Oak Furniture Land Leveraged Email Marketing To Drive Online Sales

About Oak Furniture land

Oak Furniture land is UK’s largest retailer of hardwood furniture. Primarily started as a trader selling on EBay it slowly rose to become an Omni-channel retailer with 62 stores across UK, with a turnover of £85m and a profit of £9.2m in the year to September 30th 2012. Oak Furniture Land has been listed in the Sunday Times Fast Track 100 League table 4 times – 2010, 2011, 2013 and 2014. Theirs is an interesting success story where business first started online and then they moved towards having physical stores whilst maintaining a strong data and analysis driven digital marketing strategy to enforce a strong loyalty towards their online as well as offline customers.

Oak Furniture Land’s business objective

• To integrate and leverage their digital presence with their 62 physical stores across UK through brand engagement with their existing customers and helping them connect with their local stores nearby thus inevitably pushing their sales up and generating new leads.
• To bridge the gap between their online presence and offline presence through an effective email campaign
• To introduce a dynamic and automated content delivery system which is relevant to the customer

Approach adopted by Oak Furniture Land

Oak furniture land decided to adopt an email marketing approach using targeted geolocated messages and automating the process by constantly updating their content based on the locations and customers to which the mails are being directed to. The location data is procured when their customers give their postal code or area code whenever they make a purchase either from their site or store. They grouped and segmented their customers based on this location data and then sent email messages which were highly personalized and relevant to their local store; mails which their customers would actually like to see and get usable information from. The geo-targeting approach also increased footfalls to the stores during new store openings or special sales events.

Example of a geo-targeted mailer for illustration

Results achieved by Oak furniture land

• Since going live in 2013, they have been able to see a boost in their existing email marketing campaign results which was more general in nature, with the implementation of geo-targeting and personalized dynamic content they got more than 30% year on year increase in their email generated sales revenue while also improving customer engagement throughout all their sales channels.
• Oak Furniture Land’s targeted emails proved extremely efficient in driving online sales too. By developing and deploying a creative and optimized email campaign in the run-up to the Christmas season, they were then able to enjoy a significant 40 percent year-on-year boost in email-generated revenue during November and December 2014.
• In addition, Oak Furniture Land was able to analyze past purchase data and identify those customers who had previously bought items within a particular product range. The retailer then sent targeted emails to those customers, showcasing other items that would likely be of interest. This data-driven approach successfully drove a significant increase in revenue.

Graph depicting a gradual rise in interest over time of Oak furniture land in the UK since implementation of various digital marketing activities.

Learning

• It’s very important that when a company or business decides to leverage email marketing, they know the difference between relevant and irrelevant emails. And that their customers find their mails useful.

• Oak furniture land used this knowledge and used their existing database of postal codes to segment their customers based on their location and sent them relevant mails which otherwise would have ended up in their spam boxes or just not useful enough to their needs.

• Email marketing is often misconstrued as being an outdated or older method of marketing, but with the implementation of newer technologies and more efficient platforms for deploying appropriate content, many digital marketing agencies have been able to offer innovative solutions which eventually add to lead generation and boosting sales.