Will has been busy as a regular contributor to econsultancy’s blog as well as others, so we thought we’d share some of his posts here too.

Having a growing online business can be filled with thousands of individual decisions, each of which in sum can lead to the shape of your business.  We thought we’d summarise some of them here as a guide for anyone making similar decisions.  Enjoy.

Tips for boot strapped startups (try saying that after two pints)

In his post, Six top tips for bootstrapped startups, Will shares his advice about what to expect when starting a new company without piles of VC backing behind you.

1. Employing friends and family at the start of a new company is a good way to get people who believe in you on board – but make sure the relationship can survive the stress.

2. Take the lead, the buck stops with you. Management by committee can lead to poor compromised decisions.

3. Don’t wing it or make rushed decisions. Tell your team exactly what you need to make a decision (data, costs, where assumptions are) then they will come prepared when seeking approval (and more likely to get a “yes”).

4. Don’t let minority investors run the game; this can slow down progress when small share holders dig their heels in because of different expectations.  It’s your business, so make sure you can run it your way.

5. Patience isn’t a virtue, it’s a necessity.   Will gives a rule of thumb that “raise twice as much as you think you need and expect it to take twice as long”.

6. Know your end game. And keep it in mind the whole way along.  There are many reasons to start a business, but once you’re immersed in the detail and the hard slog, don’t forget your reasons and make sure the ship keeps moving in the right direction.

Nothing is normal

If you’re just at the early days of starting your business and feel like your life is a bit all over the place, it’s normal.  Feeling like you’ve done nothing for a week then completely manic the next week, it’s normal.  In Will’s post for Management Today, My Week: Will Wynne of ArenaFlowers, he describes how a day can involve going to meet with a courier company, or getting two hours sleep, or not having lunch, or flying to the US to check out how they do things out there.

Sit in big chair, stroke cat, ponder world domination

In one of Will’s post for econsultancy, he looked at issues regarding international expansion of an online business.  This can be an attractive prospect for business owners – you may have found that you get a lot of traffic from non-UK audiences, or that your product might be attractive for those outside of your current target country.

This is not an insignificant decision to expand your business internationally and there are some tools which can help you work out if or where markets for your products exist.  Will comments in the telegraph on Google’s new export research tool here. Called Global Market Finder, this tool from Google allows you to look at search terms and competition in new countries.  This might give you some ideas if there is demand for your product, or what people are looking for in your particular field.  For example, Marmite appears to be a popular search term in China, as is Marmalade in France.

Will also writes about the potential complications around websites, language, SEO and tax.  Once you determine that there is a market, how you get into that market is a plethora of details.  Will gives you 3 top things to consider in his post International e-commerce: three things to consider.

The first is how you show your content to your new audience.  Targeted, local websites?  Or using your main domain?  There are pros and cons to both; you need it to decide which are most important to you.  Having a local website gives a better customer experience, but takes more resource to build and may be harder to get integrated into your backend systems.  Having localised content on your main website maybe a good way to test the market before you invest in a new site.

Do you need to create a locally registered company?  No, it’s not a legal requirement within Europe (although it can help massively when negotiating with local suppliers.  Again, it’s worth weighing the benefits of a local company against the set up.  Creating one does lead to more admin and accounting costs.

VAT, under the distance selling rules for the EU, are charged at the local VAT rate of the goods-receiving country.  Up to a certain threshold.  And this threshold changes from country to country.  For example, once a UK company has sent 35K Euros of goods to Belgium, the company then has to register for VAT in Belgium and pay the Belgian tax to the local tax office (not the UK one).  Variable tax rates on products can create a development issue too, because different tax rates will need to be applied to products depending on which country they are to be sent.

Socially acceptable marketing

You have things up and running, plans of global domination simmering gently on the stove.  So what’s all this social media marketing malarkey?  Ok, that’s a bit patronising, if you’ve come here to a blog from a twitter link or a facebook post, you probably know.  But knowing how to use it for marketing is not necessarily so straightforward.  We hear a lot of examples from big brands with big bank accounts and what they do with social marketing, but how about young companies decide to use the space is trickier.   Will’s blog post on econsultancy “How should a young company approach social media marketing?” gives insight into our experiences of using social media.  Things that have worked long term (like our twitter application, Flowers and Fun) , things that have some success at key times (our Facebook valentine’s wishes page), and things that we could have done without (our world cup flowers video).

Will gives 6 points of sage advice:

1. Make the idea simple. It should be easy for people to pick up – but then also easy for you to put down if it falls flat.

2. Be realistic. Converting sales from social media campaign may disappoint you, but focus more on getting your name out.

3. Make it non-commercial. People don’t want to be marketed at, they want to be entertained.  If your marketing message is obviously selling something, people are less likely to engage, in our experience.

4. Don’t hashtag spam. There are plenty of examples of this going wrong (Habitat being the first example, although they’ve since gone into administration – not due to the hashtag spam, though!)

5. Have fun with it (if you post robotically, people won’t be very inclined to read it or respond)

6. Track what you can (traffic, use referral tags)

Staying on the right side of right

You may be on the right side of your customers – but are you on the right side of the law?  The Advertising Standards Agency released a new extension to its remit in March 2011, which includes content on websites, twitter feeds and Facebook walls.   There are some grey areas which we identified in the new remit and Will’s blog post on the new ASA online regulations, gave some examples of where companies had gone wron and some of the trickier issues.  We thought we’d summarise some of the grey areas and how to avoid getting an ASA complaint upheld:

1.  It’s all about context: Editorial content on a website is not within the remit.  Unless it’s used for marketing purposes.  The example Will gives is the Tanning Shop using a Daily Mail article about tanning being good for you in one of their marketing emails.  Complaints were upheld because although the article was published by the Daily Mail, that wasn’t enough for the Tanning Shop to substantiate the claims.  Similar with customer reviews.  You can’t control what people post on your wall, or how they review products on your website.  But you are responsible if you use those reviews for marketing purposes.

2. Familiarise yourself, your marketing team, your content team and your design team with the new regulations.

3. Respond if the ASA contact you.  From what we’ve read about complaints, the ASA don’t take kindly if you do not respond and you are very likely to have a complain upheld.

4. Be cautious on social media.  If you retweet a tweet from your company which has erroneous information about your company or products, that could lead to an upheld complaint.

5. Question any agency you use to write content about you to make sure they know the new regulations.  Put processes in place so that claims the write about you can be substantiated.  This means more editorial time.

There we go. Quite a few tips all in all! Hopefully helpful / of interest.

Post from: Arena Flowers - Flower Delivery London & UK

Share This Post:

If you think your partner may be worried about getting you something you actually want for Valentine’s day, we’ve created a handy little tool on our Valentine’s Wishes page to help you give them a little bit of a nudge in the right direction.

We’ve taken our favourite Valentine’s flowers and put them onto one Valentine’s Wishes page.

It’s very simple; click the facebook ‘like’ button underneath your favourite bouquet and it will appear in your facebook feed for all your potential Valentines to see (provided you’re already friends with them on facebook).

I’ve done one to show you below (and perhaps I’ll be lucky enough to receive some!).

Let’s hope that your loved one or suitors get the hint.

If you think this hint may be a bit too subtle, we have a more direct approach. Choose a bouquet from our Valentine’s flowers range and click the ‘Send a hint’ button.  This sends an email with the wording of your choice to your Valentine.

With luck (and some hint dropping) you may get the flowers you would most like this Valentine’s day.

