Ivan Smith Furniture Finds Value in a Dedicated Email Team

Ivan Smith Furniture is a family-owned and operated out of Shreveport, Louisiana. Since their founding in 1961, they have expanded to 46 stores. We first met their V.P of Operations, Trey Smith, at The Furniture Market in Las Vegas in 2009. He heard our CEO Ken Mahar speak about the power of email marketing and realized his company needed to get in the game.

For two years, we worked on building Ivan Smith’s email list through our SuperCollector™ and hands-on training with their store sales staff. At the end of the two years, Ivan Smith was so confident in the strategy we built together they thought they could manage their own campaign going forward. We parted as friends.

After six months, Ken checked in to see how things were going with their in-house plan. It turned out, they had bitten off more than they could chew. With no one in their corporate office dedicated to handling their emails, deadlines were getting missed and the quality of the campaigns was suffering. Ultimately, we teamed back up and have been happily working together ever since.

 

With Ivan Smith’s email list size numbering in the hundreds of thousands, email marketing has become an revenue channel too important to not have an expert team at the helm. Some of the interesting components of Ivan Smith’s campaign include:

• A great welcome message to new in-store and online shoppers that has open rates in the high 40s with a 5+% click through rate,
• Monthly broadcasts relating the latest promotion where Email Broadcast lends a creative hand in shaping the events
• Public service announcements where Ivan Smith shares its latest community involvement
• An automated message informing consumers they have a refund coming due to an unused protection package
• An evergreen private anniversary sale sent to each person who purchased a year prior.

Ivan Smith Furniture has come to realize that getting people on the email list is just the beginning. You then have to provide reasons to stay – namely engaging personalized content worth reading.