Use images of people trying your mattresses to encourage people to give them a try by stopping at your store. Jack Hollingsworth/Photodisc/Getty Images Selling comfortable mattresses that help people get a good night’s sleep requires knowing your target market. While it may seem as if everyone you meet needs one of your mattresses, your ideal customers either want a mattress at a discount or prefer quality with price a secondary factor in their buying decision. Once you know what your potential customers want, you're ready to convince them you have the solution to a great night's sleep. Community Papers Advertising in community newspapers gives you a budget-friendly way to specifically target a local market, such as placing ads about a discount mattress sale in the local college newspaper to appeal to students in apartments. If you sell high-end mattresses to upscale homeowners, look for community papers in neighborhoods with luxury homes and high incomes. Free publications related to parenting or children give you a place to run ads about bunk-bed mattresses or choosing a crib, twin or full-size bed that offers the proper support system to help a child's body develop properly.
Online Information While you may not want to rely on the Internet to directly sell a mattress, use your website to explain the differences between the innerspring, latex foam and memory foam mattresses you sell. Explain the features and benefits of each one, such as how certain brands of innerspring mattresses allow you to sleep without being disturbed by your partner's movements. Talk about how long mattresses should last – about four to eight years –– to help convince people they need a new one. What to Include In your advertising messages, let buyers know you can help them obtain financing so they feel better about picking out the mattress they really want, not the one that costs the least if they're short on cash. Describe the large selection of mattresses you carry, including the various brand names, styles and sizes, because prospective customers like knowing they get plenty of choices. Offer a money-back guarantee if the buyer doesn't get a good night's sleep on their new mattress.
Themes Three-day holiday weekends, including Memorial Day and Labor Day, are prime shopping days for selling mattresses. Advertise truckload sales or holiday-themed events to get shoppers to plunk down the money for a new mattress during these prolonged shopping periods. Other ads can focus on creating a romantic bedroom using images of an attractively furnished room with one of your mattresses. Another ad might use a photo of a smiling customer and a written endorsement. Use an endorsement that explains what problem your customer had before they bought the mattress from you and how shopping at your store resulted in finding the ideal product. References Street Fight: Case Study, Mattress Retailer Uses Targeting to Boost In-Store SalesPrimeau Furniture Sales: Retail Furniture & Mattress Stores -- Are You in the Right Market?Primeau Furniture Sales: Retail Furniture & Mattress Stores -- The Seven Deadly Advertising Mistakes to AvoidEntrepreneur: Business Idea Center -- Mattress ShopFurniture Today: Mattress Metrics, Romantic BedroomsThe Daily Aztec: 10 Advantages of College Newspaper Advertising Photo Credits Jack Hollingsworth/Photodisc/Getty Images Suggest an Article Correction
By Dan Forootan, President of EZ Publishing A mattress is one of those things nobody thinks about until he or she needs one. But once someone needs a mattress, well, he or she REALLY needs one. Nothing impacts the quality of sleep quite like the mattress, and once it goes bad, it should be replaced as soon as possible. But how do those who need a mattress go about finding a new one? Most people don’t window shop for mattresses, after all. Fortunately, mattress stores can take a proactive approach towards attracting new customers-and ensuring that they spread the word to their family and friends whenever they are shopping for a mattress-by overseeing an email marketing campaign. Here are four reasons why email marketing software is a must-have for owners of mattress stores everywhere: 1.) There is excellent interactivity offered within the mattress store’s email marketing plan. People who are desperate for a new mattress often feel helpless at the start of the search process.
But there’s no better way to put a stressed out potential customer at ease than with an email marketing message that features embedded video of customers shopping for and “test-driving” the mattresses and then discussing their satisfactory experience. The email marketing software makes it very easy to embed these videos in the body of the message and for the consumer to view them right in the message instead of cutting and pasting the URL into a new window. 2.) The email marketing software required for a mattress store’s email marketing campaign is affordable and easy to manage. Most establishments and businesses these days are looking to save money wherever possible. But an email marketing plan provides an immediate return on the software necessary to implement it. Not only is the software inexpensive to purchase, but the campaign can be managed by anyone with even a moderate amount of computer experience. 3.) …a mattress store’s email marketing campaign provides the type of direct impact that no other form of advertising or marketing can match.
Most advertising and marketing requires a leap of faith by those placing the ads. There’s no guarantee at all that the target audience will read the ad in the newspaper or not change the channel when the commercial appears on the television or radio. Yet an email marketing message is not only sent straight to the recipient’s inbox, it also contains a personal salutation both in the subject heading and in the introduction that makes it much more likely to be read and absorbed by the customer. Newspaper and television ads can’t do that! 4.) With mattress stores, an email marketing plan can reach even more people via social media. The marketing audience these days is far larger than it used to be, thanks to social media. Each mattress store’s email marketing message can include buttons that allow it to be shared via the user’s Twitter and Facebook accounts. This allows the message to reach infinitely more people than it would have even just five years ago! Dan Forootan is the President of EZ Publishing.