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Two years ago Vanessa Taylor left her high profile position with HSBC. Today, she is running a successful and rapidly growing e-commerce business that she set up from scratch with no previous experience in direct commerce.
What’s even more noteworthy is that she chose to enter a market which appears to be highly competitive. Just look up ‘Wedding Services’ in a telephone directory or via Google and you will be overwhelmed with the variety of services and choice of suppliers.
So why did she choose this sector and what have been the secrets of her success?
“I left full time employment to have a baby” says Vanessa, “and I wanted to do something that would fit in with the demands of being a mother. To begin with I researched the possibility of launching a baby goods web site but soon realised that there was huge competition and little that I could do to create any form of differentiation. I then turned my attention to the wedding market and attended a few local exhibitions. What became clear from my market research was that not many businesses offered wedding gifts and there was not much variety on offer.”
An intense period of product research and supplier sourcing was then undertaken to find new, unusual and appealing wedding gifts which would create a niche position for the eventual launch of www.thebridalgiftbox.com (BGB)
At the same time Vanessa realised that she would need to find more than just a web builder. As she comments, ”Although I was confident about the business concept, I had absolutely no experience of building or maintaining a web site – so I looked for a company with whom I could build a partnership. I eventually chose Web-Feet because they offered both breadth and depth of service and equally important, I felt I could trust them with my fledgling business.”
Apart from the complexities of the web build, the most pressing concern was how to start generating enquiries from any of the 240,000 weddings that take place in the UK each year and then how to take a small slice of the typical budget of £25,000. Even more challenging was to ensure that the site took advantage of the main wedding season between April – September.
Web-Feet advocated a twin-track approach. To begin with they advised BGB to undertake a ‘Pay per click’ (PPC) advertising campaign via Google to start generating enquiries and building up awareness. At the same time, they also needed to invest in Search Engine optimisation which was likely to take more than a year to start producing significant results – the aim being to eventually switch off or reduce PPC campaigns.
On top of these plans BGB continued to experiment with conventional sales and marketing activities such as attendance at local and national wedding exhibitions plus directory advertising in several monthly wedding magazines. However, most of the marketing budget was dedicated towards search marketing.
Initial research undertaken by Web-Feet revealed that there were about forty keywords which required initial testing. Subsequent response analysis enabled BGB to narrow this down to about ten keywords which produced the best returns for the monthly budget of £275. Even then, the response was sufficient for the campaign to only run during the most effective trading hours of the day.
Even though conversion levels from these responses were above the industry norm it meant that the cost of each order from PPC was in the range of £10-£15 which made a substantial dent in profitability. As Vanessa comments, “In the early stages the PPC campaign was only generating a small amount of profit. At the time I thought it was a waste of time but it was the only way I could start build traffic and awareness. In hindsight it was very valuable in kick starting the business - it provided immediate feedback on the successes and failures of different product lines, it provided data for the analysis of site traffic which helped identify usability issues - and the continuous receipt of orders meant that we quickly learnt the pitfalls of fulfilment.”
During this period, orders from search engine optimisation were slowly beginning to build. From the outset, Web-Feet had ensured that ‘best practice’ was applied to the design, text and links of the site so that it improved rankings for relevant keywords and phrases. As Andy Nolan, Technical Director, Web-Feet comments, “Successful optimisation is about doing a combination of things correctly. There is no magic button that produces a top ten listing. However, there are some fundamentals which are important such as ensuring that there is sufficient keyworded text on the site and the inclusion of a site map to ensure that search engines can navigate around the entire content of the site”
Andy adds, “It’s also about ensuring that you keep abreast of any changes that search engines make to their algorithms which check for the relevancy between the search phrase and the content of each web site. So there is a vast difference between how you would construct a site two years ago and how you would construct a site today”.
GRAPH OF PPC VS NATURAL RESULTS
At the close of the peak wedding season in September ‘07 the PPC campaign was finally closed after fourteen months and the site became entirely reliant on natural search rankings. Just four months later, the site recorded their highest ever number of unique visitors and page impressions, a healthy sign that trading volumes for 2008 are likely to exceed expectations.
In addition, two years of trading experience had enabled BGB to widen its range and expand those product lines which were successful - the number of products sold on the site was increased from 250 to 1200.
As Vanessa comments, “Natural optimisation is absolutely vital for the long term health of any direct commerce business but PPC can play a valuable role in the early stages of a start up”.
So what’s next for the development of the business?
As Vanessa comments, “It takes a long time for search engine optimisation to produce results and it is therefore tempting not to make changes for fear of undoing what’s working well. It’s certainly very easy to ruin an online business without knowing why. Nevertheless, there are several areas that will be evaluated which will either improve our natural research results or help customers buy more easily – for example site flattening, dedicated meta tags, improvements to navigation, drop down menus and text descriptors for product images.”
“The other critical area for improvement is data capture. Currently we only hold name, address and order history and yet there is significant potential from capturing wedding dates, establishing how they heard of the site plus rewards for providing referrals. We may also look at generating advertising revenues from compiling a directory of complimentary wedding services.”
From a standing start The Bridal Gift Box has overcome the difficulties and challenges of the first two years of trading and is now poised for further growth. Vanessa concludes, “I’m really excited about the future potential of the business and couldn’t have achieved this without Web-Feet’s help”.
It’s easy to fail at direct commerce but - from a standing start - here’s a wedding business built on firm foundations that’s unlikely to be dissolved! 
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