Data-driven marketing, fueled by Audience Extension, helps online furniture retailer drive 300% growth

A rapidly expanding online furniture retailer was looking to transform its marketing approach. Historically, its strategy had focused on promoting individual products—sofas, beds, tables—without deeply considering the customer’s lifestyle needs or purchase motivations. Leadership believed that moving toward a marketing strategy centered around customer need states—such as furnishing a first apartment, upgrading for a growing family, or designing a dream home—would yield stronger business outcomes.

The challenge was to:

A: Find new, effective ways to increase online retail revenue — without spending additional media dollars.

B: Build a media investment model that would yield the highest weekly revenue while maintaining ROI performance.

Big Village started by providing the retailer with a comprehensive understanding of its customer base: what motivated them to shop for furniture, how they made purchasing decisions, and what types of experiences they valued. The goal was to define distinct customer segments that were meaningfully different from each other yet internally cohesive.

Through the research, five customer segments emerged, ranging from budget-conscious first-time renters to style-driven home decorators and function-focused families. To translate these insights into actionable strategies, Big Village implemented its Audience Extension solution, which included:

1. Media Behavior Insights – Data on how each segment discovered, researched, and purchased furniture online to inform smarter campaign planning.
2. Digital Segment Profiles – Online personas of each segment used for precise digital targeting.
3. Digital Twins – Lookalike models to support personalized messaging strategies without the need for further research.
4. Customer File Mapping – Alignment of these segments with the retailer’s CRM data to enable segment-specific marketing performance measurement and optimization.

Using these tools, Big Village developed a comprehensive DTC campaign focused on driving growth for the retailer. Channels included paid search, paid social, and display. We also leveraged our in-house SSP to reach segments on CTV platforms. The campaigns evolved over time, and based on performance, allowed us to learn and strategically position tactics with defined roles within the media mix and throughout the purchase funnel and process. Our most evolved work began to integrate broader brand awareness initiatives to reach new, unique audiences and unveil a refreshed brand positioning.

We developed an e-commerce marketing machine that built and optimized DTC and B2B campaigns in unison, deploying a variety of data-driven digital tactics and a thoughtful use of traditional media types.

The Audience Extension process created a more accurate media plan, eliminated guesswork and the use of audience proxies, and delivered campaigns 40-50% more accurately.

We helped our clients better understand and use their first-party data to support both DTC and B2B programs and measure their success.

Our efforts not only achieved our minimum 5:1 ROI goal, which we often well-exceeded, but they also inspired an expansion of the store’s marketing program — and we helped increase total revenue for the company by almost 300%.

Our work went beyond just building campaigns, and we continually challenged ourselves to learn more and deliver nuanced solutions that drove real results.