How to sell kitchens?

[Michaeldon]

Hi All

We have just opened a kitchen store in Plzen in the Czech Republic and we open in Prague in about a month. When I say kitchens I mean we build the kitchens. It's a fairly large store with about 40 kitchens on display.

It's our first week and we distributed 80,000 leaflets. Response has been tepid. We have had about 20 people request designs or home visits. That's ok but we can't go distributing 80k leaflets every week. Plzen is only about 250k people

I would like to know from the gurus who have some experience of furniture retailing the effectiveness of the methods of marketing out there and what mix of spend would you advise for them?

Here are the ones we plan to try:

leaflets (offering promotions, free gifts, lottery etc)
SEO on our website
PPC on our website. Kitchen keywords cost about 50 euro cents per click.
Radio ads (man in deep voice repeating our name ad nauseum)

And one we would like to try but needs more work: deals with builders, furniture shops, white goods retailers to refer customers. Perhaps they will get a TV free in the TV shop if they buy a kitchen.

So that's it. What would you spend on each of them? Did I miss something? Do controversial ads work in furniture or alienate the customers?

Lots to learn.

Cheers

 

[Michaeldon]

Ah, forgot billboards. We have been offered 50 display ads around the town cheap by one of our white goods suppliers as they are buying 200 anyway and it's no problem for them to get 50 more.

 

[Mike W]

Here in the UK, local and national press advertising, magazines and telesales are quite the norm. TV is also used by the bigger businesses.

 

[truesilver]

Hi

You've got more than one marketing strategy going - which is brilliant! There are over 96 different ways to get customers but most people don't get past leafleting or advertising. In all honesty, those are the least effective one and quite costly for start up businesses.

If you'd like I can give you some more ideas but I need to know more about what kind of people you're targeting. May be message me?

Good luck with it all.

L

 

[TBTB]

I once helped open a Kitchen retail concession in a new area.

Advertise the New Store Opening Launch Event with your appliance suppliers providing chefs to demonstrate how good their ovens/hobs are. This will bring in prospective customers if only for the free food and drink!

Partner with a local charity and hold a raffle at the Launch Event to raise money. Charities will have a wide network of contacts that you can invite and take advantage of to get your business known. Through it, we got the Mayor to formally open the retail outlet. Get the local press photographer down to cover your event.

Get every person who enters your shop to fill in a competition entry form that offers them a free kitchen to the value of ???? (something very attractive). Ensure that on the form you get their contact details, where they heard of you (to monitor your advertising effectiveness) and when they are thinking of renewing their kitchen. When you draw the competition winner, publicise it. Make sure you follow up every competition entrant - this is your initial potential client base, make the most of it.

We went from zero to selling £200k worth of kitchens in the first three months. Good luck!

 

[Michaeldon]

wow guys

Thanks very much for the ideas. Love the charity angle.

We are doing the lottery also for a free kitchen. The trouble is we need to get info about the info out there about it.

What do you guys think about billboards, radio and leaflets? All are pricey and hard to measure effectiveness.

We are experts on SEO from our other business so we'll give that a go too, but I am curious, have you got any clue what kind of conversion rate we could expect for paid clicks on targeted keywords on the website? In our other biz it's easy to measure but with this one people will go to the site and then shut down the PC and come into the shop. Then we need to try to convert them there. I am thinking if it's anything like our other biz we might expect 1% of people to visit the store after a relevant keyword search and perhaps 20% to buy. Am I way off base here? Again, hard to measure, but possible.

 

[Michaeldon]

keep it coming guys.

 

[BobbyBoy]

We've been selling fitted kitchens and kitchen doors since 1996, over the years our marketing has changed to keep up with changes in the marketplace.

In the early days we did a lot of newspaper advertising.

We also did lots of leafleting in the local area.

Now we mainly rely on online marketing.

Hope this helps

Bobby