Winning Website Tip #6 From PERQ: Can You Tie Your Digital Advertising Back to In-Store Sales?

Furniture World News Desk on 3/11/2019

by Scott Hill

As a home furnishings store owner or manager, when it comes time to review your sales team’s performance on the showroom floor, do you ONLY care how many customers each salesperson interacted with? No, because traffic isn’t the ultimate metric to determine sales performance. You want to know how many sales they generated and the value of those transactions.

That’s not how you want to manage your sales team, so why would you manage your digital advertising that way? Evaluating an individual’s performance by sales numbers and transaction totals tells you who on the staff needs training, where to make improvements and who you may need to replace. Your digital advertising analytics should perform similarly.

We encounter many businesses managing their digital marketing budgets based solely on how it impacts website and foot traffic — not on sales and conversions, which is what you really should evaluate to increase profitability and make your digital efforts more effective.

Measure ROI on Digital Advertising

 
This missing link between real revenue dollars and digital advertising performance makes it impossible for businesses in the home furnishings industry to make solid decisions. You can’t improve what you can’t measure.  

Right now, business owners get frustrated when they spend thousands of dollars in digital advertising per month and can’t tell from inside the store if anything’s different, who came into the showroom because of the online ads, or how the various ads are performing. When they talk to their digital advertising team, they all say how great it is because of all of the traffic it brought to the store’s website.

By combining multiple marketing technologies, we’re now able to turn anonymous website traffic into a trackable lead, so we know which channels bring a consumer to a website and which advertising avenues perform the best for a particular business. We correlate online shoppers to in-store transactions to show true revenue and the value of each advertising campaign driving online shoppers to engage with a home furnishings website. We track website behavior and tie it back to an actual digital advertising source.

That gives us the ability to improve our results and deliver verifiable return on investment. Looking at the consumer data, we can see which profiles are the most valuable and which customers are most likely to convert, and then re-target them with digital marketing advertising. We can then decide which channels are most likely to get us in front of those types of individuals, as well as which kind of offers and products help to convert the best.

Use Data to Develop an Effective Digital Ad Strategy

 
Designed to power the consumer experience from digital to in-person shopping, a marketing cloud gives retail stores a centralized, automated way to manage and track all of the components that go into their advertising and marketing spends.

PERQ’s Marketing Cloud uses machine learning and artificial intelligence to bridge the gap between digital advertising tools, from online ads and website lead management to database and marketing automation. We’re then able to distill all of that data to make more targeted and effective digital advertising decisions, attracting new customers who are much more likely to come in and buy from that store.

Leverage Your Home Furnishings Store’s Best Asset

 
All of the data can also be leveraged by your best asset — your sales team. The data gives a salesperson an opportunity to start building a digital relationship with an online shopper before they visit the store by utilizing the consumer profile data collected throughout a consumer’s digital shopping journey and organized in your web lead manager that’s part of the marketing cloud.

Your store should be engaging with consumers digitally the same way you would when somebody walks through the showroom door, reaching out, nurturing that lead and being helpful. An integrated marketing cloud with digital advertising and an AI-powered website automates and personalizes that process to power a better consumer experience and easier in-store sale.

More about PERQ: PERQ (www.perq.com), boosts website conversion through its online guided shopping solution which leverages artificial intelligence to dynamically change existing websites to deliver the next best step in each buyer’s shopping journey. As experts in online consumer engagement and behavior, PERQ leverages over 10 million consumer data points, along with real-time visitor behavior.

Founded in 2001, PERQ solutions are used by more than 1,000 businesses in the home furnishing, auto retailing and multifamily industries. Its brands have been named to the Inc. “500 Fastest Growing Companies in America” list on three separate occasions. In 2017, PERQ won the Gold Stevie® Award for lead generation software and Product of the Year in the Big Business Awards.

Winning Website Engagement Tips From PERQ

Articles in Winning Website Engagement Tips From PERQ