Smart Furniture Uses Mobile to Promote Home for the Holidays

Furniture doesn’t leap to mind as a common holiday gift item. But by optimizing its customer experience for mobile devices and utilizing advanced personalization, Chattanooga, Tennessee-based online retailer Smart Furniture (which also runs a single flagship store) is making consumers think of the home for the holidays.



“Last year, we had the single biggest traffic pattern shift in company history,” said T.J. Gentle, president and CEO of Smart Furniture. “Our standard traffic increased 12% to 15%, while our smartphone and tablet traffic increased more than 100%.”



Smart Furniture has been busy this year creating a fully responsive site, using in-house technologies and resources, with a few outside contractors, to launch optimized versions of its site for different screen sizes, based on the same underlying code. The retailer is aiming to have the work completed by the fourth quarter in order to provide the best possible experience for mobile holiday shoppers.



In addition, Smart Furniture will be using in-house-developed personalization capa- bilities it developed this year to better target potential holiday shoppers. Noting that customers who take an online “Style Quiz” to create a customer profile have much higher conversion rates, Smart Furniture has begun creating “implied profiles” of shoppers based on buying patterns and other available data points. By calibrating personalized offers and inventory levels to these profiles, the retailer intends to boost holiday sales.



“We have gift-oriented home decor items, and there is also an increase in dining room table purchases in October as people realize they need to seat guests for holiday meals,” said Gentle. “We can target specific segments like young married professionals who have recently bought a home and will be hosting their first holiday get-together, and need a table to do so.”