Post from: Arena Flowers - Flower Delivery London & UK

Share This Post:

A few weeks back, around the time of the World Cup, we (Flower HQ’s three marketing execs) thought we would have a shot at creating a fun short video, in the hope that it might get a few views on YouTube and drive some brand awareness.  That was the idea anyway. We also knew there was a good chance it would only get a few views, given how much other World Cup related content was going around at the same time.

If you have not yet seen it, have a watch here: Flowers’ World Cup.

Whilst it was fun to make and it came out (we think) pretty well, there are definitely things we’d do differently if we were to do another.  We thought we’d share some of these with you, to help if you ever make a stop motion video.

Tips:

• Creativity: Think of great new ideas, people like watching new things.  This is not only the most important – and perhaps obvious tip – but definitely the hardest.  If you can’t think of something creative and new, then do what’s been done before but add new elements and do it really, really well. Our idea (showing our flowers competing against garage flowers in a game wasn’t super original but hadn’t been done before).
  

• Plan: Make a feasible plan & write all of your thoughts and ideas down.  This should include the original point of doing it – you should keep referring back to this to make sure you’re staying on track.

• Location: Select an appropriate location to shot the video.  The environment around you will affect the quality of the video. This includes lighting, setting – for example, whether you are likely to be interrupted by passing traffic or noise.
  

• Time: Take reasonable time to make a video as couple hours will not suffice.  It’s really easy to underestimate the amount of time it will take.

• Target: Do your research and select the audience you want to target.
  

• Be entertaining: Keep it short and interesting.  If you want the world to watch your video, you will need to make it as entertaining as possible and not bore people.

• Sound: Chose a suitable audio track that you wish to add on your video.  Make sure it’s a high quality audio track.  Most audio tracks require a license to use them – some sites to get royalty-free audio are: istockphoto, royaltyfreemusic.  We had quite a debate about the raucous music on our video.

• Commit to finishing it: Don’t give up and stay focused.   Many obstacles will hinder you (I’ll give some examples of what went wrong for us), your motivation might drop, but remember there’s always a great sense of achievement making something, so keep going…

• Distribution: This can be one of the hardest aspects to making a successful video.  There are plenty of different video hosting channels out there; YouTube, Dailymotion, Vzaar and Squidoo to name a few.  Its important to get as much visibility as possible, so you might also want to consider relevant forums and social networking sites.  The more outlets you showcase your video the higher the chance that the video will gain traction and views.

• Go for it: Once you’ve taken the time to make your video – it may not be what you had initially expected, but put it out there anyway.

How & what we did wrong:

Just so that you know we are talking from some experience, we thought it’d be fun to give you some examples of things not going entirely to plan.

Planning:

Finding creativity wasn’t really our problem.  In fact we were so excited to get started, we drew up a plan on the white board in the meeting room.

Once the plan was finished and we ready to get it approved and start making it, we realised, that the drawing was not organized well!  On top of that we couldn’t save it and so we resorted to taking photos of it.

Location:

Selecting the right location is important and we found this out the hard way.  Although our studio is perfect for shooting product images, it didn’t work so well for shooting our video.  The main reason was the heat.  With temperatures rising above 30 degrees in peak summer time, it made it quite hard to work efficiently.  So hot, in fact, that while we were shooting we managed to overheat one of the lamps and blow the mother boards inside.  All we heard was a snap, crackle and pop followed by a puff of smoke and that was the end of shooting for the day (and week).

a

a

Props:

Some of the more keen eyed of you might have noticed we used six beautiful Sunset Cubes to act as a crowd for our game of football.  However after the light melting episode we had to postpone the filming until after the lights had been fixed.

Unfortunately, due to flowers being perishable and our desire to have them looking their best, we had to change the flowers for the second part of the filming.

Distribution:

We did not spend enough time getting our video out there.  We spent almost all our time and energy on getting the video finished before the ever shortening deadline of the World Cup Final as we wanted it to be relevant to current affairs.  What this meant was that once it was done we all sort of sat back relieved that it had been finished, this was a mistake.  We didn’t push the distribution any where nearly hard enough, and of course the video’s views suffered.  We should have spent more time thinking about how we would get our video out there and onto people’s screens.  We assumed that once the video was made we would post it and watch the views fly in, this doesn’t happen in reality.  In hindsight we should have taken time to build a more structured method of where and who we were going to distribute to.  In future productions this will be a very high priority.

a

We had great fun making the video and it was a massive learning experience for us three.  The next time that we attempt something like this we will go into it expecting every thing that could go wrong to go wrong, and be prepared this time :)

Here is the vid again – enjoy!

Post from: Arena Flowers - Flower Delivery London & UK

Share This Post:

Hello all, my name is Freddie (a.k.a Flower Funster on the blog).

I joined Arena around the February Valentine’s period and as you can imagine it was a VERY busy first few days.  I came to Arena off the back of studying Environmental Business at Leeds, and was looking forward to trying something new and challenging in the world of online marketing.  It was all quite bewildering at first with so many acronyms being thrown around by everyone in the office, but I am beginning to get an understanding of the enormous worlds of Google Adwords, SEO (search engine optimisation) and general internet marketing and site housekeeping.  There seems to be a never-ending stream of information and techniques to learn about and trial.

a

What has amazed me from when I first arrived is the pace at which things change and evolve, even in the short time I’ve been here.  One of the things that has been beeping louder and louder on the marketing radar is Facebook.  On a personal level I am used to using Facebook to chat to my friends, share photos and organise pub trips.  However, I – along with many others – have become interested in exploring its potential usage and capabilities in e-commerce (beyond simple banner advertising).  I can see how it can start to affect consumers’ decisions.  What could be a greater source of influence than friends and their recommendations?

a

I heard that way back in 2007 Arena launched its own Facebook app, Flowers & Fun, which became really popular.  The idea was to send flowers to your friends for any occasion using Facebook.  It was even possible to send them anonymously as a secret admirer.  Overall, 28,000 people added the app to their Facebook profiles, and sent 65,000 bouquets.  This created a huge amount of brand awareness at a time when Arena Flowers was relatively new but the app didn’t necessarily have much direct effect on a consumer’s decision making and our sales.

The FaceBook “Like” button appears to be tapping directly into the power of recommendation.  Facebook are integrating themselves with external websites via the “Like” button.  Previously the “Like” button was only embedded within Facebook.  Some people have been looking at the possibilities of what this simple little button could well be capable of.  One friend of Arena, Nigel Whiteoak has posted some interesting thoughts about the “Like” button and what Facebook may have planned going forward; such as more search functionality (for example, where the “Liked” pages show in Facebook search results).

a

ArenaFlowers.com, always keen early-adopter, has rolled out the like button across all our products, see here: Bright & Cheery (we put the “Like” button up 24 hours ago), and you will even be able to “Like” this blog post ;).  Luckily for us we sell an interesting product, if we sold duct tape online then this might not be so exciting.  Flowers are a fun and beautiful gift for so many different occasions making it hard not to “Like” them.

a

I think the “Like” button has the potential to be huge.  One of the main reasons for this; Facebook has hit 500 million users, which is staggering and cannot be ignored for any online business.  The “Like” button could also be a very accessible way of tapping into those users and finding out what they actually like and want.  I think the introduction of the “Like” button has also started to create a shift of authority.  Previously the power was purely in the hands of the website, or the first results in Google.  Now people can essentially vote for what products they like with a simple click of a button – and show this to all their friends.  External reviews and star ratings are definitely still prominent but are by no means the only influence on a potential customer.

a

People trust their friends’ tastes and preferences, when a friend “Likes” a product it appears in your news feed, in their user profiles and perhaps if Facebook bring out a search functionality, there too.  Facebook creates a sphere of trust between you and your friends; you share photos, news and all the rest.  The “Like” button could extend that trust to products and businesses.  Potentially for people that are still wary about shopping online, or on sites they’ve never tried before, with categorical recommendation from a trusted friend about a product or website, I think this may greatly influence someone’s buying in the future.

