The DIY and home-improvement market keeps getting bigger. Between 2019 and 2021, spending on DIY projects grew 44% to $66 billion, according to the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University. 

Almost 60% of homeowners remodeled or redecorated their homes in 2022, and 48% made home repairs, according to the 2023 U.S. Houzz and Home Study: Renovation Trends. More than half of homeowners planned projects in 2023. 

All these home projects mean consumers are shopping for home building materials, home decor, tools, supplies, and more. Most consumers shop for what they need for their projects both online and in stores. They seek inspiration and information on social media and via user-generated content (UGC) posted by other DIY-ers — most shoppers always or sometimes read reviews before buying anything.

However, one thing to note about customer behavior and industry trends these days is that inflation is causing many to be slightly more budget-conscious with their DIY and home improvement projects. Our research shows that 55% of DIY consumers plan to re-purpose products that they already have to improve home decor.

Still, in the next year, 66% plan to make decorative changes in their homes, while 58% plan to make wear-and-tear repairs, our research shows. About 20% will take on structural, functional, or major renovations. 

Home improvement trends: Now and next

Using our own research as well as third party insights, here’s a look at how DIY and home-improvement industry trends have evolved over the past few years, what’s on trend now, and what shopping habits you can expect in the near future. 

Now: UGC entices consumers to shop for DIY products 

Millennial DIYers often leverage social media platforms, like TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, and Pinterest, for home project ideas and inspiration. Influencers, including everyday consumers, reveal their latest projects and discuss the newest home trends. Retailers and brands need to make it easy for shoppers to connect the dots to purchase on social media. 

Many consumers aren’t planners when it comes to DIY. 35% of DIYers do home projects when inspiration strikes, our research shows. But, they need help choosing the right items. That’s where UGC comes into play. 

UGC is the most trusted form of content, according to 63% of DIY consumers. We’ve found that when DIY shoppers interact with UGC, you can see a 167% conversion lift and 250% RPV boost. Consumers are also more likely to buy items with written reviews and customer photos and videos. 

Most shoppers expect UGC to be easy to find, whether they’re shopping online or in stores for home decor and DIY supplies. It helps them make informed decisions, so it’s important to feature UGC everywhere people shop. 

About 2 in 3 consumers prefer shopping for DIY and home improvement products in-store (that number rises to 76% for consumers over 55). The main reasons they prefer visiting stores in person are to get advice from in-store sales reps and to get what they need more quickly.

Vancouver-based furniture and decor company Urban Barn strives to offer shoppers consistent, unique experiences both online and in stores. The brand has found that even when shoppers visit stores, they research products on its website first. The company has been beefing up its UGC collection efforts by encouraging customers to post images on social media tagged #RightAtHome. 

Urban Barn has seen a 59% conversion rate boost, a 29% increase in order value, and a whopping 270% lift in time on site since implementing its UGC strategy.

Next: DIY shoppers want multi-channel experiences 

In the next few years, consumers will continue to seek convenience when shopping for home improvement items. DIY retailers should rise to the challenge and rethink their formats and services. Topps Tiles is a good example. The brand has opened smaller boutique-style storefronts to offer unique experiences. 

Shoppers will embrace online shopping for home improvement purchases more often. Our research shows that consumers are motivated by the fact that more items are in stock online (41%), they can quickly get advice from customer reviews (36%), and they just enjoy shopping online more (34%). 

The DIY brands that are winning offer a consistent, seamless shopper experience across digital, in-store, outdoor, and social media. For instance, Made.com, a British home goods e-commerce brand, has opened a few showrooms to provide this omnichannel experience. 

Over three-quarters of shoppers research DIY and home improvement products online or on social media before buying them. And, more than 40% of 18- to 34-year-olds frequently purchase directly from social media. This highlights the importance of relevant, high-quality UGC in guiding online and in-store purchases. 

Consumers tend to search for UGC on web browsers (45%), retail websites (40%), brand websites (39%), and social media (27%). 

