SMS and Email Marketing Create Huge Boost
in Sales and Revenue for Ashley Furniture

In a tough economy, companies need new and better advertising methods to keep customers coming in and maintain name recognition in an increasingly crowded market. Traditional marketing, while still marginally effective, has lost its luster. Businesses are searching for unique methods to spread their message and forward-thinking companies are turning to digital marketing, and more importantly mobile marketing to give customers and brands a new opportunity to interact using 21st Century communication.

Ashley Furniture HomeStores of Charlotte, North Carolina and upstate South Carolina make up eight of the 377 independently-owned regional retail stores that exclusively sell the Ashley Furniture brand across the United States. The small group of stores, seeing that traditional newspaper advertising was losing effectiveness, decided that the time was right to explore new advertising channels. Their answer: Switch to digital marketing using a combination of SMS and email messaging.

The group chose a highly integrated messaging platform that allowed it to deploy and monitor the success of their campaigns in real-time while tweaking accordingly to maximize return on its investment. The switch to digital marketing and mobile techniques proved to be a huge success. To build on that success, Ashley Furniture HomeStore officials decided to expand its reach and put on a four-day “secret sale” promoted solely by SMS and email messaging.
The foundation for such a campaign was rooted in Ashley Furniture HomeStore’s carefully cultivated permission-based messaging relationships with its consumers to counteract the misconception within the mobile marketing industry, that email and SMS messages are often mistaken for spam. Ashley’s work to build highly-interactive contacts with a growing base of active subscribers ensured that its consumers want to continue receiving messages from the retailer based on positive and relevant subscription and sending policies.
The company deployed a series of promotions to build opt-ins and its growing database of contacts in preparation for its “secret sale” promotion. Some of the promotions included:

• Free Gas Giveaway. Ashley Furniture HomeStore implemented a multi-channel campaign in which it advertised its free gas contest via TV, radio, newspapers, and even Facebook. Interested consumers were prompted to text keywords like GAS and DRIVE to a short code—ultimately generating more than 1,000 text-message subscribers.
• Email coupons. The retailer sent its first email campaign, offering coupons to 27,000 of its customers.
• One-day secret sale. This “12-hour private event” was announced only via SMS and email to subscribers, on the evening before the sale began. It generated $30,000 in just one day.
• $500 shopping spree. The furniture chain conducts a weekly contest in which customers participate – via SMS – to win a shopping spree. With this campaign, the company also gathers demographic information on its customers, adding to the database of people who ultimately received the Secret Sale coupons.

With its high-quality contact database, Ashley Furniture HomeStore was ready to deploy its secret sale. The sale ran from July 10th through the 14th, 2008 and was sent only to the list of SMS and email subscribers it diligently created. Overall, the retailer sent out 34,743 permission-based messages: 28,743 emails and 6,000 SMS messages. To better gauge the success of the campaign, officials waited for the morning of July 10th – the first day of the 5-day event – to send the messages. Each message included digital coupons for furniture, accessories, and mattresses, and was not supported by announcements in any other media.

The result after the short, five-day sale astonishing. Across all its stores, Ashley Furniture HomeStore generated $138,460 in revenue, this after offering a total of $24,491 in discounts through its email and SMS coupons. Of the revenue generated by coupon type, after discounts, $85,438 was attributed to SMS, while $53,022 was attributed to email. Ashley’s ability to report campaign results in real-time during the event allowed it to track the conversion rate for each individual coupon code and thus instantly know which coupon was the most redeemed overall, as well as which coupon generated the greatest amount of revenue.

The company realized an impressive return on investment from its digital marketing. After discounts, for every dollar spent, the retailer generated approximately $122 with SMS and $76 with email.

Impressively, SMS out-performed email by a significant margin. Nearly 30,000 emails went out, resulting in $53,022 in revenue. While this is a great success, it does not measure up to nearly $86,000 on only 6,000 text messages sent.

“These new forms of digital marketing via email and especially SMS have really impressed us out of the gate, and shown us a clear path to offset declining response rates and poor ROI in some of our other forms of advertising,” said Charlie Malouf, co-owner and COO of Ashley Furniture HomeStore of Charlotte, North Carolina and upstate South Carolina.

This shows the undeniable fact that mobile marketing produces by far the most bang for your buck. The direct-to-consumer communication, combined with the personal interactivity it creates between a consumer and a brand proves it’s the leading form of digital marketing and can provide the widest return on investment for anyone seeking 21st Century advertising techniques. Of course, the success of any SMS campaign relies heavily on the diligence taken in creating an opt-in database, which Ashley has proven it can do very well.

“We have been most surprised with the revenue generated from a simple 160-character text message with a sale offer. No doubt about it, this has been a game-changer for us,” Mr. Malouf said. “With two simple SMS campaigns, we’ve generated over $100,000 in new business. Our efforts with permission-based digital messaging platform will increase and continue over time. We’ll not only use email and text messaging as a means to drive business, but in the future, we’ll also use these forms of new media as a way to effectively communicate directly with our customers. We’re still learning and have a long way to go, but the early indicators have been quite promising.”