Do you know how to turn online shoppers into purchasers?
Today, Mark and Adrienne discuss exclusive research conducted in partnership with Outward, Inc., regarding the confidence of the consumer in the shopping process.
According to research, there are 5 key factors that can build confidence in a shopper when viewing a product online that will enable them to complete a purchase. The good news? The retailer has the ability to control more of these factors than they may realize.
Go deeper: Connect with Outward and see how they can help you!
Need More Marketing Ideas?
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FULL TRANSCRIPTION
Mark Kinsley: [00:00:00] There’s an easy way to increase confidence people have buying your products, and it’s probably not what you’re thinking about. The fan marketing show starts right now.
Welcome to the Fan Marketing Show Strategies, tips, and Ideas to help retailers and brands grow their furniture, appliances, and mattress business. I’m Mark Kinsley, and this is Yo Adrian.
Adrienne Woods: Hello. Hello friends. Welcome back to the show.
Mark Kinsley: I’m ready for a trivia question, like I’m chopping at the bit. Like this feels like a trivia question type of day, so hit me with it.
Is it your
Adrienne Woods: favorite part of the show? I mean, I feel like it should be, so it’s the part that I can attribute the most. It
Mark Kinsley: really is. And then I’m always excited because like I have to just wait just a little bit for it to come and finish up. And so it’s always fun to wait around on it.
Adrienne Woods: And just in case anybody at home thinks that he knows the answers beforehand, I can guarantee you I don’t put them in our like show outline anymore because [00:01:00] he will cheat.
So he does not know the question and he does not know the answers. True.
Mark Kinsley: Okay. True. There’s a difference between cheating on the trivia question and doing thorough prep preparation in review for the show, and I happen to glance at it and I can’t unsee it.
Adrienne Woods: Okay. Okay. Fine excuses. All right, so here it is.
Which holiday yields the highest transaction rate for email market?
Mark Kinsley: The highest transaction rate for email market? Well, it depends on how you classify a holiday, Adrian, because some, you would classify Black Friday or Cyber Monday as a holiday, but it’s not the case in my opinion. So I will do, I will say it is Thanksgiving though, if you’re gonna narrow it down to just a holiday.
But I’m, Don’t tell me the answer. I don’t wanna know. I’m not gonna tell you if you have guests. All you gotta do is head over to fam.news. Text us on our podium number. And you can, uh, basically just tell me, Yeah, kinsley’s wrong, here’s why, Right outta the gates. But go to fam.news right now and also, hey, be sure to subscribe on Apple and [00:02:00] Spotify to this show.
Adrian, I started off the, the show talking about how to make people more confident in their choices. Well, I’m gonna give you a laundry list here, so, Okay. How to make people more confident in their choice. How to make sure people know exactly what they’re buying and making people more willing to buy online and not see it in person.
What’s the one factor that can do all those things? It is high quality, high quality photography. Oh, high quality furniture and mattress photography. So we have some original research at the fam, so we’ve doing a bunch of research projects. If you’re not signed up@fam.news for our emails, you need to be, because we’re gonna show you how you can get the entire deck.
From research that we’ve conducted, and this was in partnership with Outward Inc. This is the only company, by the way, that William Sonoma, only tech company that William Sonoma ever purchased because of what I call their beauty box . I, I don’t know what they love, like it, what I call it the beauty box, but I do.[00:03:00]
Because it’s like this 20 by 20 by 10 environment where you can put in a piece of furniture. It’s packed with technology that photographs it from multiple angles and lights it and does all the things you need to do at the press of a button. It’s works like magic uploads. It’s the cloud. You can change angles, you can change backgrounds, you can do all these different things.
So we were, we were like, Hey, you know, how do people feel consumers about furniture, photography, mattress photography? So we partnered with outward. To really dig into the minds of the consumer. And it reminded me of a situation that I came across recently. So I’m trying to find a very specific piece. It’s a very specific media console from a man cave, right?
