Furniture business: demand for smart marketing
Domashenko.Digital and EXPOCENTRE AO held the Forum on Furniture Digital: Smart Marketing That Guarantees Profit during Mebel 2023. It was dedicated to the main tools of digital marketing from the point of view of their effectiveness.
Experts in the field of Internet business and digital sales gave the Mebel 2023 exhibitors and visitors recommendations and advice on how to attract more customers from the website and advertising without additional costs, skilfully apply the formats of information dissemination through messengers, and increase furniture sales with the help of CRM and automation of various sales-related processes.
For example, Yulia Gerts, a marketing expert at Callibri, said that over the last two years furniture manufacturers found themselves in a situation where, on the one hand, there were fewer advertising channels, and on the other hand, advertising traffic became really expensive. The question has arisen about how can we sell more with the same number of requests that come from the website?
“Analytics allows you to understand how a business works, how websites work and whether they generate new customers. Cross-cutting analytics, call-tracking (tracking phone calls), email-tracking help to understand what advertising brought potential customers to the website, to calculate how much was spent on advertising, and how many orders this advertising brought,” said Yulia Gerts.
Cross-cutting analytics identifies so called weak spots in sales, i.e. those parts of the customer cycle where potential customers are most often ‘lost’ and fall out of the ‘sales funnel’. A website can have up to 20 different channels of communication with a furniture shop. According to research by Callibri, 44% of customers prefer to call the chosen furniture shop to place an order, 15% contact via chat on the website, another 14% via WhatsApp, 12% via an e-application form, etc. If a customer fails to get through to the furniture shop immediately or does not receive a prompt reply call or letter to their request for information, they simply go to another seller and the money spent by the company on advertising is lost. Unfortunately, quite often the buyer also has to face incompetence of sales managers, who have difficulty explaining to the client the parameters and qualities of the furniture products they sell, terms and conditions of their delivery, assembly, and warranty service.
One of the new effective tools for controlling the quality of sales of furniture products is the analysis of speech analytics by artificial intelligence, including data analytics. In his speech, Sergey Fomin, an expert in speech analytics for retail and CEO of imot.io, explained how this technology worked. He talked about the growing efficiency of AI not only in terms of solving problems of control over personnel compliance with sales scripts and schedules, but also from the perspective of the possibility of continuous improvement of skills and professional development of sales managers. AI is not only capable of monitoring the required quality of communication with customers, but also of prompting managers with useful arguments, precise formulations, and arguments that help the customer make a positive decision to buy.
The concluding report was made by an integrator of CRM-systems in a furniture company Nikita Averkin on the effective use of CRM-systems, which, if properly applied, can provide a systematic increase in sales of any furniture company through automation and continuous improvement of the sales processes themselves.
Press Service, EXPOCENTRE AO