Over half of DIY consumers would be more likely to purchase DIY and home improvement products if more educational resources, like videos and reviews, were available. YouTube is the preferred platform for learning about DIY and home projects, followed by advice from friends and family.

With social media such an important source of inspiration, 31% of consumers also shop there for products for their DIY and home projects. This emphasizes the vital role social media marketing and UGC play in moving consumers through the purchase funnel. 

Bedding and bath brand Parachute features UGC in its marketing mix to show how real customers are styling and using its products in their daily lives. This strategy has helped the brand increase click-through rates by 35% and lower cost-per-click rates by 60%.

By continuously collecting UGC, Parachute keeps a fresh slate of inspiring content flowing in all the time. 

Future: DIYers want personalization and support to shop with confidence 

DIY and home improvement retailers are considered places for consumers interested in tackling these projects to come together, find inspiration, and learn something new. This viewpoint is especially crucial for millennials and new homeowners, who feel that they lack the skills and confidence to complete these projects and need extra support. 

For instance, 60% of millennials can’t put up shelves, and 39% say they can’t decorate. Educational marketing materials and in-store workshops will help engage and build trust among unconfident shoppers. 

Home Depot has long recognized the value of engaging shoppers in this way. The retailer hosts virtual and in-store DIY workshops for all skill levels to help customers learn new skills and become handier at home. 

45% of consumers expect a personalized experience from brands and retailers when shopping for DIY and home improvement products. So, investing in this area can help you maintain a competitive edge. 

Consumers are also interested in tech-focused support. 45% of DIY shoppers have used some type of digital tool to plan their projects, while 25% have used “customized products on brand websites,” and 17% have used augmented reality or virtual reality to visualize furniture in their own space. 

UGC is crucial for attracting DIY consumers now and in the future

There’s one standout and consistent trend when it comes to the home improvement industry, DIY and home improvement shoppers massively rely on what other consumers have to say before purchasing furniture, supplies, home decor, and other things to spruce up their homes.

Ensuring you have a process to collect and distribute UGC will continue to attract customers and build relationships with them for years to come. Learn more about Bazaarvoice’s solutions here. 

Chances are you’ve most likely been to a Home Depot or ordered from them online. Need a new drill? Repainting your living room? Updating your lighting? Bored on a Sunday? It’s off to Home Depot. 

The home improvement retailer has 2,200 stores in the U.S., Canada and Mexico, and offers more than one million products for its shoppers. They serve DIY customers, professional contractors, and installation businesses across North America. 

For brands that sell their products on HomeDepot.ca, figuring out how to maximize channel sales is critical for business. Brands can of course come to HomeDepot.ca with their own user-generated content (UGC) — like reviews, Q&As, and social posts — but the retail chain partners with Bazaarvoice specifically to provide robust UGC collection tools for brands. 

A UGC strategy done right increases the discoverability of products, boosts sales, and creates a valuable dialogue with customers and new shoppers. It also informs SEO benefits, provides insights for product innovation, reduces return rates, and ensures shoppers have a positive experience with your brand. The impact of reviews by numbers:

Customers who interact with UGC are 2x more likely to convert, according to Bazaarvoice research. Reviews help customers validate their purchasing decisions and feel more confident about the products they buy. 

Home Depot Canada has launched several Bazaarvoice solutions and features that improve the customer experience and help suppliers optimize UGC. One of its most successful solutions is its sampling program, the Home Depot Seeds Program. 

What is the Home Depot Seeds Program?

The Home Depot Seeds Program is a product sampling program that puts a brand’s high-priority products in the hands of Home Depot Canada’s most loyal shoppers, in exchange for honest reviews on HomeDepot.ca.

Bazaarvoice and Home Depot partnered to help brands select which key items to sample, identify Home Depot Canada audiences within the sampling community, and guide brands through fulfillment. 

