As a mattress store owner, you have a lot of competition. You have to deal with national stores like Mattress Firm as well as countless online bed-in-a-box companies that keep popping up. In order to grow, you need to create an effective retail digital marketing strategy. A critical part of that strategy is to generate leads.
Why is it important to generate leads?
Most website visitors are on your site to solve a problem. We call this a buyer’s journey and it can essentially be broken down into 3 main sections: the awareness stage, the consideration stage, and the decision stage.
During the awareness stage, a website visitor is almost certainly not ready to purchase a mattress. In fact, they are most likely not even sure a mattress will solve their problem. They are simply researching possible solutions.
During the consideration stage, a website visitor has decided a new mattress will most likely solve their problem, but they don’t yet know what mattress to get or where to purchase it.
During the decision phase, a website visitor is deciding where to get their mattress.
The type of search query a visitor does is a good indication of where they are on their buyer’s journey. The more closely the query resembles “local intent” the further down the journey they are. For example, if a visitor searches for “mattress store near me” they are most likely in the decision phase of the buyer’s journey.
Logic may dictate that this is where you want to spend most of your time, budget, and energy in the decision phase. After all, this is when the visitor is ready to buy, and focusing here means a shorter buying cycle. The problem is you have not built any value in your brand at this stage. In other words, it is also the most likely stage where visitors will equate price as the primary value and will shop around. This makes your sales associates’ jobs more difficult and leads to a lower conversion ratio and lower sales tickets.
What does all this have to do with generating leads?
You are most likely getting 3 to 5 thousand website visits every month. If we assume that a third of them each are in 1 of the 3 stages of the buyer’s journey, that means that at least 2 thousand visitors a month are not ready to purchase a mattress. However, they will be ready at some point. The question is when they are ready to purchase, where are they shopping? During their research, visitors are obviously going to your competitor’s websites as well.
Having an effective lead generation tool on your site allows you to collect your visitor’s contact information and nurture them with a series of emails that help solve their problem. By the time they are ready to purchase, it will most likely be your store that they think of.
Best Practices for generating leads
The key to generating leads for your mattress store is to create something of value to the website visitor. Most mattress sites still have the old-style contact us form as the primary way to generate leads. The problem with this is very few real visitors use this type of form. In fact, you probably get more spam emails from this form than you get actual leads.
We have found the best way to generate leads for a mattress store is using a sleep fit quiz. A sleep fit quiz accomplishes several key items:
A quiz offers something of value
Website visitors typically will not give out their contact information unless they get something in return. A sleep fit quiz helps your visitors solve a problem by finding the mattress that works best for them. Since that is most likely why they are on your site in the first place, it dramatically increases the chances that they will fill out the form.
A quiz gathers useful information about the lead
As we discussed earlier, the purpose of generating leads is to nurture those leads with an effective email campaign until they are ready to purchase. The key here is effective. You want to make sure that your email campaigns are solving the problems that your leads have. This is not about you, it’s about them. In order to solve their problems, you need to know what their problems are (at least where sleep is concerned). A quiz can help you get this information. In quizzes we have created, we have been able to gather information like:
- Health problems they may have that attribute to their sleep problems
- Aches and pains they wake up with
- The position they sleep in
- What kind of budget they have
We can use all of this information to hyper-focus the emails we send to your leads. As a side note – the best part about the emails we send is they are completely automated. We use a marketing automation tool called SharpSpring.
A quiz can help you improve your overall marketing strategy
If you are a data nerd like me, you can use the results of the sleep fit quiz to learn more about the sleeping habits of your customers and use that data to adjust your marketing strategy. For instance, if you see a large number of your leads have sleep apnea, you can adjust some of your content marketing around the best mattress for sleep apnea, or how an adjustable base can help improve sleep apnea.
Let us help you gain leads
From our experience, these lead generation tools can help a local mattress store in a massive way. At Focused Engagement, our primary focus is on working with local mattress stores and helping them succeed in the best way possible. The way we do this is through lead generation and nurturing techniques that were detailed in this blog post. We have a passion for local business and want to help you succeed. If you are ready for us to help you, please reach out to us today for more information and to get started.