It isn’t easy to compete with the eCommerce giants in the home furnishings industry. What can you do to build trust with digital shoppers?
Write Helpful Content
How quick are you to judge the content on a website? How much value do you put on reading helpful news on a company social page? Whether directly or indirectly, content plays a vital role in establishing trust with digital shoppers.
Content is the driving force of your print and digital marketing, your branding, your sales, even your customer service. Put more time and resources behind making your content show “good faith”.
What is “good faith” content?
Good Faith content is content that aims to educate first, sell second. Furniture retailers are historically pinned in the “big purchase” category and therefore are reactive in marketing to the customer during the buyer’s journey. Big Purchase items need the most content in the best quality to keep your store top-of-mind between the long periods of purchase decisions. Luckily, the home furnishings industry is also full of opportunity to upsell services or accessories to a large purchase.
Pro tip: write great content about designing fresh office spaces in the home or tips on how to buy furniture for others. By creating an engaging story around the soul of your brand (RE: selling furniture or interior design services), you are establishing a narrative with your customer on what you do and what you stand for. Top-of-mind to bottom-of-funnel. Content is the gas for this engine.
Be Transparent
This can be making changes as small as Hours of Operation on your website. Most of the digital shoppers in your cart are Millennials and Generation X shoppers. From our research and many hours of content writing on the subject, these digital generations are skeptical first, trusting later.
If you offer online payment or BOPUS (buy online, pickup in store), give your customer all of the details up front. If you require credit checks on financing options, include this information up front in the buying process.
Studies show that abandoned carts are on the rise. Increasing your transparency before the checkout process. Let’s repeat: Customers do not like surprises in the checkout process. An informed customer is a happy customer.
Pro tip: Make sure that you’ve secured your site with Google! Internet security measures are changing. The penalties now far outweigh the costs to improve.
Show Value
If your retail store does more than selling living room furniture for the contemporary modern home of Generation X shoppers, how are you telling your customers? Show your customer, through Good Faith content, the value your store adds to their big furniture purchase. If you offer white-glove delivery or a special design service as part of a customer reward program, educate the customer! Digital shoppers have unlimited options when it comes to making the decision to purchase furniture for their homes. With competing companies like Amazon and Wayfair dominating the online shopping marketplace, your value is the primary differentiator.
Find the ways that make you stand out and educate the prospects and your digital shoppers on the piece everyone else is missing.
Collect Reviews
We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again. Local reviews matter online when you want to build trust with digital shoppers.
Store reviews matter online because your customers are looking for them. According to eMarketer, 35% of people leave online reviews to inform others about the customer experience. Meanwhile, 15% of customers don’t leave reviews at all.
Why? In theory, the retail stores are the ones to blame (we know, it’s hard to hear). In reality, we don’t blame you because the world of how to collect reviews in an ethical and lawful way have changed over the years. Not only have the methods changed, but the reviews themselves have been difficult to understand. Product reviews, store reviews, company culture reviews (think: Glassdoor), there are so many types of reviews available to your retail store.