Texas-Based Furniture Retail Black Friday Case Study
The furniture business can be very lucrative, but it’s a highly competitive space. To stand out from the crowd and gain a healthy market share, furniture brands have to offer their customers consistent value.
Annual events like Black Friday present a golden opportunity for furniture retailers to boost brand awareness and make more sales with targeted deals, discounts or incentives. But there’s a catch.
Black Friday is a saturated space. A steady shift towards online shopping and increasing consumer choice means that people are no longer lining up in their masses overnight to snag a hot deal.
No, these days, offering head-turning deals or discounts isn’t always enough to cut through the noise. You must work harder — you have to get creative.
To reach your targets, you must create experiences and develop offers that really speak to your audience—as our client discovered.
Meet Our [Furniture] Client
Our client is a Texas-based furniture retail group with eight stores in the region. It sells a range of high-quality furnishings and has a well-established customer base.
Although this well-regarded furniture group maintains steady business, one of its primary goals is to grow its presence and become a more prominent name in the region. To get an edge on the competition and boost its seasonal profits, the ambitious furniture group turned to us for help.
The Challenge: Declining Black Friday Sales for Furniture
Our client has traditionally earned a healthy level of sales from its Black Friday doorbuster promotions, but in-store traffic has fallen in recent years.
To address this problem head-on and drive more value from its Black Friday promotions, the furniture group needed help with its advertising strategy.
After an initial consultation, we discovered that our client’s previous strategy was based on offering its customers a limited amount of doorbuster deals.
The problem? This one-dimensional approach had started to lose its impact. While enticing, the offers were swallowed up in a sea of similar Black Friday deals.
As a result, fewer customers showed up to their stores on Black Friday morning. Plus, the limited sales our client did earn had tight profit margins. Something needed to change.
Our Solution: Audience-based Black Friday Campaign Drives ROI
To increase in-store traffic, maintain marketing momentum, and attract higher-value customers, we decided to target two different Black Friday audiences. We also rolled out ad assets across a mix of digital advertising channels:
- Meta Ads: Targeted campaigns to reach qualified furniture shoppers
- Google Paid Search: Campaigns focused on high-intent keywords to capture individuals actively searching for furniture or home furnishings
- Customer Database: Using the existing furniture customer list to send personalized emails that bring people back via email and SMS text messages
- Conquest: Target new potential furniture customers – people who haven’t shopped at your furniture store yet – by sending compelling emails to high-intent furniture shoppers
Here’s how we did it.
Our Four-Pillared Approach for Furniture Retailers
1. Smart audience research and segmentation
To engage a wider net of regional customers and attract higher value customers, we created two specific in-market Black Friday sale audiences:
Black Friday Early Access
We targeted this exclusive audience segment with a private event held on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. It was an RSVP-only event plus a bonus savings offer to attract high-ticket customers looking to beat the Black Friday crowds.
Black Friday Doorbusters
We developed four value-driven Black Friday doorbuster deals for anyone who visited our client’s stores early in the day. These incentives offered a healthy reduction on select items and targeted customers looking for big in-store Black Friday savings.
2. Cohesive multichannel media strategy
To develop a results-driven multichannel media strategy targeting high-intent furniture shoppers, we dug into our most effective look-a-like data sources. We defined each of our audiences based on household income and specific domestic interests to refine our Black Friday messaging.
Once we established our client’s campaign messaging, we rolled out our communications across these key ad channels:
- Meta Ads: We launched our furniture store event and incentive campaigns to each audience segment across Meta advertising channels. The focus here was to drive engagement, close event RSVPs, and drive customers to our client’s early access sale.
- Google Search: We expanded our client’s Google Search campaigns to expand brand reach and capture low funnel audiences actively seeking the terms that featured ‘Black Friday + Furniture’.
- Previous customer database: We honed in on our client’s past customer database and targeted previous consumers with actionable ‘early access’ and ‘exclusive VIP’ messaging via email and SMS.
- Conquest email: We reached out to potential furniture customers with high household incomes with lead nurturing email campaigns to earn more event RSVPs and reach consumers beyond our client’s existing database.
3. Engagement-boosting digital-first design
To fortify our furniture client’s early access and Black Friday doorbuster incentives, we adopted a digital-first design approach.
Our talented in-house team brought both key themes to life with end-to-end creative designed for each ad asset and placement, all with attention-grabbing messages that earned conversions.
For both campaigns (early access event and doorbuster incentives), our design team developed conversion-optimized landing pages to support our multichannel ads. This cohesive method maximized engagement around our doorbuster and hot buy deals. It also increased RSVPs to our client’s pre-Thanksgiving event.
4. ROI and attribution
Using our in-house tech stack, we were able to track engagement across touchpoints and connect the dots from the lead generation phase of the campaign right through to the in-store purchases.
Digging deep into detailed insights across every channel and touchpoint empowered us to refine our messaging and drive the best possible ROI for our client.
Pinpointing strengths and weaknesses in performance also gave us the tools to make targeted improvements for future campaigns to maximize our client’s Black Friday success year after year.
Results That Matter
What did our four-pillared approach achieve, exactly? Great things. Let’s take a look at the highlights:
- We achieved a year-over-year (YoY) sales increase of 14%. This is nearly four times the national industry average which stood at 4.2% compared to 2023.
- The Early Access sale was a roaring success. It earned our client a significant boost in sales. We also managed to elevate their average revenue rate per customer by attracting customers with bigger budgets.
- Our unique digital-first approach and targeted messaging inspired a total of 680 Early Access RSVPs, creating an abundance of presale awareness and sales engagement.
In addition to enjoying a record year of Black Friday sales and engagement, our client now has confidence and the framework, to earn the best possible ROI from its key advertising campaigns. We’re proud to have played such a pivotal role in our client’s success.
Key Takeaways
- Targeted, Multi-Audience Strategy Drove Exceptional Sales Growth
By segmenting audiences into “Early Access” and “Black Friday Doorbusters” and deploying tailored messaging across Meta, Google Search, email, and SMS, the campaign drove record-breaking furniture sales for Black Friday. - Digital-First Creative and Data-Driven Execution Boosted Engagement
A cohesive multichannel campaign combined with high-impact design and precise tracking led to significant pre-sales and higher revenue per customer, proving that strategic personalization and digital optimization can significantly outperform traditional Black Friday tactics.
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