Post from: Arena Flowers - Flower Delivery London & UK

Share This Post:

It’s a week since Valentine’s Day – a busy time for florists around the globe – and things have remained as exciting as ever at Arena Flowers.

Particularly exciting as we launched our new tool: Flowers & Fun.  This is a completely free (and fun!) messaging service allowing you to send messages with a virtual bouquet.  Flowers & Fun is perfect for sending a quick note and provides something a bit different to a quick, one line email or tweet.

It’s simple to use; 1) Choose your message, write the recipient’s name 2) Edit the message and choose the bouquet. Then send!

Your messages can be easily sent by email, or posted to Facebook.  We’ve integrated it with Twitter too to enable you to quickly post notes celebrating Birthdays, achievements…and well, just about anything.

Flowers & Fun is particularly innovative because there’s some pretty clever technology running in the background that identifies people wishing one another a happy Birthday or sending congratulations through Twitter; our Flowers & Fun account (http://twitter.com/flowersandfun) sends a short message with a virtual card attached.

We wanted to create something innovative, surprising and something to make people smile. So far the community response to the Twitter messaging has been very positive.

Flowers & Fun for Twitter is the latest in technological gadgetry we are so passionate about developing at Arena Flowers. Our Flowers & Fun for Facebook application launched in 2007 and so far there’ve been 65,000 virtual bouquets sent via Facebook (try Flowers & Fun Facebook for free here).

Arena Flowers is developing a tradition of exploring the web’s capabilities and using new technology – not just to make fun tools – but also to enhance the customer experience.  We have a photo uploading service on Arena Flowers, allowing customers to add photos when they order our flowers for delivery.  Using our calendar service, you can create electronic reminders for key events to make sure you never miss someone’s Birthday and order your Mother’s Day flowers in good time.  Those who’ve used our flower delivery service will know of our SMS delivery messages to let you know when your orders have been delivered.

Coincidentally (and very timely), we were proud to have been announced as one of Smarta100, an award which celebrates dedication to innovation in small business. See our Smarta100 award here.  We are pleased to have been awarded and see this as an acknowledgement of our passion for using technology to create a great user experience and to engage new customers.

We love feedback, if you have any for us about Flowers & Fun (or anything at all), email feedback @ arenaflowers.com or follow us on Twitter (http://twitter.com/arenaflowers).

Many thanks to Marc G. Smith for helping us build Flowers & Fun and for being a good friend of Arena Flowers.

Post from: Arena Flowers - Flower Delivery London & UK

Share This Post:

It was my pleasure to be at Small Business 2.0 this year; an even greater pleasure to take part in the SEO panel and SEO forum session.

There were some interesting speakers there from BT Tradespace. Ivan Croxford had sage advice and hilarious anecdotes about managing reputation via the BT Tradespace platform and social sites more generally. Arena Flowers has long been an advocate of BT Tradespace, so please feel free to join our network there, or to watch our very own technical whizz, Sam Barton here talking about BT Tradespace and social networking for businesses, a very hot topic at Small Business 2.0.

Other presenters included Microsoft, with a focus on their search marketing offering with search engine/ decision engine, Bing. One of my favourites was friend of Arena Flowers, Dan Wilson, giving a very candid forum session on social media and some of its uses and pitfalls.

I’ve put up the SEO presentation I gave here, in case anyone is interested. I really enjoyed all the questions on the day and feedback about the panel and forum session. Thank you to everyone who attended.

For other resources, you can see Will’s post Arena Flowers at Small Business 2.0 from 2008 or have a look at our other posts about marketing and setting up an online business.

Thanks for asking us along, Dan. We already look forward to the next one!

P.S. Valentine’s Day is just over two weeks from now! Have a look at our Valentine’s Day Flowers for inspiration.

Post from: Arena Flowers - Flower Delivery London & UK

Share This Post:

A few months back, Will wrote a first post about previous newsletter winners and had promised to frequently update the winners on our blog. Since Will’s last post in March, we have sent out Seven more newsletters and we have seven new winners (Some are already updated on Will’s Post) who need a grand mention on our blog for believing in Arena Flowers and for winning £50 worth of free flowers. Of course you could catch all the previous winners from our archived newsletters here, but here’s a quick look at the most recent winners.

June 2009 – Simon D – No Picture Received :0(
Simon likes to send tulips and in the past he has sent our 30 Red Tulips Gift Wrap, Tulip Sensation (a lot!), Spring Sunshine, Summer Surprise and Autumn Orange. Simon asked our florists to makes something nice using.. you guessed it ‘tulips’ with his £50 winnings.
Congratulations, Simon!

July 2009 – Kirsten – No Picture Received :0(
A loyal Arena Flowers fan since autumn 2007, Kirsten has previous sent our 35 Magnificent Orange, Red & Yellow Roses Bouquet, Sunset cube, Luxury Romance, Red Sky at Night, Mass of Pink Roses, and Lovely in Lilac. Congratulations, Kirsten!

August 2009 – Helen
A big fan of Arena Flowers since February 2008, Helen has previously sent our Pink Orchid, Bright & Cheery, Summer Surprise, Lovely in Lilac, A Dozen Yellow Roses, Pink Gift Wrap, and Big Balloon Birthday Gift Set. On being told of her win, Helen took the opportunity to tell us that Arena is always her first choice and that she never hesitates to recommend Arena Flowers to her friends and family. She has chosen the deluxe Strelitzia Tropical Arrangement with her winnings to send to her mum and dad, a flower connoisseur’s choice. Ps thanks for the kind words, Helen!

September 2009 – Brian
A frequent customer of Arena Flowers since 2007, Brian has previously sent our Two Dozen Red Roses, Pretty & Elegant,  Autumn Golds Bouquet, Autumn Orange, Tulip Sensation, Black Magic, Sunflowers Bouquet, Red Sky at Night, Mass of Red Roses, Mass of Fifty Red Roses, 35 Magnificent Orange, Red & Yellow Roses, Winter Tulips, Winter Roses, Freesias Cube, The One, Spring Sunshine, and 100 Tulips Special – phew! Brian will be sending a special deluxe version of our gorgeous new African Queen bouquet to a special lady in his life, and as he recently celebrated his birthday, it’s double congratulations to you, Brian!

October 2009 – Heidi Marie
A fan of Arena Flowers since April 2007, Heidi has previously sent our Pink Gift Wrap, Summer Surprise, and 35 Magnificent Orange, Red & Yellow Roses. Heidi has decided to send a special deluxe version of our traditional favourite Country Garden for Grandparents’ Day on behalf of her son Mitchell (pictured left with Heidi). Congratulations Heidi Marie!

Sending out newsletters to our customer base forms an essential part of our efforts to build storng relationships with our customers. We believe that it gives us an opportunity to thank our customers for the support and appreciation they have given us through the years. Our newsletters contain useful information for our customers including reminders of key dates (in case you miss any), exclusive discount codes and special offers on a whole range of flowers, chocolates, wines and other gifts. If you are not subscribed to our newsletter yet, you know what you are missing. Not to mention the opportunity of winning £50 worth of free flowers! Subscribe to our newsletter today!

