Direct mail marketing for furniture store retail is essential to the success of maintaining foot traffic in furniture showrooms across any city. With heavy competition all vying for the attention of the too few buyers of residential furniture, the industry is liken to the auto dealership market. Like the auto dealership market, furniture stores sell most of their products on the weekend sales, offer financing, continually upgrade their merchandise, and attempt to position themselves differently amongst their competitors. The furniture store marketer integrates their brand message within the primary advertising mediums; direct mail, newspaper print, television, and online presence.

The direct mail marketing advantage

Direct mail marketing’s primary advantage is that it’s highly measurable. Every campaign dollar spent can be measured for performance by tracking response. The furniture store marketer can use direct mail to advertise a clearance sale or special financing offer but require the direct mail recipient to bring the direct mail piece with them when they come into the store to redeem the offer. Maybe it’s an RSVP for personal tour through the showroom, or a coupon for discount on certain furniture items. This direct mail piece is the recipients’ ticket to take advantage of the special offer. Too many beginning furniture store direct mail marketers lack an offer that is measurable and miss out on valuable response information. The primary goal to including a direct mail response measurement vehicle is to attempt to learn what’s working and what’s not working, how subtle changes in the mailing list, offer, creative, and timing affect the response. Direct mail can be measured to as high a degree as the direct mailer is willing to track it. And because this is so, great strides can be made as to the best mailing list audience, offer and creative direct mail piece.

Customer Mailing List Profiling

Though most anyone is a good candidate for furniture, there are more responsive people than others. Some direct mail campaigns attract some kind of people, while others attract other kinds of people. There’s no better way to determine the most responsive direct mail audience than to consider the previous customers of your furniture store. This can be done by providing your customer mailing list to a professional mailing list broker who’s experienced in database profiling. Your goal is to identify the differences within your internal customer mailing list as it compares to the rest of the population in the same market territory. Presumably, these other people are shoppers of your competition, because, well frankly, everyone needs to find a couch to sit on and if they’re not buying from you, they’re buying from someone else.

So how does the furniture direct mail marketer utilize his/her resources to capture information about their customer mailing list? It is easily done by having a number of elements of demographic and psychographic elements appended to the internal customer mailing list data. Then you look for patterns within the elements you’ve found, such as what’s the income range that most closely resembles your existing customers. This is done with other data elements until you come up with a description of these most “common” audience.

Market territory

The furniture direct mail marketer can also utilize their existing customer mailing list to determine their most natural market footprint. There are several things that affect the market territory beyond the need for the furniture. They are listed below:

* Driving distance
* Natural distractions such as driving on a bridge over a river or around a mountain
* Competition within the metro-area your store is located
* Traffic congestion between you and your prospects
* Easy of deliverability

All the above items shape the market territory of your furniture business. Developing a clear picture of where your customers will come from is aid in increasing your direct mail marketing campaign. The easiest way to accomplish this is to again, use your existing mailing list containing the mailing address of your customers. From here, you can append the carrier routes to each and every mailing list record you have on your database. These carrier routes and then be tabulated such that you can rank the most populated carrier routes to the least populated carrier routes. Those routes which are most populated should be your most ideal market territory and those routes with the least should be your least favorite to market to.

Furniture finance marketing

Keep in mind that a big part of the furniture direct mail marketers effort is to sell financing, not furniture. All furniture is attractive at the right price, so if you can direct mail a message that offers furniture, along with no payments, no interest for a period of such and such a date, the direct mail recipient is now challenged with deciding not to take furniture with no money down, instead of weighing out the option of wanting furniture enough to find the money to pay for it. The furniture buying experience changes for the direct mail recipient by installment payments, and for the direct mail furniture marketer by managing payment terms on more furniture sold.

Alt mailing list options

* New homeowner mailing list

New homeowners are a great target audience because new homeowners typically want to fill their new home with new furniture. Because they’ve just purchase a new home, they have exhausted their savings making the down payment but still need/want to complete their home. This target mailing list audience is perfect for the No Money Down/No Payments until the year XXXX. We can assume they’ve done everything they could to clean up their credit score so they should have no problem with the financing.

* Newly weds mailing list

Newly weds are a great mailing list audience to consider because no matter what furniture the new husband brings to the table, it’s hand carried to the curb usually within weeks of the marriage. The newly wed mailing list is not very large relative to the number of potential consumer mailing list records there are available but they are highly responsive to total make-over furniture plans.

* New Movers mailing list

The new movers mailing list is sometimes a good file to direct mail market to under certain conditions. Unlike the new homeowner mailing list, the new mover mailing list doesn’t account for the ability to finance the loan for new furniture. The new movers mailing list is great for those clearance sales that liquidate dated, but new furniture.

Tags: Furniture Direct Marketing, Furniture Marketing, Increasing Direct Mail Response

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 10th, 2008 at 8:42 PM and is filed under Furniture Retail. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.