How to leverage the Home Depot Seeds Program

Home Depot encourages its brands to enlist the Seeds Program for seasonal, exclusive, and new products. Or even any products that just need a fresh crop of reviews:

• New products: Brands can collect authentic UGC for products ahead of a new launch. Insights found within reviews ensure your products launch with a bang, and will help future shoppers feel confident about purchasing your new products
• Seasonal items: Optimize seasonal item product pages with UGC to boost discoverability and increase conversions during their limited time
• Home Depot exclusives: If your brand sells products exclusively through Home Depot, then HomeDepot.ca is the only place where shoppers can see that valuable UGC
• Products with outdated reviews: Search engines like Google favor pages with fresh content, so a a continuous flow of review content means more traffic to your product pages, which means more sales

Getting started with Bazaarvoice + Home Depot

The Home Depot Seeds Program has already helped some brands on HomeDepot.ca more than double their conversion rates. In addition, the program has been so successful that Home Depot vendors in the United States are now interested in using it to collect reviews for their Canadian exclusive items and product launches. 

Learn more about the Bazaarvoice + Home Depot partnership and more ways you can utilize strategies to increase channel sales over on our partnership page. Or get in touch directly below to get started.

For these brands, it meant more orders and more consumers discovering them via online channels. And companies that had already been following e-commerce trends had a major advantage over those that had to catch up.

Two years later, home improvement marketing trends are focused on customer experiences that bring a new level of immersion to the shopping experience. Customers reward brands that make it easy to get as much product information as possible through live support, mixed reality technology, and user-generated content (UGC).

Top 5 home improvement marketing trends

By 2025, a quarter of all furniture sales will take place in the online channel. For your home improvement brand to win in 2022 and beyond, these are the five marketing trends and tactics to watch.

1. Augmented reality

When shopping for a new piece of furniture, customers want to be able to visualize it in their home. That’s where augmented reality (AR) technology comes in. Using their phone, a customer can see if that new sofa matches the coffee table before they commit to the purchase. As such, AR isn’t a gimmick but a useful functionality that’s a win-win for retailers and consumers. Some AR tools, like Envision, decrease returns up to 80% while increasing sales by 30%.

Pinterest, everyone’s go-to platform for when they need visual inspiration, has released a new AR shopping feature that includes home improvement. The Try On feature works with items from retailers like Walmart and Crate & Barrel and spans 80,000 pins. Because the pins are shoppable, users can easily go from scrolling to ordering, so there’s little friction between discovery and purchase. According to Pinterest, the Try On feature increases the likelihood of users making a purchase by 5x. 

E-commerce platform Shopify also helped the shopping complex Magnolia Market bring an AR feature to its app. Users can preview what decor products would look like in their homes and also take a photo to share with others. They can also manipulate the object to see it from different angles.

When it comes to using mixed reality technology, leave it to furniture giant IKEA to go all out. It already has an AR-powered app (IKEA Place), but the Swedish company has released a new solution that blends AI and mixed reality. Called IKEA Kreativ, it captures an image of a room and helps you decorate it from scratch. It can also remove your current furniture from the photo, so there’s no need to shuffle things around IRL. The kings of home improvement marketing.

2. Buy now, pay later

With rising inflation and an uncertain economy, shoppers are going to think twice before making big purchases — especially if they must pay up front. Flexible payment options like buy now, pay later (BNPL) can increase conversions and expand access to your products. BNPL allows customers to pay off items in multiple installments, usually without any fees.

Over 30% of internet users are also BNPL users, and projections estimate that 79 million consumers in the US will rely on BNPL in 2022 to fund their purchases. 

Home improvement e-commerce stores can offer BNPL via popular providers like PayPal, Klarna, Afterpay, and Affirm, which integrate at checkout. BNPL can also help you when marketing to Gen Z, as they made up nearly 37% of users in 2021 — more than any other generation.

Furniture companies that added Affirm’s BNPL solution include Article and Herman Miller. For Article, it represents an opportunity to build consumer trust, while Herman Miller wanted to bring more payment flexibility to its online customers. According to Erika White, head of communications and corporate marketing at Affirm, its retail partners experience an average order value growth of 85% with its solution.