Post from: Arena Flowers - Flower Delivery London & UK

Share This Post:

We’ve been a little quiet on the blog front this past few weeks – call it a little blog break while we recovered from the excitement of serving sumptuous fresh flowers to the nation’s romantics on Valentine’s Day, then just a few weeks later, creating the perfect Mother’s Day bouquet arrangements for mums, grandmas and godmothers across the UK.

But it doesn’t stop there, it is actually only Great Britain, Ireland and Nigeria that celebrate Mother’s Day on the fourth Sunday of lent and, in fact, most of our international cousins consider May to be the month of Mothering Sundays with the most popular date falling on the second Sunday of May.

It is generally believed that Mother’s Day is celebrated internationally around the world on a variety of days through the year because the event has a number of different origins. For instance, in Iran the day originally commemorated the birthday of Fatima, Muhammad’s daughter. In Canada, Mother’s Day was introduced in the mid-19th century as a call to unite women against war.

With our burgeoning portfolio of European ventures in the guise of Arena Bloemen (Netherlands), Arena Blumen (Germany), and Arena Bloemen Belgium, as well as our international flower delivery service, our development team now consider Arena mums all year round, not just for Mother’s Day.

To help them, and you, here’s a comprehensive list of the countries we serve, and their respective Mother’s Days for the next twelve months…

May 3rd: Hungary, Lithuania, Portugal, Spain.

May 8th: South Korea (Parents’ Day)

May 10th: USA, Aruba, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Belize, Bermuda, Brazil, Brunei, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, China, Colombia, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Ecuador, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Greece, Honduras, Hong Kong, Iceland, Italy, India, Jamaica, Japan, Latvia, Leichtenstein, Malaysia, Malta, Netherlands, New Zealand, Pakistan, Peru, Philippines, Puerto Rico, Singapore, Slovakia, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Suriname, Switzerland, Trinidad, Taiwan, Turkey, Ukraine, Uruguay, Venezuela, Zimbabwe.

May 15th: Paraguay.

May 26th: Poland (“Dzień Matki”).

May 27th: Bolivia.

May 30th: Nicaragua.

May 31st: Dominican Republic, France, Mauritius, Morocco, Sweden, Tunisia.

June 14th: Luxembourg.

June 28th: Kenya.

August 12th: Thailand.

August 15th: Antwerp Province (Belgium), Costa Rica.

October 12th: Malawi.

October 14th: Belarus.

October 18th: Argentina.

December 8th: Panama.

December 22nd: Indonesia.

Between 30th January – 1st March: Israel.

February 2nd: Greece.

February 14th: Norway.

March 8th: Armenia. Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Moldova, Montenegro, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Ukraine.

March 14th: UK, Ireland.

March 21st: Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Yemen

March 25th: Slovenia.

April 7th: Armenia.

If you enjoyed this post and would like to know more about Mother’s Day, check out Will’s rather excellent blog post on the moon’s influence on when we celebrate Mother’s Day in the UK.

Post from: Arena Flowers - Flower Delivery London & UK

Share This Post:

We quite often get asked “So, does anyone ever win that free newsletter competition or is it just a fake?”.  The answers are “Yes, every month!” and “Absolutely not!”.  We typically send one “postcard” email and one full newsletter every month (Mother’s Day flowers edition going out tomorrow).  In the newsletter we announce the winner of that month’s free order up to the value of £50.  We think this is the right mix of driving business without being pushy (previous newsletters and postcards can be seen here).

Of course, some people aren’t subscribed to our newsletters so don’t ever get to see the winners . As a result, in future we’ll be putting the winner on the blog too.  But in the meantime, we thought we’d show all of our previous lucky newsletter winners.  So here we go:

May 2009 – Paul M from Coatbridge, Scotland

No picture received. Boo!

April 2009 – Kalsoom from Birmingham

“My first order with Arena Flowers was back in December for some Grand Prix roses for my partner’s birthday,” Kalsoom told us on learning of her win.
“He absolutely loved them, and surprisingly they are still standing – albeit dark and crinkly – two months on. It’s a fantastic service I recommend to anyone in the world.”

March 2009 – Pippa who lives in Antigua, West Indies

On being told of her win, Pippa tells us “I find the Arena flower service an excellent way of keeping in touch with my mother, who sadly had a stroke over ten years ago, and has not been able to speak since, so no chance of chats on the phone unfortunately. She loves flowers, and this is a wonderful way of brightening up her life.”

February 2009 – Doreen from Guernsey

January 2009 – Linda W from Leeds

December 2008 – Sharon from Plymouth

November 2008 – William A from Surrey

On being told of his win, William sent this message: “Arena Flowers provides a first-class service. Completely reliable, you always deliver that WOW factor with your amazing bouquets, and I’m a big fan of the easy-to-use web site too. Thank you, Arena Flowers!”

Oooh, you’ll make us, blush, William. Thanks for the great feedback. We appreciate it!

October 2008 – Andrew W from Surrey

September 2008 – Carlos M from Northumberland

No picture received. Boo!

August 2008 -Trish N from Sheffield

July 2008 – Melanie S from Haywards Heath

June, May & April 2008 – Kirsten L from Surrey, William N from Essex & Mark S from Worcestershire

Photo FAIL! Actually, this was our fault as we only picked winners really close to the deadline so no time to get a picture!

March 2008 – Jacqui M from Blackpool

February 2008, January 2008 & November 2007 – Siobhan M from Edinburgh, Kathleen from London & Michael B from Canada

No photo.  Sometimes customers don’t want to be in the newsletter, out of shyness…or maybe their partner might want to know who they’ve been sending flowers to! (NB not suggesting that that was the case with these two anonymous winners, but it does happen! Don’t worry, our lips are sealed!)

December 2007 – Mo from London

October 2007 – Philip O from oops, we forgot to ask.

Philip also apologised that he only had this rather serious work photo to hand!

September 2007 – Steve U from oops, we forgot to ask again!

August 2007 – Mark H from hmmm. Again we didn’t ask. Maybe we only started asking in December 2007

Mark was kind enough to write back as soon as the flowers were delivered, saying:

“The flowers you delivered to Alicia yesterday were simply breathtaking (Alicia’s own words) and so thank you once again for a fantastic job.”

Thanks, Mark!

July 2007 – Jennifer H

Jennifer said this: “I’m really thrilled to have won – all of the flowers I’ve ordered in the past have been absolutely fantastic, I’m just so excited that I actually won!   It’s my parents’ wedding anniversary next month and I was planning on ordering them some flowers anyway so it’s perfect timing too! My Mom really loves roses and gerberas so I’ll probably get something bright and cheery along those lines! Thanks again!

Thanks, Jennifer!

June 2007 – Claire D

April 2007 – Estanis M from London

March 2007 – Danuta R

January 2007 – Matt H

And finally, from our first ever newsletter, we had the following:

Christmas Winners
Every time we send a newsletter, one of our subscribers gets a free order worth up to £50. As it’s Christmas, we got a bit carried away and decided to choose three winners this time round, just for the fun of it. Congratulations to this month’s winners:

So that’s the lot!  They really exist and they’re always very happy to win the prize.

If you want to sign up for the newsletter, click here (it’s free and there’s no obligation to buy).  You never know, you could be the next lucky winner; and if you’re not, you’ll just get exclusive discounts and other offers and news direct from Flowers HQ.  Right.  Enough of the sales talk.

Thanks for reading and thanks to all our winner for sending in their pictures!  Next stop: Mother’s Day!

Post from: Arena Flowers - Flower Delivery London & UK

Share This Post:

The Arena Weddings arm of Arena Flowers has been around for just over a year now, and what a better way to celebrate our first twelve months than to take some examples of our beautiful fresh wedding flowers on the road.

