Furniture and Textile Industry: Is Your Digital Marketing Working?

The furniture and textile industries are some of the oldest industries out there.

It comes as no surprise that when working within either of these industries that it can be a challenge to get your teams on board for various marketing and sales strategies that go beyond numbers in an excel spreadsheet.

However, due to the increased demand for online shopping, there has never been a more important time to rethink, revamp, and re-invigorate your B2B marketing strategy as a furniture or textile provider. Before you can jump into creating a new strategy, it’s important to clearly define your goals.

What is a Goal?

Whether you are in a marketing role or not, chances are you know what the word “goal” means. However, the difference in setting marketing goals as opposed to some other personal goals you may have is they need to be SMART.

Smart goals are goals that are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely. Let’s break down what each of those mean for you.

“S” - Specific

Specificity is very important when setting a goal. If I set a goal that is just “Improve email open rate,” that is not specific enough.

• • • What is the rate now?
    • How much should it improve?
    • How will you improve it?
    • Who will be in charge of improving it?
    • Will this apply to all emails?
    • How will you measure it?

These are important questions to ask yourself and your team when setting goals. Always use specific wording when setting goals.

So let’s make that first goal more specific: Improve Fran’s Fine Furnishings (insert your company name!) marketing emails (specifying what emails) open rate.”

“M” – Measurable

Let’s use the first example again “Improve email open rate.” No part of this goal is measurable.

• • • How will you know you met or did not meet your goal if there is no way for you to track progress?
    • This is where your KPIs or key performance indicators come into play.
    • A KPI is the metric you choose to measure the result you are trying to attain.

In this case, the open rate would be our KPI. Other KPIs include sessions, conversions, unique web visitors, and more.

Now that you know what KPIs are, let’s revisit our goal to make it more measurable. “Improve Fran’s Fine Furnishings marketing email open rates by 25%.”

“A” - Attainable

Goals are created to be met. When creating a goal, you want to make sure it is feasible.

For example, if your company has only made a $10 profit in the first month it has been open, it would be completely ridiculous to make your goal to turn a $10,000 profit in the second month.

Let’s go back to Fran’s Fine Furnishings: they currently have an average marketing email open rate of 10%. To increase the open rate by 25% they would only need a 0.025 increase. This goal is attainable.

“R” – Relevant

Does your goal matter – is it relevant to your current marketing strategy? If your goal is not relevant to anything your company is currently prioritizing, then what is the point?

Fran’s Fine Furnishings wants to strengthen their email campaigns and make sure they are reaching their audience as they have had success with email campaigns in the past so that the sales team has more relevance when they reach out personally about new product lines. Thus, we know their goal to increase marketing email open rates is relevant.

“T” – Timely

It is important to create time constraints around your goal. The loftiness (or lack thereof) of a goal is heavily influenced by the amount of time you, your team, or your company have to achieve that goal.

To increase the email open rate of Fran’s Fine Furnishings by 25% in a week is a bit of a risky goal depending on how many emails they send in a week. A month will give enough time for multiple emails to go out and make it more attainable so that a marketing team can implement new techniques like testing subject lines to improve the metrics. 

I’m Ready to plan SMART KPIs. What Does That Look Like?

Now that we have used the SMART process to fix up our goal, we have a truly SMART goal that we can use to measure the success of our email marketing campaign for Fran’s Fine Furnishings.

Our final SMART goal is …drum roll please… the Stratagon marketing team will increase the email marketing open rate for Fran’s Fine Furnishings by 25% in one month to allow the sales teams more leverage for the new product lines.

That's what an effective Key Performance Indicator should look like.

What Are the Main KPIs You Should Track in the Furniture and Textile Industry?

Now that we have a solid understanding of what a SMART goal looks like, let’s discuss KPIs that are integral to the furniture and textile industry.

1. Sessions

With online shopping becoming a major source of purchasing and often the only way your buyers can purchase items outside of major trade shows, buyers, designers, and retailers must be getting to—and staying on—your website.

• • • • A session is the length of time a user spends on your site. Within that time, they can perform various actions like visiting multiple pages, purchasing items, chatting with a bot, and more.

• • • • Therefore, the more sessions your site has, the more people are visiting your site, and the more actions are taking place, like purchasing directly or connecting directly with a sales rep, based on how you prefer to guide your visitors.

It is important to note that a single user can create multiple sessions.

So how does a session end? A session can end in two different ways:

• • • • First is time-based expiration. In this case, a session will end after 30 minutes of inactivity or at midnight when Google Analytics starts a new day of analyzing.

• • • • The second is if there is a campaign change.

• • • • • • For example, say Buyer Betty got to Fran’s Fine Furnishings by Googling “trade furniture manufacturers.” Fran’s website popped up and she clicked.
          • However, maybe she got distracted and started clicking through Instagram and was reminded about what she was doing after seeing an Instagram ad that Fran’s targeted Buyer Betty with to bring her back.
          • So, she clicks on the ad and gets directed to the site again. Even if Jane still had the original page open from her organic search, this would still count as a second session because she got there via a different campaign.

Marketing teams should create SMART goals around sessions and share relevant data with sales teams.

2. Conversions.

This is another KPIs that you should prioritize. What do conversions show and why are they so important?

Google defines it: “Conversions shows how many conversion events and purchases, along with how much revenue and lifetime value were driven by each aspect of your marketing (e.g., campaign, ad network, creative).”

In other words, conversions tell us how many people are visiting the site and converting into customers after purchasing a product.

However, conversions do not just have to be defined as those who purchase.

For example, you could set up a conversion to keep track of how many of your site visitors are converting into email subscribers. Both tell you very different information but are equally vital to the health of your business. These different conversions are known as conversion events and can be easily tracked in Google Analytics.

Smarketing tip: gather conversion analytics from marketing and provide the info to sales so that they can decide the most relevant leads to pursue based on who’s converted recently.

3. Open Rate & Click Rate.

Open rate and click rate are like two best friends: we like to keep them together.

Emails are so important in the furniture and textile industry – especially when it comes to B2B marketing and sales. It’s common to have designers, prospects, and clients all over the world, so it’s the best way to get in touch and keep in touch with them to stay relevant and top of mind – or top of inbox!

However, an email is useless if no one is reading it and no one is clicking any of your call-to-actions or CTAs.

That is where the open rate and click rate come in.

• • • • • Open rate is the percentage of people who received the email successfully and opened it.
        • Click rate tells you the percentage of people who clicked your email out of all of the people who were delivered the email.

These are great KPIs to use when creating SMART goals regarding email campaigns and general email marketing.

The furniture and textile industries are going through an unprecedented time like the rest of the world. It is more important than ever to set goals for your company and your teams that are SMART and valuable by prioritizing KPIs like sessions, conversions, open rates, and click rates.