DFS Uses Bloomreach Engagement’s Automated Welcome Email Series to Increase Revenue Nearly 4%

Story Behind the Brand

DFS is a furniture retailer in the United Kingdom, Spain, and Ireland that specializes in sofas and soft furnishings that is operated by the DFS Group. The DFS Group’s purpose is to bring great design and comfort into every living room in an affordable, responsible, and sustainable manner. It is listed on the London Stock Exchange under ticker symbol DFS.

4.2

conversion rate increase with the Bloomreach Engagement automated welcome email series

3.9

revenue increase with the Bloomreach Engagement automated welcome email series

Challenge

As the team at DFS knows full well, the nature of the ecommerce furniture business differs greatly to many other categories. Most customers have a significant average order size and make purchases far less frequently than say, at online grocery stores or online fashion retailers. After all, just how often do you need a new couch or bedroom set for your home?

Once customers have purchased their furniture, it isn’t a wise business decision to keep emailing them about buying another piece of that same furniture. Because if the quality of the original product is good, said customers won’t need another one for quite a while.

The lengthy sales cycle and time in between reactivation means that DFS must be clever about email follow ups after purchases, customer relationship management, and about how it contacts customers via email in general. Being able to combine collected data from both in-store and online experiences helps, but what is the most effective way of using that data to provide limitless personalized experiences to customers?

Solution

An automated welcome email series is a set of emails triggered by a customer action that signals an interest in your company (e.g. account sign up, list subscription, or event registration). The email content should typically convey what your company or brand is about to a new customer. A good welcome series is helpful, informative, engaging, and not necessarily sales-oriented.

Like a good elevator pitch or a warm greeting, the automated welcome email series lays the foundation for a long-term relationship in the future. It strategically places key information from your brand into three or four emails so the customer gets small chunks of digestible content related to your company at a reasonable cadence.

Sending it right away after a purchase, customer opt-in, or at least within the first 24 hours, will help the success of key metrics. Consumers have short attention spans so it is best to land in their inbox when your brand is still top of mind.

DFS’ automated welcome email series with Bloomreach Engagement goes a step further and is specifically tailored to its furniture business and how the company wants to craft customer journeys. The company uses Loomi — Bloomreach’s AI for ecommerce — to deliver personalized product recommendations via email based on what products it knows customers are interested in thanks to previously collected customer data.

For example, if the automated welcome email series determines that the customer is interested in bedroom furniture, the Bloomreach Engagement scenario will automatically send a guide to purchasing bedroom furniture to the customer to help facilitate next steps. The welcome series will then encourage customers to visit a brick-and-mortar location to get the complete in-person experience with the product at exactly the right moment in the customer journey.

DFS asks customers “what’s your thing?” to learn which furniture pieces they are interested in and then personalizes a customer experience specifically for them based on collected zero-party data. This ensures that emails don’t spam the customers and each email they receive is educational and related to the products that they have an interest in.

At DFS, we are synonymous with sofa shopping, but we also cater to bedroom, dining and other home categories. It’s therefore essential that we accurately personalize our communications so we only talk to our customers about the specific furniture they’re shopping for. Furthermore, we know that a visit to a DFS showroom is an essential part of the consideration journey. Bloomreach Engagement, coupled with third-party data enrichment and visualization tools, has enabled us to do all of this in a scalable and easily manageable way.

Mike Aspinall

Data Activation Manager, DFS

Results

The results show that DFS customers are appreciative of the personalized experience and enjoy the automated welcome email series content.

Compared to a standard control group with no personalization, DFS has seen an increase in conversion rate of 4.2% and a revenue increase of 3.9% since implementing the Bloomreach Engagement automated welcome email series.