So I was trying to get my man cave in. I gotta, I got a pool table up there. My neighbors called me and they said, Hey, if you can move it, you can have it. So I got a free awesome pool table. Thanks Dave and Leslie, love y’all. Those also were, and then I was trying find this. Oh, it took three men just to move each piece [00:04:00] of slate, and there were three pieces of slate.
Um, put it back together. It, it works great though. I love it. So I’m, I’m trying to find this media console and I can’t tell you how many times I was trying to like, just visualize it better and spin it around and like see what the edges looked like because it’s gonna be exposed on one side very heavily and that’s gonna be like a prominent view.
Um, I’ve looked for desks in the past. I was like, all I wanna be able to, I wanna place the desk in the middle of the room, not up against the wall, so it has to have a finished back. And it, and it frustrated me to the point where I was like, I, I’m narrowing it down to certain online, um, sites based on the product photography experience they’re offering in, in seeing these different angles.
And so it’s no surprise. That when we got this, uh, research back in partnership with Outward, uh, you know, this is a national sample size with a 90% confidence interval. [00:05:00] Okay? So this is representative of all the population out there in the United States. It’s not surprising that people were much more confident in their purchase.
They knew exactly what they’re buying. They’re willing to buy it online if they had this high quality furniture photography. It just led to all these different positive feelings Now, Here’s, here’s what the, the data said in what was available and what was the most used areas of furniture photography.
Now, all of these areas registered 50% or more in terms of availability and did somebody actually use it? Okay, so number one, high, high quality photos, multiple product shots, the ability to zoom. Customizing the look color of the fabric or furniture. That’s more a business decision. That’s a little bit different.
Yes. And then a 360 degree view, and I was raising my hand on that one.
Adrienne Woods: Absolutely. You would be. Absolutely. I, I just redid so you know that I do part-time [00:06:00] homeschool, and about two weeks before school started, I took our entire office and I gutted the whole thing, sold every stitch of furniture, repainted the walls, repainted the trim.
And my, I would say one of my biggest pieces when I was trying to look for something, I needed two kids’ desk and I needed my own desk and the desk in the middle of the room. Is, uh, it sits in the middle of the room. It doesn’t sit up to a wall, so it needed to look nice. And there were, I, it was my third website I got to before I actually picked my desk, because a lot of them just were insufficient.
I didn’t know what it would look like from every angle.
Mark Kinsley: Yeah. And that’s what the, the data says. I mean, you need, uh, you need to be able to look at it in 3D or from a 360 degree view. Mm-hmm. . The, the actual most important aspect of f furniture, photography, the data. Was the ability to zoom in to see details.
Agree, Agree. If you don’t have a system or a platform, uh, on your website, that that gives you that ability to really zoom in and see the texture of the wood, some of the [00:07:00] detail of the handles. What are the corners, you know, all these different things that people want, you know, to potentially make match.
They need to see it up close. They need to, they need to really get a feel for what this is gonna be like.
Adrienne Woods: I will also say there were two websites that I was on kind of after I had decided, I mean, I decided to purchase the desk I did based on price point and a couple other things, but those people that have those companies that had the technology to, that allowed me to see it in my room.
You know what that means? Like you can take picture of your room, you can upload it, and then it will put that desk. In my case, in that picture, just so you can see what it looks like in your room, because I can, I mean, we’ve all done it. We’ve all purchased something online. We’ve gotten it in, in back to our home, and we’re like, This is not at all what I thought it was when I purchased it.
Color’s wrong, texture’s wrong, and the list goes
Mark Kinsley: on. Yeah, and I think people are starting to manage for that on the front end. You know, they’re really starting to do everything that we’re talking about with really good product photography. They, they’re saying, Hey, I gotta visualize this in my [00:08:00] room. I don’t want to pack up this thing and send it back.
And the data that we got here without where, here’s another stat that you can, you can hang on to, and this is a, this is a positive for the furniture industry. 87% of recent buyers are satisfied with their new furniture purchase. So 87% are satisfied. Um, Of which 37% say they are completely satisfied.