3. Live customer support

Customers who are making big home improvement purchases sometimes need more information before placing an order. If they can’t find this information on your website, then their next step is to get in touch with customer service teams. That’s where live customer support comes in. It includes customer service agents who are there to help customers in real time, by phone or chat. 

Live customer support is especially important when we talk about online shopping for items that require some technical knowledge. “Lighting is a very technical category. It requires different electrical components, installation. We certainly augment our site experience with live sales teams, based here in the U.S., that are very knowledgeable. Sometimes that will help people feel comfortable making the decision,” explains Anne Berger, chief marketing officer at lighting retailer YDesign Group.

Customer expectations for live support have increased. From 2019 to 2021, the percentage of US online adults who described live online chat as “important” for retailers grew from 27% to 42%. Home improvement e-commerce brands that ignore this are providing an opportunity for their competitors to win over potential customers, making live support an essential part of your online store user experience.

4. Social commerce

For proof that social media is essential to home improvement marketing, look no further than Pinterest. When we plan a redecorating project, we go online to find interior design inspiration. (How are you supposed to know that a glazed tile backsplash is perfect for your kitchen if you’ve never seen it before?) 

So, social commerce bridges the gap between exploring and purchasing, allowing online furniture and decor brands to organically incorporate their products into social media. From Instagram to Facebook, major social networks all incorporate e-commerce features that your furniture store can take advantage of.

Anthropologie, a clothing and home decor retailer, saw a dramatic increase in searches for its home decor on the platform: 1,057% year over year for the “anthropologie home decor inspiration” keyword. To follow up on that success, it launched an exclusive digital catalog on Pinterest for its 2020 spring home collection.

While browsing the catalog, Pinterest users can click on links that will take them to the Anthropologie website, where they can purchase the items.

Live commerce (shopping while watching a livestream) is also making waves in the retail industry, with conversions close to 30% (almost 10x higher than traditional e-commerce). Although live commerce is much more popular with clothing brands (furnishing and home improvement only make up 3.6% of live commerce events), this creates an opportunity to focus your home improvement marketing strategy on attracting this consumer attention.

In Korea, IKEA has already piloted a live shopping solution. During the livestream, IKEA home improvement experts talked about their products and shared tips, while viewers could ask questions and make orders.

5. User-generated content

Images, videos, and written reviews all fall under the umbrella of UGC. Since UGC comes from real people and not the brand, it plays an important role in providing social proof and assuring consumers of the product’s high quality. And UGC has a major impact on consumers — by using customer photos and videos, you can increase the likelihood of purchase by 66% and 62%, respectively.

You can grow UGC for your home improvement marketing strategy in several ways. One is by introducing a product sampling program that gives out items for free in exchange for honest customer reviews. Home Depot Canada partnered with Bazaarvoice to create the Seeds Sampling program to increase UGC for four new Philips WiZ products. The added product reviews resulted in a 68% higher conversion rate compared to other products that weren’t included in the program.

Another way of encouraging UGC is by launching contests and challenges on social media. Furniture and houseware retailer Made.com launched a campaign that invited customers to share photos on Instagram of its products in their homes with the hashtag #MADEdesign. Participating customers had the chance to be featured in a new digital and print campaign which was a strong incentive to take part in the contest.

Build your customers’ trust in your home improvement e-commerce brand

New consumer behaviors and marketing trends have allowed home improvement brands’ e-commerce businesses to flourish. In the UK and Germany, for example, more than 50% of consumers now turn to online shopping for furniture and home improvement.

Home improvement marketing isn’t immune to broader trends in retail, such as social commerce, but it does face unique challenges. Customers take more time to research and buy furniture and other home furnishings (as opposed to clothing), so providing them with innovative ways of learning more about your products is essential.

Solutions that establish customer trust grow UGC with genuine reviews. The reviews boost your customers’ confidence, which results in improved conversion rate metrics — just in time for you to take advantage of the growing number of online home improvement shoppers.

Learn more about home improvement marketing, trends, and solutions.

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