How Zvet.ru reaches new furniture buyers with digital advertising

Zvet.ru has been gaining momentum as one of Russia’s leading upholstered furniture retailers for the last 15 years. With their own design team, construction bureau, patented technologies, and factories, Zvet.ru manufactures over 90% of their products, including convertible sofa beds that are simple to assemble as well as sofas with removable covers.

The retailer aims to make their products accessible to customers, offering maximum convenience, efficiency, and durability — all at an affordable price. To engage with these customers and reach new prospects, Zvet.ru has pivoted their strategy to digital channels.

For over two years, Zvet.ru has been transitioning from an offline retailer to an omnichannel brand with strong ecommerce. To grow their digital presence, they set a goal to increase the percentage of online sales to 25%. To do this, they furthered their partnership with Criteo to move their marketing strategy higher up the funnel.

Acquiring new site visitors

Furniture retailers face the unique challenges of having relatively long sales cycles and low purchase frequency, so it’s important for them to acquire new customers on an ongoing basis. Alexander Stegantsev, Head of Digital Advertising at Zvet.ru understands this and decided to test an acquisition-focused campaign with Criteo, beyond their typical conversion-focused advertising.

Stegantsev says, “We decided to try Commerce Audiences because we are always open to new tests with our partners. Commerce Audiences allow us reach new potential clients, and we plan to increase our budgets… when the peak season begins.”

The customer acquisition campaign allowed Zvet.ru to tap into Criteo’s real-time shopping data across more than 800 product and brand categories to reach high-value audience segments of people who are most likely to engage with their brand. This digital campaign helped Zvet.ru measure their impact better than with their previous upper-funnel marketing efforts.

Stegantsev says, “In the past we put flyers in mailboxes, advertised on TV, and word of mouth helped spread awareness. However, we realized that impact of TV advertisements decreased, and we abandoned it in favor of digital advertising. Our plan is to step into mobile advertising next year and increase our reach.”

Scaling across the funnel

Zvet.ru was happy with the success of their campaigns. Stegantsev elaborates, “Cost per visit with Criteo is lower compared to other channels – four times lower than the next best performing channel.”

And they were even able to drive 8.1% of their new website visitors back via their lower-funnel retargeting campaigns, creating a full-funnel strategy to simultaneously acquire new customers and drive sales. When asked about the future, Stegantsev says, “We plan to launch campaigns for every stage of the funnel, grow our budgets, traffic, and turnover.”

The Zvet.ru team was happiest with the level of optimization that Criteo offered, as well as the self-service platform that allowed them to work on their campaigns directly. Stegantsev says, “Commerce Growth interface is super friendly, and it’s great that we can upload our own audiences – that’s a big advantage which some other advertising platforms lack.”