That was the very top box you could get. Okay. So overall, um, people are satisfied with that furniture purchase and I think, you know, they also reported pretty overwhelmingly that, you know, 80% of ’em said the retailers they purchased, uh, they were satisfied with the store. Um, but they were, yeah, 80. Let me go back to the data point here.
87. Are satisfied with their furniture purchase, 37%. Completely satisfied. And most of them said, uh, the retailers where they purchased did a good job with their product photography and it looks like they [00:09:00] rewarded them with their business. No surprise there. That’s excellent insight. How Adrian, how much of a hassle is it to like, you know, pack up a big item?
And I wouldn’t
Adrienne Woods: have done it, take it back. I would’ve gone to like Facebook marketplace or something else and just sold it there, or. I mean, one of my really bad habits is I’ll just buy something and depending on the price point, I may just like keep it in my garage for the next two years before I finally decide to get rid of it.
Cuz I just hate returning things that much.
Mark Kinsley: Ugh. Yeah,
Adrienne Woods: and I mean, in a desk, I mean, this sucker weighs a ton because it has a motor in it, because it’s a standing desk as well. So I, I’m sitting now, but then I can also raise it up and it was heavy to put together. And it’s heavy to move because I got a good quality one.
So if it hadn’t worked, I probably would not have taken it back. I would’ve just found a different one and then sold this somewhere else, and I would’ve sold it at a loss because I just wanna move it and get it outta
Mark Kinsley: my way. Yeah, that’s, I mean, I think people do it all the time. You know, they end up with stuff or they sell it on Facebook marketplace or they just, you know, stuck with something.
[00:10:00] So, and if you, if you’re, if you’re stuck with something and the product quality doesn’t match, You’re gonna attribute that to the retailer. So all this stuff we’re talking about, like making sure that your, these products are represented with good high quality imagery. Zoom in, see it from different angles.
Like you said, if you want to, you know, visualize something in your house that’s important to you. These, these things are gonna help with your brand identity and your brand trust whenever somebody comes home with a product. Um, this kinda interesting too, attributes of importance. So in the furniture shopping process.
So the most important aspects during furniture shopping entail comfort. Looks and appearances, price and value, followed by this goes down the list. Warranties, um, photos online are in catalogs they can see in such in store and the online reviews. I thought that was interesting that, you know, comfort and then how it looks in appearance was right up at the top.
Not surprising to us, but it’s nice to see that reinforced. Um, and, and look, this is not just. The [00:11:00] online shopping experience, This to me is more about making sure that people can come into your store armed with information because they want to do most of this, you know, a significant portion of the shopping process online before they ever do come into the store.
They wanna narrow it down. They wanna make it sure it works with their dec. They have, you know, some other important attributes in mind before they come in. So this is also about arming people with what they need. So they will come into your store to get that final look and, and pull the trigger on it.
Adrienne Woods: Well, and you know, we talked a couple of weeks ago, it was actually our trivia question about how many average reviews does the average consumer look at before they walk into a store? And it’s 11, and I personally have purchased things and then gone back to look at reviews and what one of the poor reviews are.
It looks nothing in person like it actually looks in the picture on the website. There is nothing worse to be like, the only thing I had to rely on was what you put out there for the public to see. And when I got it, I’m very disappointed because it doesn’t look like this lighting [00:12:00] was important. I bought it a set of end tables.
What I’m thinking about is up in my guest room, I thought they were gonna be kind of this whitewashed wood look. When I got them, they were very dark, beige, and all that told me is whatever they used. On their website, the lighting was off. They had a different picture from the manufacturer. I’m not sure where they got this from.
I ended up having to paint it myself to get the look that I wanted. .
Mark Kinsley: Oh no, you had to paint it yourself.
Adrienne Woods: I painted the whole thing and then sanded it down and did everything else to get the color that I wanted.
Mark Kinsley: Oh, what a mess. Mm-hmm. . Yeah. And if it would’ve been represented properly on the front end, You know I say a lot of times when things go wrong, they went wrong at the beginning.
