - - and also much less expensive. To manage costs, establish strategic alliances with companies that have complementary marketing goals, sharing the costs of customer acquisition, communications, and rewards with them. At Domain, we view this as a key strategic goal for our company. With a cooperative marketing program we are implementing with Market Loyal, we plan to build an on-line e-mail list in excess of 100,000 Domain Preferred Customers. We are already well on our way towards this goal. Tip 4. The Customer First and foremost, don’t waste your customer’s time. Making a site with lots of fancy graphics, animations, and movies that take forever to load will only drive her away. Again, think of your store. Would you make your customers stand at your front door for several minutes before they could enter? Second, don’t send your customers email for the sake of sending email. If you have nothing new to say, then you’re better off saying nothing at all. We work hard to make sure that each email to our Domain Preferred Customers has some relevant, new information. By doing so, we can retain customers for extended periods of time. To date, our opt-out rate is less than 1%, even though we make it exceptionally easy for people to unsubscribe if they care to. Third, ask for customer input. Before we launched domain-home.com, we conducted 40 focus groups with our customers. (Interestingly, very few people in our focus groups said they would be interested in purchasing furniture on-line.) Universally, they said they wanted to see furniture placed in room settings. Placing an isolated item on a stark white web page was of no interest to them. Fortunately for Domain, we merchandise in room settings and create our marketing materials based on proprietary room shots of collections. We were able to create our site, therefore, from our existing photo database. Tip 5. The Brand Use your Internet site to build your brand. I cannot reinforce enough the power of the "brand." Create a consistent branding strategy that builds on your strengths. This means the merchandising strategy in your stores should match merchandising on your web site. We have seen tremendous success with domain-home.com based on the strength of the Domain brand in our core markets. People know us, know what to expect from us, and love to shop with us. Most of the thousands of consumers who have visited domain-home.com have done so because they were actively searching for our web site and looking for more information. When they arrive, they see what they expect from the Domain brand - furniture placed in sumptuous room settings, a personal connection and an inspiring selling message, "It’s your dream, live it." On each successive visit to domain-home.com, our brand just gets stronger with our customers. We also have a highly visible, in-store signage program to increase awareness of domain-home.com and build the domain-home.com brand. Because many of our stores are in high-traffic mall locations, we are able to get thousands of "eyeballs" every day for no incremental cost other than the cost of signage. Our design associates also hand out take-away postcards that describe the domain-home.com experience. Tip 6. The Follow Through Don’t put up a web site unless you plan to keep it up-to-date and respond to customer inquiries. Would you install a telephone system and then not answer it? If your web site is a consumer’s first impression of your store, and it is an unfavorable impression, then most likely she will be shopping elsewhere. We treat our web site like a publishing business with a monthly publication schedule. Each month we update core parts of our site with new promotions, new collections, and new editorial content. We give our customers a reason to keep coming back. In addition, we drive them back to the site with a monthly e-mail newsletter. Tip 7. The Analysis Look at what people do on your site and adjust your site regularly to make it better. You may be surprised by what information you can extract from a successful web site. In addition to personal information on your customers such as zip code, address, and answers to specific survey questions, you can also get valuable insights from tracking where they go on your site. We have found there is close to a 100% correlation between those furniture collections viewed on our site and our best selling collections in-store. Based on this, we have added a "cast your vote" page where consumers can actually vote on new items in our development studio. A radical thought letting customers vote on your next product line? Not really; they vote with their pocketbooks every day in your store. Tip 8. The Profit We set clear financial goals for our Internet site, which included making a short-term profit on the investment in our site. We also made sure that we had a way to measure our financial performance on the web. Our on-line coupon programs give us a clear view of who is visiting our site and then making purchases in our stores. Each Internet coupon has a unique customer code that lets us track purchases at our stores. We know who came to our site, printed a coupon from home, and then redeemed the coupon in a store. This lets us quantify the substantial ROI from our site. Tip 9. The Connection Establish an emotional and personal connection with your customer. Retailing, in the end, is a face-to-face business. One of the marvelous things about the Internet is that you can personalize communications with your customers right down to the individual. Supplying the right information at the right time creates the perception that you're serving customers, not advertising to them. At Domain, we’re segmenting our web customers into communities of common interest. For example, we have a loyal following for our warehouse special events and we give these customers specific emails about any upcoming warehouse sales. We are also personalizing our communications through a targeted newsletter program. Ultimately, we would like every one of our customers to feel that the newsletter was personally created just for her. 10. The Long Haul Once you begin, plan for the long haul. You will find this to be the most difficult part of running an Internet site. It needs continual care and feeding. Take a step forward every day. Make your site a little bit better, add a few customers to your e-mail list, train your sales associates to point customers toward your Internet site. There are hundreds of little things to make your site a success. Step-by-step you’ll get where you want to go. Domain Home Fashions, founded in 1985, operates 22 retail stores in high-traffic, upscale malls and sites from Boston to Washington, D.C. Well-loved for its affordable decorator looks, fully accessorized displays and classic European-style furnishings, Domain has won numerous industry and customer awards, including Outstanding National Furniture Store Chain. Domain’s Founder and CEO, Judy George, has also won many awards, is a best-selling author and has appeared on national TV, radio shows and in magazines.