Ever watch those HGTV shows when the interior designer fills a homebuyer’s space with fabulous furniture, rugs, and accessories? If you’re like most of us, you wonder how you can grab all that great stuff on the screen for your home. That desire to “shop the room” is the inspiration behind the latest email marketing campaign of iContact customer, American Home, New Mexico’s furniture and mattress mainstay.
With an 80-year history of being the “go-to” furniture brand that caters to the décor preferences of New Mexicans — a unique look that combines traditional, industrial-chic, and bright Southwestern colors and patterns — the store’s buyers take pride in really knowing their customer. You’ll never see a coastal print for sale at American Home.
Beverly Adele Snyder, web store manager for American Home, borrowed the same visual merchandising tricks used to entice customers to linger in-store, to entice subscribers to open more emails. By using lots of color and trendy lifestyle photos, they’ve amped up engagement and click-thrus to their website.
One technique that is working successfully for the retailer is to use a large, “inspirational” hero image on top of their new email template created by our Design Services team. “Whether someone is in one of our six showrooms or shopping online, everyone just wants to be inspired,” says Snyder. “Often, customers will have that one room in their house they can’t stand and they rely on us — almost like a best friend — to help them completely redo it from the lighting, to floor coverings, and everything in between.”
But before Snyder and her team of designers, writers, and merchandisers, could hope to impress shoppers with a relaunched blog and clickable cover spreads, they first had to take back the website from underneath the technology department. The first order of business was to get the website cleaned up and made more shopper-friendly.
“Email and social marketing should really be the responsibility of the advertising and e-commerce team,” reminds Snyder. “You can’t expect consumers to drop thousands of dollars on quality products if online descriptions are missing, inconsistent or have spelling and grammatical errors. IT has a very different goal than to sell products and build a brand.”
Holidays such as Fourth of July, Memorial Day, President’s Day, Black Friday, and Labor Day have traditionally been good times to run specials on mattresses and furniture. Snyder makes sure that Google Analytics code is added to all her links to track the overall customer journey. “It’s not that mattresses have anything to do with our country’s independence, but it’s when customers expect discounts, so we’ll definitely be sending promotional emails around July 4th,” said Snyder.
American Home relies on their Strategic Advisor, Ananda Eidsvaag, to provide creative ideas to help them grow their contact list, for example, using their new email template and iContact’s “plug and play” signup form when running local contests.
“Ananda and I talk every month, and she is fantastic and really cares about our business,” says Snyder. “iContact makes everything so easy; they really know how to support their customers with tons of training tips and webinars. We’re excited to work with Ananda on our next project to use Instagram to delight and inspire potential shoppers on social media even more.”
Thanks to American Home for sharing their story with us. Happy Fourth of July, everyone!