Over 147 Years of Service to the Furniture Industry Better Bedding & Mattress Sales: Hybrid Marketing Volume 146 NO.1 January/February Just how hybrid is your store? And no, I’m not asking just how many hybrid mattresses you have on your floor. I’m asking how well have you embraced the new economy, the new ways to connect with customers, and new ways to sell mattresses in today’s economy. We talk an awful lot about hybrids, the mattresses, yet the ways that we sell, promote and ultimately deliver our products is akin to an old black and gold floral print, two side, 364 coil count, 12 ¾ gauge mattress! In other words our wares don’t meet up with our words. As an industry, we still promote on price and product. All the while our consumers are buying based on experience. In fact, an entire generation, the Millennials, have forgone the security of a home, car and 401k just so they can have experiences. Does your store measure up to what they and others are looking for?
The words Omni Channel have become the desired “sugar, spice and everything nice” of all department, big box and a large portion of the top 100 furniture stores. Omni Channel is defined as a multi-channel approach to sales that seeks to provide the customer with a seamless shopping experience whether the customer is shopping online from a desktop or mobile device, by telephone or in a brick and mortar store. How Omni Channel are you and can you even afford to be? But you can re-invent your store to be a Hybrid Mattress Store. A hybrid mattress store is a mix of the old with a mix of the new. Let’s remember and be proud of who we are as brick and mortar retailers that sell mattresses. First, our product can positively impact the health and well being of the average person’s life, not even the iPhone does that! And, as brick and mortar retailers we have a number of advantages that online-only retailers can’t match including: Our products can and should be tried out at length in our stores with no hassle or pressure.
Our service after the sale is typically above and beyond that which is contracted out by an online retailer and we almost always can find the solution to the in home problem that presents itself at the eleventh hour. We are members of our community. Our businesses support other local businesses and they support us. The money spent in our stores comes back three fold to our communities. We should and typically do have a better process to fit our mattress solutions to each customer’s needs. If you don’t or feel your process needs improvement, check out a training offer for free on the Infotail YouTube channel. Simply search “Infotail” in the YouTube search bar and look for the video titled “The First Visit System.” How To Combat Their Challenge 1. Commit to education. 2. Win based on being a consumer advocate. 3. Commit to transparent products and pricing. 4. Win based on your expertise to best match the product to the customer. 5. Commit to better service after the sale.
6. Win by having a proactive satisfaction survey. 7. Commit to having a system for reviews and referrals. 8. Win based on your search results. Jeff Giagnocavo and Ben McClure co-own Gardner’s Mattress & More in Lancaster, PA a multi unit destination boutique mattress store. They also co authored the book “Mega Mattress Margins” and “Retail is Dead” as well as created the industry’s only turn key, done for you, sales and marketing machine called Automated Mattress Profits that creates captures and converts prospects into paying customers. Read other articles by Jeff Giagnocavo Two-year-old online mattress startup Casper is quietly planning to open physical stores, according to a series of ads for executives discovered by the New York Post. The Casper job postings include a director of retail to “build, launch our retail store fleet,” a director of wholesale, a hospitality partnership manager and two dozen other positions worldwide needed for a brick-and-mortar strategy.
Casper inked a tie-up with Williams Sonoma-owned furniture retailer West Elm earlier this year, and has also run a series of pop-up stores in Los Angeles, New York and London. Casper, like rivals Lessa, Yogabed and Tuft & Needle, has disrupted the mattress industry by scaling back the profusion of mattress types, qualities, prices and sellers to offer a lean list of equally priced mattresses. These upstarts are grabbing a growing amount of the $14.2 billion retail mattress industry, which for years has taken the opposite tack — providing consumers with a hodgepodge of mattress types and price points that make comparison shopping between mattress stores and department stores nearly impossible. Tempur Sealy and Serta Simmons made 70% of bedding wholesale shipments in 2014, when half of the industry’s revenue growth came from price increases. The success of e-commerce mattress retailers depends in large part on a model that allows them to inexpensively ship a mattress in a box so that it slowly unfolds until it’s ready to fit on a bed.
But online sales may be hitting their limit in a retail space where many shoppers still head to stores to bounce, lie down and try to imagine how the mattress will feel at home. Casper’s return guarantee may not be cutting it with those customers that want to see and touch the goods before plunking down payment. Indeed, the advantage of brick and mortar is proving irresistible to once pure-play online retailers like Warby Parker and Bonobos, which have both chosen to expand their physical locations. The trend is the fulfillment of L2’s contention earlier this year that pure-play e-commerce is not viable for success. Many pure-play ventures are well aware of the need for brick-and-mortar; two-thirds of venture capital-backed e-retailers raised funds “with the explicit purpose of building stores,” according to that report.While bedding is a product category that consumers tend to want to see and feel before purchasing, you cannot discount the ever-growing impact of ecommerce.
So if you’re a brick-and-mortar mattress store, and you’re not taking advantage of online marketing, then you’re missing the boat. According to comScore, a digital business analytics provider in Virginia, U.S. retail ecommerce sales reached $186.2 billion in 2012, a whopping 15 percent increase over 2011. In fact, ecommerce growth rates for 2012 outpaced brick-and-mortar by a factor of four, and online sales now account for 10 percent of total U.S. retail spending. Simply put, brushing aside the power of online mattress store marketing is a grave mistake for your business. This is not to say that you must publish all of your mattresses online with a price tag. Across the brick-and-mortar industry, a rising percentage of sales are first researched online. So while you’re not necessarily losing all your sales to ecommerce enterprises, consumers are doing more research online before they visit your physical location. However, if you don’t have an easily navigable website, and you’re not providing valuable information about mattresses, then you’re most likely losing customers.
A high quality website offers the opportunity to reach a segment of buyers who otherwise would not know about your store. Among other things, your website should: If you have all of these things, you should have an edge on ecommerce retailers. Because you have a storefront –and more specifically, customers know who you are and are more apt to trust you. Use this as a strength by displaying social proof, business awards, community involvement, the years you’ve been in business, and any other information that shows you can be trusted. Back in the “old days,” shoppers visited four or five stores before purchasing a bed. Now they go to one, or if you’re lucky, two stores. This is the power of the World Wide Web. Shoppers are doing more of their research online and then they find a store to complete their purchase. Once your website is up and running, you will not only have to maintain it (updates, optimization, etc.) but also market it. You will need at least one dedicated staff member to update the pages regularly, produce new content, and engage socially to help market your company.
Key components of an effective online marketing campaign are: You can use all of these methods – and more – to reach a wider audience of relevant visitors while driving more foot traffic into your mattress store. By running an active blog on your site, you will be assisting in consumer education (or what we like to call, bed-ucation), allowing you educate consumers into the best options to satisfy their needs, to show best-selling products so you increase the value per customer, coupled with reviews written by actual buyers. Offering videos, quality photos, and detailed descriptions will help lure shoppers away from the web and onto your doorstep. Enhance interaction by using social media tools such as Facebook and Twitter to reach more people and increase brand awareness. This is only the start. Look at the Internet as one more vehicle – in fact, the most important vehicle — to add to your marketing arsenal. If you, as a mattress retailer or wholesaler, don’t have the in-house expertise to launch or manage a quality website, find an outside marketing agency to handle the work for you.