Marketing
City Furniture's shopping experience is all about knowing the customer
City Furniture can now identify more site visitors, which means improved targeted offers and greater insight about the shopper.
August 10, 2023 by Judy Mottl — Editor, RetailCustomerExperience.com & DigitalSignageToday.com
In real estate, the number one mantra to success is location, location, location.
In retail the number one mantra is "know your customer" and be able to personalize the shopping experience given data, insight and knowledge about that customer.
That's exactly what City Furniture has been busy doing.
The Florida-based furniture and home accents retailer, which has been on a mission to "change the way people live with beautiful home furnishings at incredible value since the 1970s," has deployed Bluecore's Transparent Identification solution that offers a complete view of website identification rates.
The technology is aimed at retailers dealing with customer log-in rates of 10% or less and little understanding of the other 90% of site visitors. Those issues make targeting, personalization and remarketing much more challenging. In fact, most retailers can only identify 5% to 10% of their site traffic, according to Bluecore.
Finding the solution
With 23 showrooms across the state, an expansive e-commerce shopping destination, City Furniture was dealing with the above-mentioned challenges as well as the challenges inherent in the long buying cycle for its products, according to Justin Roisman, managing director of marketing.
"People visit our site at many stages, whether they are doing some early research or about to buy. From an identification perspective, we knew that it was not just about this endless pursuit of new subscribers, rather, it's an opportunity to leverage all the rich data through the identification process for a truly one-to-one experience that is a lot more relevant to wherever a person is in their buying process," Roisman said in an email interview.
Roisman was already familiar with Bluecore as a consumer and described the experience "as magic." He had worked with Bluecore in past roles as well and knew the speed with which it could launch campaigns and drive revenue was "unmatched."
"I saw what truly personalized marketing could do. I've since come to understand the data, science and technology that combines to create that magic," he said.
Bluecore's solution provides City Furniture with the ability to take control of data, put it all together and distribute it in a meaningful way.
"Being able to take it, use it and feed it into predictive models helps us understand what shoppers want and where they're likely to convert," said Roisman.
The payoff
The return-on-investment has been substantial in more ways than one for City Furniture. Within one year of launching the number of identified visitors grew 330% and the audience of customers opting in grew 58%.
But that's just two reaped benefits. The technology has fueled the retailer's transformation from product-first marketers to customer-first marketers.
"Product-focused innovation will always be part of the fabric of who we are. But thanks to the millions of signals and clues we are collecting from customers online and in stores, we can craft and target our messaging with confidence to know which product will be the perfect fit for each of our customers' homes," said Roisman.
The technology has also given City Furniture the ability to speak to customers one-on-one, which Roisman called "table stakes" given the increasing consumer attention to furniture and increasing competition.
"For City Furniture, we need to make sure the digital experience is just as custom as the experience shoppers receive in showrooms. Think of it this way — if you're in a showroom and tell the sales associate that you're looking for a brown loveseat, they aren't going to show you any white sectionals. If the sales associate wants to provide more recommendations to match the new sofa you just purchased, they aren't going to recommend that you buy another sofa. That's the experience you get without personalization," he said.
The marketing transformation
With Bluecore the retailer can craft and target messaging with confidence to know which product will be the perfect fit, said Roisman.
"With this in mind and knowing that we typically have a long rebuy cycle, we decided to test how we could shorten it and more quickly turn first-time buyers into repeat purchasers," he said.
His team leveraged Bluecore's category affinity models within email that include co-view, co-purchase and co-cart data to discover relationships that may not be immediately obvious.
"As a whole home brand, our product catalog is broad — and the complexity of the product catalog makes those predictive models more interesting and targeted. With affinity models, we could create audiences on a sliding scale of level of interest in the selected category to serve that category of products to the right people — with elements of the emails customized to each customer based on their behavior," he said.
City Furniture was also able to determine shoppers' discount affinity, so it began only offering discounts to those customers who needed them to convert to protect margins.
Then, by extending that experience into social channels including Facebook and Google, the retailer drove a 118% increase in repeat buyers and pulled 30% of their inactive buyers back into the fold within one year.
"Being able to take it [data], use it and feed it into predictive models helps us understand what shoppers want and where they're likely to convert," said Roisman.
Why ID approach is gaining
So many gains are why City Furniture isn't the only retailer using Bluecore's technology.
Oriental Trading Company has seen a near 100% increase in website visitor identification rate and retailer Lulu and Georgia has seen a 5% increase in overall list growth and a 229% increase in repeat buyers. Those are among the 400 brands that are Bluecore clients, and the list includes Express, Teleflora, Alo Yoga and NOBULL, according to Jason Grunberg, CMO, at Bluecore.
Grunberg described Bluecore, in an email interview, as "a team of retailers who have built a solution for our retail peers: one that is built for retail data and to put that data into action to maximize reach and engagement through event-triggered marketing, our retail AI models and retail-specific workflow."
The quest is maximizing shopper ID and understanding where there are gaps in identification.
"This sets the foundation for us being the more effective at moving customers through the purchase funnel than any other customer data solution in the retail stack," said Grunberg. "Bluecore has a patented approach to combining customer and product data so that retailers have a complete, streaming retail signal versus CDPs that collect customer data alone and campaign management solutions that are focused on channel data versus omnichannel data sets like in Bluecore."
Personalization, he said, is only possible via identification and many marketing leaders don't realize that they can identify only 10% of their retail website or less.
That means retailers need to determine the real ID rate on the site.
"Their CRM teams will say it's possible to identify 100% — and that's true in the CRM system — but the site attracts many many more people, and only identifies people if they are logged in," he said, adding, "to get more personal, and identify more site traffic, it's important for CRM and website teams to work together to identify more people on site, and work to use signals on the site to understand more about their visitors to create better customer experiences."
Some retailers in the quest for personalization may have some misconceptions — a big one is that some marketing leaders may not realize that it's possible to improve ID rates.
"CRM marketers are not aware that online is such a black hole compared to what they can do in direct marketing to known customers. They're not tuned into new visitors or people who aren't logged in. Website teams know there is a low ID rate, but often don't realize that there is data on their site and there are mechanisms to identify far more," Grunberg said. "Immediately, we are able to identify upward of 25% of site visitors for retailers, and working together, we get that rate up to 40%, 50% and more."
About Judy Mottl
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