Flowers…uncut

Posted by: Will – Priority Juggler on February 8th, 2008

Hello, everyone. Apologies for the relative blog silence of late. We’ve been super busy at Flowers HQ - not only is Valentine’s Day looming, but we’ve also been hard at work on a top secret, world first feature for our customers - video and voice messages delivered with flowers. Heard of that before? We haven’t (let us know if you have!). How does this magic work? Read on!

We’ve been obsessed with providing the most beautiful flowers that money can buy, at great value, since we launched. The most important thing to us, by far, is sourcing flowers direct from growers at great prices and delivering them direct to our customers, so that we can give flower lovers service second to none. Middlemen and UK relay organisations get no money from us and our flowers never sit in shop windows - savings and quality are passed direct to our customers.

But that’s not enough. We want to do more. We want to do things better. We want to do new things, like allow people to send virtual flowers on Facebook. We want to keep improving the whole experience of sending flowers.

When people send flowers, they send a message. The flowers represent more than just flowers. They also represent emotion and sentiment. The message card tells a story. Put simply, flower sending is personal. We’ve therefore spent a lot of time pondering how we can help our customers personalise their gift giving experience even more and built some new features which we think will help:

• We a built tool to allow customers to format the appearance of the text on the message card - 90% of our customers now format their message in some way using the “wysiwyg” editor.
• We offer occasion-specific greetings cards, to reflect the key message (eg “I love you!”).
• Arena customers can upload a photo to go with their order. We’ve sent enough photos to fill a lot of albums since the photo feature launched.

And, from yesterday evening, Arena customers have been able to upload a video or sound file to go with their order. Why? Well, we think that if you’re sending Valentine’s flowers or wishing your mum Mother’s Day love, then this is just about the best possible way, on top of the flowers that you send, to personalise your message.

It’s pretty simple (we hope):

• As you go through checkout, you choose to add a video/sound file
• After checkout completion, you add your video/sound file
• We send your recipient a card telling them how to access the video
• They go and view it!
• As an added extra, you can elect for you video to be ‘Public’ - if you do it will appear (subject to the expected terms and cons) on our Arena Video page for other Arena Flowers browsers to see.

We’ve even got our first public video up there. It was made by the great team at Vzaar (the place to go to put videos (for free) into your eBay listings). Arena Video is powered by Vzaar so they know exactly how it works!

We don’t expect everyone to use this feature, especially not to begin with. That was our experience with photos. But we think that, like the photo feature, usage will rise as customers return and know that the feature is there. If people don’t want to send a video or sound file - no problem. But if they do want to, the only flower shop in the world where they can is Arena Flowers!

Any feedback very welcome!

PS I got knocked off my bike again today and the last thing that I thought before thumping into the road was “If I go to hospital, I hope I get a video message from the team!”. Fortunately, no trip in an ambulance was required so I’ll have to wait before I get a first hand experience of the video message. :)

Filed under: Customers, Marketing, Matters Webby, Mega Days, Setting up, Valentine's Day on February 8th, 2008

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