The enquiry from Marika, organiser of the Think Pink Wedding Show came late in the day last week to see whether Arena Flowers may be interested in exhibiting last minute. Apparently, a couple of other London florists had let her down at the eleventh hour, and the show was left conspicuously missing wedding flowers from the burgeoning list of exhibitors for the show in Raynes Park, south west London.

Our florists were more than happy to rise to the challenge, and Judith got her thinking cap on while I started knocking together some promotional literature. With the flowers arriving freshly picked from Holland very early Saturday morning; our wedding florists Judith, Andrzej and Paulina got to work at the crack of dawn to create not one but four beautiful wedding bouquets for the show, as well as three coordinating buttonholes, two table arrangements and a gorgeous cascading tall vase display.

Once completed, the next challenge was to very carefully pack the wedding flowers so they weren’t damaged in delivery. With two drivers and an anxious florist overseeing the operation, it was a real eye-opener to see that as much care and strategic planning go into the delivery as do with the actual creation of wedding flowers!

Leaving just after 9am, it was straight to Raynes Park in the van with our rather lovely driver Jacek who put up with me in the passenger seat as I tried to prepare best I could for the unknown! On the way through Barnes I spotted a heron stalking the Barn Elms football pitches, just a few feet from the busy thoroughfare – wasn’t expecting that…but it kind of reminded me of my mission – a lone stalker, drawing in those brides to my lair of sumptuous wedding flowers!

Met with a huge bottleneck queue of cars and vans outside the venue, we made the decision to quit the extraordinary wait and frantically carry our booty the final 100 yards, heave them up the vast stairs (no lift!!!) and set up our pitch for the day with just an hour to spare before the doors opened to the public.

As soon as the show started, the event was packed with excited brides-to-be, mums, fiancées, bridesmaids and other womenfolk eagerly sourcing wedding garb and accoutrements from start to finish. Located right next to the entertainment, we found ourselves in a prime spot and, although a little deafened by the steel band (!!), the Arena Weddings stand was kept populated by interested parties and potential clients throughout the day. There was also the odd glass of plonk to entice visitors to my side of the ‘pond’…later polished off by me and a few other dry-of-mouth wedding suppliers located nearby.

The event seemed to go quickly and I was particularly pleased with the interest our wedding flowers arrangements generated, especially as this was pretty much new territory for us and a few miles out from the comfort zone of Flowers HQ! With online enquiries already coming in off the back of our first event, I am confident that we may be returning to the London Wedding Show circuit again soon – but perhaps with a bit more advance notice next time!

Interestingly, there were two common questions asked by visitors to the show: ‘Are they real flowers?’ and ‘How can I keep my wedding flowers budget down?’. To answer the first question, yes – all our flowers are real (maybe some of our flowers look just too perfect!), fresh and – wherever possible – ethically sourced. As regards budgeting for your wedding flowers, that’s for my next blog post – coming soon!

The wedding flowers on display at the Think Pink Wedding show last Saturday were: Amnesia roses, Cool water roses, Schwarzwalder calla lilies bridal bouquet (from £65), guest table arrangement (from £50) and buttonhole (from £7.50); Cool water roses, Limbo roses, Sea holly / thistles bridal bouquet (from £65); Sweet Avalanche and Sea holly bridal bouquet (from £65) and buttonhole (£7.50); Orchid cascade bridal bouquet (from £120), vase arrangement (from £26) and buttonhole (£7.50); and large mixed vase display including while lilies, pink mini gerberas, sea holly, sweet avalanche roses, limbo roses, carnations, and completed with soft ruscus and bear grass (from £80 plus vase hire).

Click here for a quick movie of the Arena Flowers stand at the Think Pink Wedding Show

If you enjoyed this post, you may want to check out our recent blog post on Winter Wedding Flowers, or learn more about our team of dedicated Wedding Florists or perhaps see how Arena Weddings began, with Jackie’s original blog post!

Post from: Arena Flowers - Flower Delivery London & UK

Share This Post:

Following up from her previous well-received guest post, we asked Pascale, friend of Arena and online marketing guru, if there was another topic she fancied sharing her thoughts on.  Sure enough, there was.  So here’s a very interesting discussion of how the web and TV and other media are getting increasingly intertwined and changing the way clever marketers get us to buy from them.  It’s certainly given us some food for thought for various partnerships we’re currently negotiating.

Search doesn’t occur in a vacuum

It’s a very familiar concept for marketers that no marketing channel (offline or online) works independently from another.  Exposure to advertising in print, television and radio commonly results in online traffic and of course, online search.  Offline push, online pull.  A survey by iProspect, 2007 showed that 67% of respondents searched online as a direct result of exposure to an offline marketing channel.

Whilst the concept is familiar, the potential benefit of the search demand created by offline advertising isn’t always harnessed effectively online by marketing departments or agencies and it is worth considering search behaviour when engaging in any offline marketing.

Using search prompts in offline campaigns

Increasingly, companies and organisations recognise this relationship and attempt to guide the consumer by encouraging them to “search online for [brand/company/campaign]” within the advertising campaign, rather than listing a long and often forgettable URL or telephone number.  Government campaigns have been doing this for some time – for example, Direct.gov’s Act on Co2 campaign in 2007, in which consumers were prompted to “search online for ‘act on co2’” in all the offline media.

The public duly responded, and there was a large increase in searches for the term “act on co2” (below is a screen shot from ‘Google Insights for Search” showing search interest for ‘act for co2’ between October 2006 to Jan 2009).

The offline push was very clear, and the search demand it created was caught by presence of the direct.gov content in both the natural and paid search channels.

More recently, a new government initiative promoting healthier lifestyles “change4life” also has a search prompt in the offline campaigns “search online for ‘change4life’”.

This campaign, which will cost the UK tax payer £75m over the next three years, so far has less than optimised search engine results listings on Google, with no paid search ad shown at the time of writing (although competitors are showing for the term), and press articles ranking above the campaign content on the NHS.uk domain (content which looks unoptimised for natural search).

Furthermore, ambiguity has been introduced by the use of ‘4’ instead of ‘for’ in the search prompt.  Searching Google for ‘change for life’ (which has shown as great an increase as searches for ‘change4life’ according to Google trends), shows first results which look relevant but are actually entirely different websites, unrelated to the Department of Health campaign.

It is clearly worth ensuring that the search results shown for a search prompt reflect the messages and websites you want consumers to see, and that the PPC budget assigned stretches far enough.  Earlier this year, confusion abounded when Orange launched a huge re-branding campaign with “search for ‘i am’” featuring on TV, radio, print and outdoor ad copy – despite the site not ranking in the natural search space at all for such a generic term (8 months on, the site currently ranks 2nd in Google); quite a few negative press articles also surface for search variations such as “orange i am” and “i am orange”.  Additionally, there were many competitors bidding on the ‘i am’ search term hoping to piggyback onto Orange’s campaign and driving up Orange’s PPC costs significantly.

Searchers don’t necessarily search for product/ brand

Some advertising creates an online search response without necessarily prompting it as with the examples above.  The infamous drumming gorilla Cadbury’s advert can be seen to have prompted a massive search response in Google.  Interestingly, there appeared to be a greater increase in searches for the generic term ‘gorilla’ than there was for the ‘cadbury’s’.

We can’t necessarily assume the terms and words people will search for when finding out more about something they’ve seen in offline marketing.  Sometimes a consumer may recall a tag line, image or theme rather than a product, brand or company.  This is worth considering when bidding on terms or optimising content for search campaigns related to offline advertising – it is worth broadening target words related to the advert or campaign rather than specific products or names alone.

