Ivan Smith Furniture is a family-owned-and-operated business based in Shreveport with 46 stores throughout Louisiana, Texas, and Arkansas. They sell everything you could possibly need to “furnish your home both stylishly and affordably”—from bedroom dressers to living room sofas to outdoor fire pits.
Email Marketing Was Too Big a Job to Do on Their Own
We first met Trey Smith, their V.P. of Operations, at the 2009 Furniture Market in Las Vegas. He’d heard Email Broadcast speak about the power of email marketing and realized that Ivan Smith needed to get in the game.
Together, we came up with a plan. We worked on building Ivan Smith’s email list with a SuperCollector™ and also did hands-on training with the company’s store sales staff. Ivan Smith was so confident in the strategy they decided to part ways with us as friends and give email marketing a try on their own.
The result? Their corporate office didn’t have a team dedicated to emails, so deadlines were missed and campaign quality suffered—understandably. A lot goes into email marketing. It’s easy to underestimate the job.
They Needed to Engage Their Growing List & Keep Them Coming Back for More
Since Ivan Smith rehired us to handle their email marketing, their SuperCollector™ continues to work wonders. To date, they have hundreds of thousands of list members. But getting people on their email list was just the beginning—we had to keep them there.
Email marketing automation has been key to maintaining their readership. Ivan Smith sends targeted emails to specific groups of people at select times or in response to certain actions, while fostering genuine connection and trust with their audience.
These automation emails include:
- A welcome email for people who’ve just joined the email list.
- An introductory/thank-you email for customers who’ve recently made their first purchase.
- A personalized Anniversary Sale message—sent one year after a customer has made a purchase.
- An email to remind customers to rotate their new mattress after six months.
- An entire series of “value-add” emails on helpful topics like lighting, flooring, organization, and preparing your home for guests.
- A message featuring credit limit extensions and special offers for customers with great payment history.
Automation & Segmentation: The Ultimate 1-2 Marketing Punch!
Ivan Smith’s “thank you for your purchase” email sees open rates as high as 35.8% and their welcome email for new list members see rates as high as 24.2%.
Several of their value-add automations—like the “Meet Your Neighbors” message with before-and-after pictures of customer homes—see open rates of over 20%. That may not sound like much, but with a list size over 200K on a product category people don’t need to buy every day, that kind of engagement is outstanding.
It gets better. Ivan Smith needed help with a financing offer and we took a targeted approach by segmenting it into two groups—one to their customers who financed in-house and another to those who utilized the company credit card. We created a separate offer for each group, alerting them about their excellent credit history and an open balance on their credit line they could use for the promotion. This successful campaign resulted in an additional $430K in revenue in a single weekend.
BOOM.
“The automation series that Email Broadcast built for us have all been hugely successful. They took a process that we would do only periodically (when we had the time or even remembered) and turned it into a consistent flow of additional business. After the launch of each series, our stores noticed a marked difference in sales—we wish we would have started it a long time ago! The best part? Automation emails let the customers know they are important to us and we are truly thankful for their great loyalty and payment history.”—Trey Smith, Vice President at Ivan Smith Furniture
