Local Atlanta Furniture Store Communicates With and Attracts Loyal Customers via email.

Furniture World Magazine

The retail furniture market in Atlanta has turned into a fiercely competitive environment. Unfinished Furniture Depot (www.UFDepot.com) needed to find a way to not only to separate themselves from other local unfinished furniture stores, but also the national retain furniture store chains. UFDepot wanted to find a way to communicate with each of their customers and hopefully develop them into loyal consumers. As if this was not a lofty enough goal as is, UFDepot did not have a lot of time or a lot of money to do this with. They contracted the services of Loyalty Marketing Solutions (www.LoyaltyMarketingSolutions.com) to assist. LMS suggested a monthly Preferred Customer email newsletter. The first step in this process was to begin to identify each consumer who entered the store and extract their email address. LMS created three separate promotions that included a Rocking Chair give-away promotion, an online sign-up via ufdepot.com, as well as an in-store sign-up campaign. As an extra incentive, on the sign-up forms there was a space to fill in the consumer's birth date. This is so that the stores can recognize them on their birthday and offer them a free birthday gift. It also serves as a great way to give the customer a personal connection with the stores. The second step was to develop a communication strategy with these customers that would be both mutually beneficial to them as well as to UFDepot. It was decided that a monthly HTML email newsletter be created that had valuable unfinished furniture tips, as well as newsletter members only discounts and coupons. This would be sent out each person that had signed up to receive the letter. One of UFDepot's major concerns was their customer's privacy. They wanted to make sure their list could not be exposed to others. LMS used its web-based email software to solve the problem. This email software sends out the messages confidentially and individually so that no person on the list can see the others list members and it does not end up in filtered spam folders. What has the been the success of the campaign so far? One word; Fantastic. Their are specialized links in the newsletter that LMS tracks the click through ratio. In some months, over 40% of the consumers make some action on the newsletters. Those actions range from clicking through to the website, looking at the online sale items, or printing out and redeeming the coupons. Last month, UFD can contribute at least 15 separate sales to newsletter promotional incentives. In just a few months, UFDepot has grown their database tremendously and the success continues to snowball. Mike Gavalas, VP of Marketing for UFDepot says, "The campaign was a hard thing to sell to the employees at first because this is a kind of thing that takes time. It is something that they have to believe will help them make more sales. But now they are seeing the benefits and are asking everyone who enters the stores to join the list and that is only making this thing even more successful. The longer we go, the more success we have. It's great. This campaign is a great way to stay in front of our best customers each month at a very little cost" Mike and UFDepot look forward to a continued success with this newsletter campaign.