Another example is the British Heart Foundation’s 2 minute ad “Watch your own heart attack”.  It aired on the 10th of August with much publicity prior to launch, and the search response to this publicity on Google is evident below:

Again, a greater response can be seen for the more generic term ‘heart attack’ than ‘british heart foundation’.  The BHF website doesn’t rank in the top 10 for ‘heart attack’ in the natural listings, so with luck they had PPC advertising with very targeted ad copy ensuring that they caught all of the search demand they generated.

Increase search spend/efforts during times of offline activity

Search prompted by strategic offline advertising can put companies at a competitive advantage.  You may have noticed that in the UK, Famous Grouse whisky is only advertised around Christmas time, when sales of spirits increase.  This type of reminder may create more brand searches for Famous Grouse compared to competitors.  Below shows ‘ardbeg’ whisky search interest vs. ‘famous grouse’.  We can see that the search difference between ‘famous grouse’ at Christmas versus other times of the year relates closely to the TV advertising – Ardbeg whisky on the other hand remains more stable in terms of search over the same time period.  It is conceivable that the offline advertising is generating this search footfall and giving Famous Grouse a competitive advantage, at least online.

It would be wise to up-weight PPC or natural search push to correspond with the timing of strategic offline campaigns to catch all the extra search demand generated.  Although this seems a logical and intuitive way to operate, with many larger companies using different agencies and different departments to run their ad campaigns, often communication is lost or is weak.  A study by iProspect, 2008 shows that 45% of companies surveyed do not integrate offline with online marketing citing having different departments managing the different channels or not having considered it as some of the most common reasons for lack of integration.

7 Top Tips to Integrate Offline Marketing with Search:

Some of these examples allow us to draw up a list of guidelines to ensure you make the most of search demand you are generating offline:

1. Integrate campaigns by ensuring that the search marketing team are kept up to date about offline campaigns.  Offline advertising campaigns should ideally budget for PPC spend, especially if they are prompting online search.  For natural search, where visibility can take a long time to achieve, terms and language used in the offline campaign should be known well in advance of the start of the campaign.
2. Ensure that when prompting consumers to “search for [product/name/brand]” online, a) you have targeted PPC ad copy related to the offline campaign b) you rank in the natural search space for the term.  The more generic the term, the pricier the PPC will be and the harder it will be to rank naturally.
3. Broaden the search terms targeted to include tag lines, themes or characters used in the offline campaign.  Don’t assume consumers will remember the brand name or product name.
4. Minimise potential misspellings or ambiguity of search prompts in offline campaigns by choosing something simple (but not too generic) and ensure that you rank for keyword variations naturally as well as bidding on them with PPC.
5. Up-weight search spend and natural visibility focus for times when offline campaigns are live to ensure that you catch as much of the search demand you generate as possible.
6. Bear in mind that competition for the PPC cost may increase as opportunistic competitors may start bidding on prompted search terms.
7. Beware of wasteful PPC cost in response to an offline campaign.  A campaign which drives interest online could be costly in terms of PPC especially if the offline teasers don’t specify what the marketing is for.  An example would be Posterscope’s Prism Search Tool, a product for marketing professionals.  The marketing campaign – brightly coloured posters on the tube and billboards around London – showed the word “Ooghle” within a search bar with no further information to indicate what the product did or the target market. With such widespread marketing and a lack of consumer discrimination (and relatively low natural search visibility) the campaign would have drawn many non-marketing searchers; clicking on their PPC ads with no chance of converting.  Having the ads only run in marketing trade press would have been much more targeted without losing the strength of the point being made.

Post from: Arena Flowers - Flower Delivery London & UK

Share This Post:

Just three good reasons to mosey on down to the David Lloyd Health & Fitness Club in Raynes Park, South West London today (Saturday 24 January) where yours truly will be exhibiting the floral fineries of our rapidly growing wedding flowers arm Arena Weddings at the Wear It Pink Wedding Show.

On display will be some of Judith (one of our award-winning florists)’s beautiful floral work especially created for this very special wedding fair in aid of Breakthrough Breast Cancer. The arrangements have also been designed with seasonal, ethically sourced flowers and take into consideration today’s tough economic climate, which has had an impact on wedding budgets up and down the country this year.

We at Arena Flowers want to make sure every bride feels like a princess without breaking the bank on their wedding flowers, making us the first choice for wedding planners throughout London and the South East. So it’s no wonder we’re fast becoming one of Cosmo Bride’s favourite stockists!

And talking of princesses and the glossies, come along to the event and you will also get the chance to view a stunning private collection of vintage wedding dresses dating from Victorian times, including a sample from Princess Diana’s iconic wedding gown.

Come join the fun from 11am-4pm. Entry fee is just £1 – which goes direct to Breakthrough Breast Cancer – and kids go free, so no excuses if you’re in town!

Wear It Pink Wedding Show
David Lloyd Health & Fitness Club
Bushey Road,
Raynes Park
London SW20 8TE
Click for directions

Full report with piccies to be posted next week – but if you need an immediate wedding flower fix, check out this post, this post or even this post about sourcing flowers for gothic wedding bouquets. Bride-tastic!

Post from: Arena Flowers - Flower Delivery London & UK

Share This Post:

• Fancy a Twitter with Britney?

- The Sun, 10th January 2009

• How boring: Celebrities sign up to Twitter to reveal the most mundane aspect of their lives

- Daily Mail, 3rd January 2009

• Twitter set for its mainstream telly moment on Jonathan Ross’s comeback show

- Guardian, 7th January 2009

What started as a trickle at the end of last year has become a deluge in the New Year, with headlines in the most popular newspapers in the UK showing incontrovertibly that Twitter has moved into the UK mainstream this year and established itself as the papers’ latest web darling.  Their interest is doubtless due, at least in part, to celebrity “tweeters” – celebs sell newspapers, so the papers are going where the celebs are and trying to grab some “Twitter scoops”.

Recently Jemima Kiss, a prominent blogger and journalist, revealed Jonathan Ross’s intention to discuss the service with keen Twitterer and web aficionado Stephen Fry on his first show back from suspension.   Yesterday, the Times Online made a story out of another of Ross’s “tweets”, publishing an article about his “announcement” that he would be hosting this year’s Bafta Awards.  There’s no end of celeb twittering going on, so if you’ve always wanted to know what John Cleese had for breakfast or are desperate to learn how Lance Armstrong’s comeback is going then here’s your chance.

There have been a few “bah humbug” articles too (hey, this is the British media after all) – work place concerns focus on how Twitter may hinder productivity, whilst some media sources simply complain about the lack of juicy gossip from celebrity tweeters.

We twitter too.  So we figured we’d share some of our thoughts on Twitter and Web 2.0.  In 2007 we launched our blog with a post explaining why we would be blogging.  Basically, as a new business in the impersonal online world we felt the blog would help give us a more human a voice, would enable us to communicate more personally with our customers, and would allow us to share interesting or fun insights or snippets on flowers and the online world more generally.

Since we started blogging, the “Web 2.0” movement and the social web have expanded significantly, offering additional channels and tempos of communication to complement the “older” channels.  The most obvious change is that the flow of communication is no longer as one directional or contrived as it once was. New media, to differing extents, encourage a balanced and more frequent communication between businesses and customers / visitors.

