Growing online furniture business like never before

“Working with Bighead has enabled us to grow faster than ever before. After efficiently scaling Slovenia, they’ve helped us significantly increase sales in Croatian market while staying profitable. We now trust them with all of our performance marketing efforts.”

Andrej, CEO,
Svet pohištva

One of the most renowned home furnishing retailers in the country wanted to know if after 10 successful years in the e-commerce business, there is still room for improvement of online sales.

The challenge

During the first meeting they set a straightforward goal for us – increase annual revenue by 25% in the Slovenian market and launch and grow the Croatian market from scratch.

They called us and initiated a comprehensive digital marketing campaign that would establish them as an industry leader in Slovenia and Croatia in home decor and furniture.

The brand was pretty recognizable in the Slovenian market but had challenges in growing online sales over the past couple of years.

We approached the project by carefully analyzing all of the performance channels. Here were some of the first key takeaways:

• More than 50% of monthly sales were generated by organic traffic while Google paid ads accounted for almost 20%.
• Facebook marketing hasn’t been utilized properly. After a few unsuccessful attempts, the client discarded Facebook channel as a non-profitable and stopped utilizing it.
• Most online sales are solely dependent on the performance Google ads
• Google ads were implemented but executed poorly
• There was no real influencer strategy
• No email automation

The process

Growing any e-commerce that is already dominant in the market means you have to take a new angle to your marketing efforts. Test new creatives. Find new channels. Optimize for specific devices. Here are the main activities from our process.

1. Analyzing the funnel

Understanding where in the funnel we are leaving money on the table helped us prioritise our growth roadmap. Since the majority of the advertising budget was going into Google ads and the results of the optimizations are almost instant, we decided to start with Google ads.

Also, we noticed that there is room for improving the average order value on each transaction with some minor changes and that the overall conversion rate had the potential to be increased by up to 100% according to some research we did based on this industry.

2. Prioritizing the roadmap

Understanding where in the funnel we are leaving money on the table helped us prioritise our growth roadmap. Since the majority of the advertising budget was going into Google ads and the results of the optimizations are almost instant, we decided to start with Google ads.  

The top priority was ensuring that Google ads were communicating the benefits and product facts as clearly as possible, utilizing straightforward copy that got the point across as quickly as possible. Here is how it went down:

• optimizing the Google ads account
• Increasing the relevance score of ads by implementing new copy and changes on the landing pages
• Setting up Dynamic ads
• Setting up performance Max campaigns
• Set up the retargeting campaigns on Facebook that improved results by 600%

As an added touch, the team upgraded the main brand visuals and based on it prepared the new retargeting creatives for Google display and Facebook.

Next in the line? Email strategy and Influencers.

3. Email automation

With some of the product prices going well above 500€ we were pretty surprised to see that the company wasn’t relying on any of the email automation flows that usually help with increasing conversion at the bottom of the funnel.

But since the e-commerce store wasn’t allowing for any easy integrations with some of the biggest email automation tools we quickly understood why. The whole integration had to be written manually through API.

After carefully reviewing many email automation tools, we decided to implement Klaviyo and before implementing all of its possibilities, first test out the main flows:

• The welcome flows
• The abandoned cart flow
• The post-purchase flow

You can read more about email automation here.

Check out the results on the abandonded cart flow (screenshot from Klaviyo).

The results

1. In the span of 6 months, we increased online sales by 35% compared to the same period a year before in 2021.
2. CTR’s range between 3% and 9% .
3. Delivered a ROAS 5 campaign solely on Facebook that represented 7% of entire sales (neto revenue, no tax included)
4. Increased Google ads conversion rates by more than 200% which significantly increased the profitability of our advertising efforts
5. The average order value increased by 146%, allowing us to invest more resources into media buying channels and scale sales in a very short amount of time
6. The absolute number of transactions increased by 17%
7. The Croatian market has been growing with an average monthly growth rate of 15%