Whether it’s glamming up the backyard or creating a new den, Spring is a natural motivator to encourage consumers to take a look around their homes, check what needs doing and get stuck into this year’s DIY projects, especially with Easter looming.
And Americans spend big on DIY. 2020 saw $457 billion spent on home improvements, with home center stores reporting nearly $300 billion in sales. That equates to an average home improvement spend of around $8,000 per household, whether that’s landscaping the back yard or painting a room.
Retailers are certainly seeing sales booming, with Home Depot for example reporting sales up by almost 20% to $132.1 billion. Lowe’s meanwhile is predicting total sales of between $94-97 billion for its latest full year.
But very few of us are DIY experts – and while we all might have picked up a new skill or two during the last couple of years, most of us still have long lists of things to be done, and often little knowledge of how to do them.
This is especially true for younger customers who are higher spenders when it comes to home improvements and also more likely to tackle the job themselves. According to the Millennial Homeowner Shopping Traits Consumer Reports millennials plan on spending nearly double on home improvement projects in the next two years compared to other generations ($29,700 vs. other generations at $15,300 on average) and are also keener to DIY themselves with 84% of millennials more likely to try DIY projects over hiring a professional.
While a good YouTube tutorial helps in the how-to, consumers still need to know their hammers from their hoes to get the job done correctly.
So how can you help them find the right tools to spruce up their home or garden? Real-time social proof messaging can help surface both what’s on-trend (whether that’s the latest paint color or garden shrub), what’s in stock or what other customers rate.
For the customer who is often more enthusiastic than expert then this last point can be particularly valuable. Using Taggstar’s aggregated review messaging, which is provided by integrating data from Bazaarvoice, you can show potential customers how others have rated what they are looking at, meaning that if they are still at the indecision stage then they are much more likely to convert after they have seen your social proof messaging.
Alternatively, they might have already put something in their cart but not quite pressed buy yet – it’s time to let them know that item is selling fast to get them to complete the sale.
DIY products can be high value and emotional purchases that can result in checkout anxiety at the final stage of your customers’ online shopping journey and so providing the extra help that customers might want can be hugely valuable. Our social proof messaging is used by DIY specialists globally, including UK giant Wickes, which has deployed Taggstar social proof across its website since first testing it in 2020, displaying more than 100 million messages each month.
The adoption of social proof messages is a powerful marketing tactic that allows you to harness the power of the crowd and deliver what is often a double-digit uplift in conversion rates. It helps to give your customers the confidence to purchase by making complicated buying decisions easier and quicker. And of course that gives them more time to crack on with that long list of DIY jobs…
