Arena Flowers

Arena Flowers.com
Will Wynne Managing Director
So we have a variety of different websites primarily focusing on flowers and gifts and
delivery in the UK and across Europe.
Expansion
One of the reasons we went into Europe is to build a natural hedge. What I mean by that
is that we built our European websites and then started taking money in euros so that
we can then pay our bills in euros and then you don’t have any foreign exchange exposure.
So that’s one reason - literally a kind of defensive measure against currency fluctuations.
We pride ourselves on having, you know, very very good contacts with all the growers and
and the whole flower growing world in Holland. It wasn’t such a difficult move to then say
OK, you know what, we can address this market, this market from this location - replicating
the model that we had done in the UK. The UK is one of the most competitive flower markets
in the whole world. If we’ve come from nowhere and become the sort of third biggest flower
business in the UK pretty much overnight we can replicate that more easily in Europe.
Using AdWords and also more generic SEO techniques, you can really get traction very quickly and
you can test the market very quickly so we were able for instance to just put some AdWords
up and just see what the volume of search was for certain searches. You can get huge
reach without huge effort.
Challenges
We were concerned - are the products we have
for the UK going to work in Holland? Do our tastes differ? So your selling flowers to
the Dutch, it’s like selling coals to Newcastle but, with some tinkering in the offer and
the pricing and things like whether you show the VAT inclusive or not -some of our websites
have the VAT included some don’t. This last weekend was Mother’s Day for most of the
world and our conversion rate on our Dutch site was higher then it was on our UK site.
Tools for Expansion
Probably the easiest part of us rolling out internationally was doing AdWords. You can
run the whole lot just from one central location, it’s very easy. We use conversion tracking
to make sure that we are profitable, absolutely on everything. We didn’t have conversion
tracking right at the start in 2006 and once we implemented it, it saved us insane amounts of money.
Results
So we have 3 international websites now, we’ll have another 2 within a couple of months,
it’s not bad going, it’s basically 12 months. But the European operation has been
seriously helpful revenue coming in to support the business. It’s not just like pocket
money, it’s crucial to us, cause in this difficult environment having diversified revenue
streams in different economies and whatever is really really helpful.
For more on how Adwords can help your business go global, please visit www.google.com/adwords/globaladvertiser