Yep. And so if you think you have the capability to properly light, You know, a complex object with a lot of different angles. You probably don’t, Somebody maybe on your team does, you know, in, in, in the case of outward, you get the beauty box and you plop it in there. It does the lighting the whole thing for you, which, you know, that keeps you from having to do reshoots and, and allows you to change in the backgrounds, change the lighting and postproduction, [00:13:00] uploads to the cloud, all this different stuff.
But you don’t think about all these factors. You, you know, it, it might be easy to do those 50 steps. But to do them every single time to like eliminate human error. I, I, I, I don’t have the time to do that. I have to work, you know, I, I have to work with a team in the past, in the way that we’ve done it. So it, it went wrong in the beginning.
And look, look what ended up happened. You know, you’re causing your consumer way more work because you couldn’t get the lighting right to represent the white washing of the wood. And here’s Adrian on the fan marketing. So talking about this negative experience,
Adrienne Woods: I will say it was not a local furniture store around here, but it was a furniture store you would be familiar with.
So I will not, I will not give them negative press, but I, I pretty much don’t go back to that store anymore.
Mark Kinsley: Yeah. Yeah. See it all because if all because of the bad photos. Well, hey, thanks to. Outward, Inc. For partnering with the FAM on this research. Mm-hmm. . Um, if you want the deck, go to fam.news and text us on our podium number.
It’s in the [00:14:00] bottom right. Just text us and say, I want the, the Outward Inc. Uh, research, cuz there’s a bunch of information on here we didn’t even get on. I mean, we have a 45 page deck about, uh, how people are shopping for furniture and mattresses. What is the buying behavior? Um, over the past 12 months and what’s the expected buying behavior for the intends coming up.
So there’s a bunch of rich information in here and it really does, you know, put a fine point on some of the things you should be doing today, and that’s why I love the data and the research. So, okay, trivia question time. Let’s come back to it. I’m ready.
Adrienne Woods: Okay. We can come back. I’ll also put in a personal point for outward.
Just because they have been wonderful people. And I was talking to our sales director, Rachel, and I was like, Is it just me or are they just outward? It’s just a fun company to work with. And she said, Absolutely, probably one of my top five favorites. So they’re just good people that also work there.
Mark Kinsley: We love that they’re part of the fam.
Yeah, they’re part of the fam. Okay. And Rob’s been on the show and Adam, you know, Adam and Leah and Grov and the whole team. Rob’s [00:15:00] actually been on, uh, on our other podcast. So if you wanna learn more about them, he did great job telling their story. Really fascinating the way that company came to be. Um, I’ll, I’ll link,
Adrienne Woods: I’ll link that show on our show now for people that miss it.
For sure. I’ll link the
Mark Kinsley: show. Ooh. Oh yeah. I like that. Okay, so trivia question, you’re hopefully I don’t miss this. Which
Adrienne Woods: holiday yields the highest transaction rate for email marketing?
Mark Kinsley: Email? I’m go, I’m sticking with Thanksgiving.
Adrienne Woods: Okay, So it’s actually Black Friday. I would not consider that a holiday either, but according to this research deck that I found they did so.
I’m gonna give it to myself. You were right on that one. I would, I would agree. I’d give it to yourself. If so, we’re gonna say a holiday, we’ll call it Thanksgiving, but it’s really Black Friday cuz Most Black Friday.
Mark Kinsley: Call me a traditionalist. Call me a traditionalist. But I don’t think shopping is a holiday.
Especially
Adrienne Woods: the day after. We have to be grateful for what we already have. Just putting it out there. ,
Mark Kinsley: I’m so grateful for what I have. No, I need to go buy everything that I don’t [00:16:00] need, but maybe just want that. Absolutely. Awesome. Absolutely. All right. I’m not, I’m not gonna go curmudgeonly here.
Adrienne Woods: That’s fair.
All right. Do you have a marketing idea that could make, could make it on the fan show? If so, text us or email us and never miss an idea That could make you a.
Mark Kinsley: King, it’s harder or queen of, of lighting and set design. Excellent.
Adrienne Woods: All right. See you guys next time on the Fan Marketing Show.