The most important difference though, in our opinion, is that new media channels enable real time, easy going contact between parties in a way that has never been possible before.  Historically, interactions between a business and a customer have been about hard nosed selling by the business and the making of informed purchasing decisions by the customer.  Social media communications are, in most cases, far more laid back.  If old media channels are like a full on business meeting in the office, then Web 2.0 channels are more like the “getting to know you” drink in the pub afterwards.  Consequently, the conversations are sometimes utterly inane and pointless but it doesn’t really matter as there’s not so much pressure on the communication to deliver immediately or at all (at least not as far as we’re concerned).

Many prominent brands have embraced Web 2.0 channels, with varying degrees of success.  Some examples of doing it right:

• Last year the web world was abuzz with the news that Top Shop, one of the UK’s leading high street fashion retailers, was getting 5% of its online visitors from MySpace. (“But is it good traffic?”, mutters my inner marketeer);
• One famously early adopter of Twitter was the popular US-based shoe retailer Zappos. Of their 1600 odd employees, 453 of them are actively on Twitter listening, engaging and responding to customer concerns;
• US-based low cost carrier JetBlue is on Twitter and has earned kudos from customers as their Twitter responses are often faster than those their customer service team;
• More recently, Dell reported $1 million worth of sales from Twitter alone. Although this number is miniscule in comparison to Dell’s overall revenue, it does offer plenty of brand exposure (eg us writing about them here).

The intangible value social media can add to a business is thought to be high. Guy Kawasaki, an early exponent of evangelism marketing who, in his capacity as chief evangelist for Apple, was responsible for creating a number of passionate user-advocates for the Apple brand, describes Twitter as one of the best new marketing tools of the century.  Of course, PR departments of big companies always produce a lot of hot air about such trendy initiatives, trying to push how cutting edge and down with the kids their brand is, so any such figures or self-congratulatory back-slapping press releases should always be taken with a pinch of salt.

Speaking for Arena, we have seen real benefits from our blog, our Facebook application (Flowers & Fun) and from our Twitter feed, and all at low cost.  However, anyone who tells you these channels will change your business overnight is talking rubbish (and may be trying to sell you something you don’t need – caveat emptor!).  There may also be a danger that with more and more people engaging with such channels, that the value will drowned out by the additional noise.

Nonetheless, we think it’s clear that Web 2.0 and new media channels can undoubtedly add value in many ways to any sized business.  As well as being informative, engaging with social media can also be just plain fun, and even eye opening on occasion.  A lot of the things we’ve found out or leads that we’ve picked were totally unexpected or from left field, and that’s one of the most rewarding aspects of Twitter; such serendipity can’t, by definition, be planned or manufactured.  On which note, here’s a final example of the unpredictable path that twittering can take: Let’s all ‘sue Telegraph’, say Twitterers.

UPDATE: For those that live on the other side of the world, the point about Twitter having arrived was made a million times better than this post by the first pic of the Hudson River plane landing appearing first on Twitterpic.

Some Useful Twitter Resources:

• 10 ways to use Twitter to Promote you Business
• 17 Ways You Can Use Twitter: A Guide for Beginners, Marketers and Business Owners
• Guardian list of Celebrities on Twitter (constantly updated)
• How companies use Twitter to bolster their brands
• How to use Twitter to grow your business
• List of Businesses on Twitter
• List of UK Businesses on Twitter
• Why Twitter should matter to you: Twustomer service edition

If you liked this post, you may enjoy reading our other posts on Social Media: Flowers in the Social Networking Arena & Send Free Flowers on Facebook.

Post from: Arena Flowers - Flower Delivery London & UK

Share This Post:

Unless you’re  living in a cave somewhere, you’ll know it’s Christmas very soon indeed – Google has even added holly and sweets to the ads shown for Christmas related searches.  It’s very busy at Flowers HQ right now too, as well wishers send flowers home to loved ones.  We’ve even sold out of Father Christmases (though Steve got all sentimental and decided to keep the last one as a memento).

Given the economic environment and the weakness of the pound, we’ve spent an awful lot of our time recently trimming unnecessary costs to make sure that our customers continue to get great value for money out of every pound they spend with Arena.  We try very hard to deliver a great product at a great price and we hate wasting money.

One example of where we’ve trimmed cost is in our marketing.  Like other online businesses, we always look at our marketing channels in peak periods to see how we can bring in new visitors and orders cost effectively.  This Christmas we have been amazed how much some of our competitors are willing to pay to buy traffic and orders, especially given it’s “credit crunch Christmas”.  One might expect marketing budgets to go down in this environment, but in fact some companies are being extremely aggressive and, frankly, throwing their customers’ money away.  Who pays? The customer of course, with a substandard product being delivered as there’s no money left for flowers because of the inflated marketing spend.

Here’s a concrete example from one of our competitors, to illustrate the crazy commission deals currently on offer and some of the tricks they’re using to try to claw some of that cost back.

Here’s what they are paying for their affiliate marketing:

• 20% commission to affiliates who send them orders
• 6% to the affiliate network
• 10% off for the customer, through a promo code given out by the affiliates

That’s 26% marketing cost plus a 10% reduction in sale value.  But that’s not all.  The commissions are all payable on the gross sale price, including VAT.  But sales are only recognised ex VAT.  So for a bouquet listed at £40 on their website:

• The gross value of the sale is actually recognised at £36 because of the 10% discount
• The net value of the order once VAT is deducted is £31.31 (£36/1.15)
• Marketing cost is £9.36 (26% of £36), fully 30% of the ex VAT value of the order!

Believe it or not, it gets worse.  Given this competitor runs a relay service, there will also be a hefty relay charge in there, at least 20% but probably more, taken by the competitor as a fee for passing the order to a local florist.  I don’t know the exact relay cost % because we don’t use the relay model, as we believe it’s a waste of money to pay middle men plus relay means you can’t control the quality of the end product.

But I digress.  The point is that with this huge marketing spend and the relay fees, over 50% of a customer’s money is spent on, erm, not a lot! With 10% knocked off the overall sale value of the bouquet anyway, one has to wonder how much is actually spent on  flowers and floristry once the order makes its way to the local florist.  It must be virtually nothing, otherwise this would be a heavily loss making offer.

Or so it would seem. But the competitor has pulled some pretty Machiavellian tricks to mitigate the impact of its marketing largesse.  For example, there’s a £4 standard delivery charge on top of the bouquet price.  The 10% discount doesn’t apply to the £4 delivery charge, only the £40 bouquet price.  There’s also a minimum £40 spend (excluding delivery charge) for the promo code to work.  Yet the lowest priced bouquet over £40 is actually priced at £44 so if your original budget was £40, after the promo code you’re back to where you started (plus have the £4 delivery charge on top). Try to find a bouquet at £40, £41, £42 or even £43 and you’ll come up empty handed.

We saw this offer and didn’t even consider matching it.  Our marketing spend percentage is way way lower than those figures as we like to put our customers’ money into flowers rather than to blow it on middle men.  We don’t sneak a delivery charge in (we offer free standard delivery) and we don’t use clever tricks to get ourselves out of tight spots created by our marketing, as we think that that will just annoy visitors and customers.  If people want to get really good discounts and special offers from Arena, the only real way to do so is to sign up to our free newsletters or to become an Arena Flowers follower on Facebook.

I guess the fact that we refuse to offer such sky high commissions means that less affiliates will want to promote Arena and we’ll grow a little more slowly.  But on the other hand, we’ll deliver a high quality product with transparent pricing and we’ll wow and retain our customers (hopefully) so that the next time they want to send flowers they’ll (hopefully) come straight back to us. And for that second order, we’ll spend exactly nothing on marketing and our customer will continue to get great service from us because we haven’t blown all their money on relay fees and marketing – everyone’s a winner.  With 40% of our orders coming from repeat customers we feel that this strategy is working out pretty well so far and that’s exactly what we’re going to keep on doing.

