Glamming up the garden, upcycling, and creating a home office are three of the top ten home interior trends Britons want to try out in 2022, according to a recent survey. And the desire to do it themselves is rampant.
With spring beginning from March 20 and Easter, the first long weekend of the year, not far behind, it’s little wonder that consumers are beginning to think about putting on their scruffs to tackle a few DIY jobs around the home.
The UK home improvement industry saw a huge spike in sales in 2020 and 2021, with nearly three-quarters (74%) of consumers turning to home improvements to pass the time. Spending grew by 14.9% according to Mintel, and Brits spent £1.4 billion at garden centres and DIY stores last Easter alone. A whopping 86% of consumers undertook a DIY project in the period, according to B&Q, spending an average of 15 hours a week on such tasks.
But despite the extra practice, not all of us are DIY experts, and while many of us 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 sometimes 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 are 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. They need the retailers from which they are buying to guide them to the best tools for the job.
So how can you help them find the right tools to spruce up their home or garden beyond simple product descriptions? Real-time social proof messaging can help here. It can surface both what’s on-trend (whether that’s the latest paint colour 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 social proof messaging.
DIY giants across the UK use our social proof messaging solution to help their customers make better choices online and provide a virtual sales assistant in the form of social proof messaging to do so.
Such retailers include Wickes, which has deployed Taggstar social proof across its website since first testing it in 2020. The retailer now displays more than 100 million social proof messages each month and, in its most recent interim results in September 2021 said that digital channels now drove two-thirds of its sales.
Robert Dyas, meanwhile, has also been using Tagstar’s social proof messaging technology since 2020, with a 15.2x return on investment in its latest optimisation test.
Adopting 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…
