Specialist marketing deal aims to generate offline sales and multichannel integration for furniture retailer

Specialist marketing deal aims to generate offline sales and multichannel integration for furniture retailer

Specialist affiliate marketing company, affilinet, has announced it is working with DFS as its affiliate network of choice.

The deal is designed to support the British furniture retailer’s wider initiative to integrate online and offline marketing activity and maximise sales from digital channels.

Having grown a strong brand presence through television and offline display advertising, DFS is using call tracking technology to improve the number of leads generated to the retailer’s call centre via the internet.

Using new technology, unique phone numbers are generated for each of affilinet’s publishers for use in online promotional activities and on their websites. This enables customers to research items on the web and then speak with the call centre team to buy bespoke products.

Uniting voice with online marketing

Every call is trackable, so there is visibility over which affiliate is responsible for each lead generated to the call centre. With this data, affilinet and DFS are able to analyse which publishers are performing best and continue to better shape the publisher base throughout the programmes development.

DFS reportedly decided to work with affilinet because of its flexibility and willingness to adapt to DFS’ very specific needs and requirements. The company was also keen to use affilinet’s network of publishers and to take advantage of its experience in affiliate marketing for other retail brands.

Richard Thirsk, head of marketing at DFS, commented: “Working with affilinet allows us to greatly extend our online reach beyond our traditional online media buys and search activity.

“We are collaborating with specific affilinet publishers on a performance basis offering them unique telephone numbers to display on their websites so that consumers can immediately call our customer support team without having to leave the publisher site. This approach means that customers benefit from researching what they want online and then making their bespoke orders with one of the team over the phone. Publishers benefit from real time reporting of the calls they generate, previously they could only be rewarded for leads generated by a callback request form.”