On that note, “Bah, Humbug!” to wasting customer’s hard earned money, thanks to all our readers and customers, and Merry Christmas to everyone!

PS If you want to send Christmas flowers with no hidden costs or jiggery pokery, click here. :)

If you enjoyed this post, you may also enjoy our other marketing posts.

Post from: Arena Flowers - Flower Delivery London & UK

Share This Post:

Yesterday was a busy day for anti-fraud newsflow plus some good old fashioned web fear mongering.  Don’t get me wrong – web fraud happens and needs to be combated but there is often something shrill and hysterical about the reporting of online fraud, especially in the UK.  “Everyone PANIC!” would seem to summarise the editorial style of quite a few media channels.  Before people lock up their PCs or throw them in the river, they should remember that they are significantly more likely to be a victim of crime and fraud when venturing into the real world than they are when venturing online.

There’s no doubt that education is key in battling web spam and other forms of online fraud and Get Safe Online in particular does a fantastic job of putting out clear, moderate and easy to understand information on how to take care of oneself online.  Common sense recommendations include running regular updates for your browser and operating system, having up to date antivirus, antispyware and firewall software and not responding to unsolicited emails or giving away key personal and account information online.  Often, sites like Get Safe Online recommend third party software vendors, such as AVG or McAffee.

Understandably, reputable online businesses recognise the challenge of building trust and at Arena we work very hard to address potential trust concerns of visitors, such as payment methods and checkout integrity, site security, quality / value / freshness of product, and data protection and privacy policies.  After all, if we’re asking customers to hand over their money without ever having met us face to face, then they will need to be convinced that we are who we say we are and that we’ll deliver on our promises.  We try as much as we can to be clear and transparent about what we do (posting to our blog regularly is part of that…I hope it’s clear that this post isn’t being written by a scammer in Eastern Europe!).  The key is not to slip up as, as they say, “trust is hard to win and very easy to lose”.  Once you have it, do your very best to hold on to it.

It’s therefore incredibly frustrating when a lot of hard work is potentially undone by a company that really should know better – MessageLabs (who were, incidentally, purchased for a whopping $700m by Symantec yesterday).  To explain, last week we sent out one of our regular marketing emails to our subscriber base.  So far so good.  But soon after the send, we started receiving emails from concerned customers.  They had received the following email from their mail client, Message Labs:

Subject: WARNING. Someone tried to send you a potential virus or unauthorised code

Body of email included the following: The MessageLabs Email Security System discovered a possible virus or unauthorised code (such as a Trojan) in an email sent to you.

Possible MalWare ‘Exploit/Phishing-paypal-1054′ found in ’7782603_2X_PM3_EMQ_MH__message.htm’. Heuristics score: 202

Now, I don’t know what you think, but if I received an email like that from my firewall supplier, I’d look very hard at any future communications from Arena and quite possibly unsubscribe immediately. After all, MessageLabs are a $700m company so they must be right, yeah?  Surely, they wouldn’t send out an email that slams a genuine business’s legitimate, opt-in marketing activity so thunderously by mistake?  Big boys like MessageLabs are bound to have complicated checks and balances in place to avoid accidentally torpedoing the legitimate marketing efforts of other organisations.  A web security firm in particular would understand the importance of online reputation and the hard work that goes into building trust.  And in any case, Arena has been sending regular marketing emails every other week for over two years, so no doubt MessageLabs would be able to use characteristics of our mail sends, such as previous send frequency, an unchanged IP address, subject lines etc etc to double check the validity of the send.

Nope.  It was a complete, 100% misdiagnosis by MessageLabs, as they subsequently confirmed.  We learnt that the reason that our email got hammered is that we put the word “PayPal” into the subject line yet we are not PayPal.  Blimey.  Sophisticated stuff.  We had PayPal in our subject line to let our customers know that they could win £10k cash if they paid for any order with PayPal during PayPal’s very generous 10th birthday promotion.

Obviously, customers of large online companies and banks, such as PayPal, can be targeted by spoof emails. However, our marketing email prior to this email also had PayPal in the subject line and email body and there was no backlash.  Also, I find it hard to understand how the word PayPal appearing in our mail can lead someone to imply we’re sending “viruses or unauthorised code”.  A virus would typically be an attachment of some kind, not a word in a subject line. I feel bad for PayPal too – we get way way more fraud from people who pay with credit cards than we do from people who pay with PayPal.  Fraud on orders paid with PayPal is virtually nil.  We much prefer people to pay with PayPal.

One of the first emails we received was in fact from a MessageLabs sales rep (who’d previously bought from Arena and who’d therefore received the MessageLabs warning email direct). His mail:

Please remove me from all your mailing list right away as you are sending viruses.
I can assist you with possible solutions however I was unable to reach your IT department.
MessageLabs Anti-virus solution has a SLA of 100% protection from all known and unknown viruses, phishing, trojans and other forms of malware.

http://www.messagelabs.co.uk/products/

Thank you

10/10 for being a pushy sales rep but frankly this mail was not terribly well received as you can imagine.  You wouldn’t want this guy consoling you if you broke up with your partner. “I’m afraid you’ve been dumped but I’m a pimp – have you considered paying for sex?”.  You’d then be even more upset when you found out that it was this guy that had caused the break up with your partner in the first place.

We also noted that, unlike the careful wording of the automated email sent by MessageLabs’ system, his email did not talk about “possible” viruses but came straight out and said “you are sending viruses” which was patently untrue. A rather terse email exchange followed, as you might expect, though not litigation as might have been the case with our American cousins (we’re too British for that).

In any case, I eventually spoke to the UK’s head of corporate sales who unsurprisingly was more reasonable and sort of / nearly / just about apologetic (although he too did suggest we bought their software, admittedly more tongue in cheek that his sales chasing colleague).  He gave me some spiel about how great MessageLabs is and how they use  complicated predictive algorithms to filter mail which all sounded good but didn’t stand up very well to “very nice, but it was just the word PayPal in the subject line that triggered this mess and you misdiagnosed it as a virus anyway”.

The frustrating thing about this is that MessageLabs has several million installed users in the UK, particularly in big, wealthy organisations, such as the government and banks etc.  These are obviously valuable potential customers and exactly the kind of people we’d love to retain.  Unfortunately we have no way of knowing how many such customers have now had their hard won trust in Arena dented or destroyed by MessageLabs’ misdiagnosis and there is no real way for us to fix this (bar writing this cathartic blog post!).  The chap at MessageLabs said “Sorry” but it’s not going to make any difference.  It’s clearly no coincidence that this email performed far worse than any other we’ve ever sent; it can realistically only be down to our MessageLabs mishap.

Maybe to add insult to injury MessageLabs will read this post and then use some of their freshly coined $700m to blast us right off the face of the earth and have done with it.  Ah well, you live and learn.  They didn’t do it on purpose but it certainly hurt.  I guess no matter how careful you are, there will always factors beyond your control, coming from any and all directions, that might disrupt your business.  The best laid plans of mice and men and all that…

Update: Following the post, we were featured on Mail on Sunday and other popular news channels. Read Mail on Sunday’s article on Arena Flowers here. The Register, one of the UK’s leading technology publishers picked up on our concerns and featured an article about Arena Flowers here. The article also featured on Softpedia, a leading technology related online publisher. Read the article on Arena Flowers here.

Post from: Arena Flowers - Flower Delivery London & UK

Share This Post: