How to open a flower shop? Case: Wholesale of flowers (B2B) Target flowers

Hello, I think many have already noticed that I am not a special fan of writing cases, but my colleagues are expecting this case from me.
I do not know who recommended me as a specialist to this customer, but once they recommended me, you need to help the person. Project:- Wholesale of flowers
Test budget- 3000 rubles (it was determined by me personally)
GEO- Kazan, Yoshkar - Ola, Nizhny, Cheboksary, Ulyanovsk
Goals- Search and attraction of new clients Result:

• 205 subscribers for 2084 rubles - the average price of a subscriber 10.1 ruble
• At the moment already 11 customers out of 42 processed (some of the potential customers are outside the delivery radius, but this is a matter of time)
• Current customer price 190 rubles (users are processed, the list of clients grows)

Search center

The customer provided a list of groups that, in his opinion, were direct competitors.
After analyzing the customer's community, which developed exclusively by white methods, as well as the groups of competitors provided, I expanded the list of competing groups.
The analysis of the groups was carried out through the tab "Groups where there is a target audience" with subsequent filtering by keywords.

The customer also identified 3 segments of the central unit:
1.the owners of the flower business
2.wedding agencies
3.Agencies for organizing corporate events

Analyzing the groups, I have identified one more segment - florists.

The story of how I fought with the side format and he beat me

The results above are indicated without taking into account the RC in the side format

1085 rubles were spent on the side format, while 10 subscribers were received - 108 rubles per subscriber is somehow expensive, unfortunately some of my records were lost due to the unforeseen death of the hard disk, below I will briefly describe what was done and what did not work no result on side-by-side format.
1. Targeting group administrators for selling flowers did not bring any positive result (in the end you will find out why)
2. The target for the administrators of the floristry groups gave exactly the same result as in the first case - i.e. null
3. Target for subscribers of 4 or more flower sales groups, as well as for an active audience in intersecting with business groups - 0
4. Target commentators - result 0
5. The target for groups of competitors (specifically for groups) gave these 10 users, after analyzing which I further expanded the list of competitors.

Here I want to note one nuance that I had to remove the geo settings, because the samples turned out to be insignificant, the database collected by various methods was only 76 people from this region, geo was set in the advertising office.

So where did the 190 rubles clients come from?

Every week in the group there was a post with current proposals for the week:

Based on the results of the bitter experience of the side format, I understood perfectly well that the only thing that gives at least some result is the audience of competitors, especially since I was able to significantly expand the list of groups of competitors.

Now many will ask themselves why it was impossible to parse the groups for the corresponding request "Wholesale flowers" and manually filter them, but based on my practice, I noticed that the groups found through the "Groups with target audience" tab are much more effective.

When applying the specified geoparameters, I again faced the problem of a small sample, after an hour of advertising, which stood in one place, I removed the restrictions on geo, expanding the RK to the whole mother Russia.

In my case, the geo was determined by the groups of competitors themselves, tk. the groups affecting the given region were taken into account.

Result of 1st post:
51 subscribers for 331 rubles - 6.5 per subscriber
Price was viewed by 450 people, downloaded by 27.

I want to note that the statistics of the promo post itself is significantly different from the real one, based on its data only 30 users entered the group, but since there are no other sources of traffic in the group, the real result is as follows:
On May 3, 36 subscribers and on May 4, 15, which totaled 51 subscribers, I repeat, there are no other sources of traffic in the group, the natural increase is zero.

And the post statistics:After analyzing the newcomers, I found a few more new competing groups and added to my gold list.

A subsequent post with current offers gave us 52 subscribers at a price of 9.8 rubles, 430 viewed the price, 22 downloaded.

In addition to the post with relevant offers, there were posts with promotions that did not go too far

Subscription price 20 rublesANDSubscription price 23 rubles
Now there is a tendency to an increase in the price of a subscription, the last post I set up for new members of these communities, which slightly reduced the cost of a subscription, to 8.5 rubles, but the flow of 10 people dropped significantly.

Unfortunately, I cannot use promo posts for other segments of the central office with targeted messages, for example, for the same florists or wedding agencies. the customer does not want to compete with his retail customers.

I want to pay special attention to the "Contacts" parser (administrators), on which quite a lot of novice specialists are pinning their hopes, working with the b2b market, but they end up in a pitfall.

This scraper works very well in small businesses, where the owner, sales manager and cleaner are one person, but in large companies in the administrators section, as a rule, sales managers are indicated for whom your offer will not be interesting.

Promotion of the flower workshop "Pansies" in Bugulma.

About the project:

The flower workshop "Pansies" was opened in Bugulma on May 2, 2017. The workshop was opened by young and ambitious guys, despite the fact that the town is not big and there is high competition. The guys made an original renovation of the premises with their own hands, having a small area of ​​the premises. It turned out to create a cozy, in an amicable home atmosphere of the workshop.

Task:

• To make the flower workshop "Pansy" as recognizable and popular as possible in
  Bugulma;
• Increase sales through public VK;
• Increase the number of subscribers to the public.
• Bring the store's income to a plus (at least small).

The target audience:

From my personal experience in other projects related to the flower business, the main target audience is:

1. Relatives of the birthday boy (s)

   Here you can divide into several segments:

   • Girls who are in a relationship with birthday people
   • Men who are in a relationship with birthday girls
   • Birthday (anniversary) Mom
   • Birthday (anniversary) of the Pope
   • Birthday (anniversary) of mother-in-law, father-in-law, nephew (s), etc.

2. Brides

3. Parents' committee (before certain holidays)

4. Men in the candy-bouquet period

5. Competitor audience.

But in this case, I will not talk about it!

Bugulma is a small town in the Republic of Tatarstan and it was enough for me to tune in to GEO and exclude the age of up to 16 and after 60.
Under 16 - most of them are insolvent, after 60 they are inactive on social networks.
The budget was replenished gradually per week by 1000 rubles (all the guys spent on opening and purchasing goods), so I could not divide the audience into each post by gender, age and site. I'll tell you about the rest of the settings later.

Budget:

5000 rubles (as of 22.05, 2026 rubles were mastered)

Work progress:

Buying bouquets is usually either pre-planned or unpredictable depending on the situation. Since in this case we did not highlight the segments, it was decided to launch promo posts with direct sales texts.

The texts and photos of the ads that were used in the advertisement of this flower shop. The advertising campaign is placed from top to bottom. The first is the last by launch date.

Results:

For the period 02.05 to 22.05 we received:
- 263 subscribers
- 61 orders, average bill 1500 rubles.
Only orders received via "community messages" were taken into account.

As a result, 91,500 rubles were earned, having spent 2026 rubles. for advertising

The case was dismantled in this period, because graduation and last calls will go further (there will be a lot of orders).

All settings:

Thank you for the attention!

.
Subject: online store of flowers and plants.
2 months budget: UAH 27,000 (including agency fees).
Promotion period: 1.01. — 28.02.2014
Region: Ukraine.

This client has been working with us for 2 years on the SEO-promotion scheme with a monthly fee. Then in 2013 he decided to promote himself on his own. In 2014 he turned to us again. The service of SEO-promotion with pay-per-traffic was offered, which he liked.

What goals have been set?

1. Increase in traffic to the site.
2. Increase in the number of conversions.

What have we done to achieve our goals?

For large projects, an especially important stage is internal optimization. To bring the site in line with the recommendations of search engines, an SEO audit of the site was carried out. With the help of Netpeak Spider, as the main tool for developing audit, the following was done:

• errors and broken links were found;
• fixed wrong redirects;
• found and fixed duplicates of title, description, keywords.

The quick implementation of our recommendations ensured that the result was visible from the very beginning of the project. The most important initial technical recommendations were related to the uniqueization of landing pages on the site. Simply put - work was done with duplicate pages and site indexing.

An important point in working on this project is the constant optimization of images.

Images are a significant part of the site's content. There are about 16,000 of them - and this is an excellent resource for getting targeted traffic.

Assignment of unique alt and title meta tags, optimization of sizes and compilation of a competent sitemap for sitemap.xml images gave a positive additional growth in traffic.

What will we continue to do?

At the moment, intensive work is underway on the semantic markup of landing pages (I already wrote on this topic once) to increase the CTR of pages, since the main KPI indicators directly depend on this. The semantic core of this project is constantly updated due to our service Serpstat (ex. Promoter). The collected queries will be used in our "smart script" of internal linking in order to optimize the distribution of PageRank across the landing pages of the site in the future and increase the relevance of phrases.

What results have we achieved

The seasonality factor is not taken into account in the results, since we are comparing the same time intervals for 2013 and 2014.

1. Growth of non-branded traffic by 60.82%:

2. Growth of non-branded traffic transactions by 17.25%:

Dynamics of website traffic from search engines since the start of promotion (from December 19, 2013). Data from the client's personal account:

All information is provided without taking into account phone calls. E-commerce data from Google Analytics:

Average margin for all product groups according to customer data: 25%;
Income from Google Analytics in 2 months: UAH 311,003;
Gross profit for 2 months: 311003 UAH * 0.25 = 77 750.75 UAH;
Promotion costs: UAH 27,000;
ROMI (Return on Marketing Investment)= ((Income × Margin) - Client's expenses) / Client's expenses = ((311,003 UAH × 25%) - 27,000 UAH) / 27,000 UAH = 187% (for 2 months).

The average conversion rate for non-branded search traffic was 0.96%, the average check was UAH 244.79. We project a 20% increase in search traffic and transactions over the next three months. Perhaps someone will think that ROMI (Return on Marketing Investment) 187% is not the best indicator, but for this project it is still ahead!

Where can you get chamomile in May if they are not yet blooming in your area? How to play the role of a stepdaughter who went in search of snowdrops in winter, and do it so that the client was satisfied with the delivery and freshness of the flowers? Sergey Semyonov, the founder and CEO of the online store and retail chain, told how the story of the creation of an unusual project began. Megaflowers has been on the market for almost 12 years, but customer service standards are still firm and consistent with those adopted almost a decade ago. The entrepreneur shared his secrets of success with our publication.

When it is beneficial to be romantic

The idea of ​​creating a store appeared in 2005. Pushed to engage in his own project of its author events from his personal life.

Sergey Semenov: “My beloved girl went on a business trip to Novosibirsk, and I wanted to congratulate her. Considering that this was 2005, when there was, to put it mildly, no Internet penetration, and there were almost no online stores in Russia, I had to think about how to do it. As a result, I found a company that had a website and ordered flowers delivery on her birthday directly to the locomotive. A few days later she came back with a bouquet. Then the idea arose. My friend and I have been discussing for several days that we could try to make a similar flower delivery service. "

Investments in opening an online store were just ridiculous - Sergey needed 1000 rubles to buy two books: one on php programming, and the other on marketing and website design. As Sergey himself admits, he never took loans: neither at the start of his project, nor after.

Sergey Semenov: “The next step was to register a domain name and rent space to host the site. It is unbelievable even for today - the first version of the site was launched in 14 days. The site offered four types of bouquets that could be bought. We photographed them in some flower stall and posted them on the so-called site. In addition, we organized a bilingual call center ”.

The development of the project was helped by the fact that the whole business is quite standardized, so it turned out to be not so difficult to open a store, subject to the main stages.

First order

The future Megaflowers received his first order 5 days after the launch of the site. Moreover, it was not a simple order, problems with the implementation of which then could arise even for a store with extensive experience.

Sergey Semenov: “The first client was at the end of May 2005. The first phone call rang, and my friend picked up the phone and said: “Flower delivery. Hello". The young man ordered chamomile! A-ah-ah! Where can I get them ?! Running through salons and flower shops for half a day, I could not find anything. And - lo and behold! Desperate and realizing that I will have to call the client and refuse him delivery or agree on a replacement, walking along the sidewalk, I notice a lonely grandmother who is sitting and selling a bouquet of daisies! "

Later, Sergei, who played the role of a courier, found out that the girl who received the daisies had lost an argument with her boyfriend. She argued that it was impossible to find such flowers in May! But, as it turned out, nothing is impossible for young entrepreneurs.

Sergey Semenov: “Perhaps we have connected the first two hearts. The understanding that we are working in an unrealistically emotional market was from the first order. There can be no chance of error. Service has become the main value of our two-person company. Delicacy, a benevolent desire to help in matters not even related to flower delivery was at the head. "

Each feedback that the creators of the project received was more expensive for them than the payment that came for completing the order. The desire to please the client, to make him satisfied with the service, pushed for development and improvement.

Realized for two

From the very first days of the online store, only two people worked in it: Sergei himself and his friend, chained to a hospital bed. Each of the project participants performed several duties at once, and sometimes they had to work almost 24 hours a day.

Sergey Semenov: “My friend had a disability group, and this idea with flowers, its implementation was an important event in my life for him and me. We could talk all night long about our project and think about what would happen to it next, what could be done even better, how to increase confidence in the online store so that customers would not be afraid to pay for orders, this was a very serious barrier at that time. We decided at all costs to provide our clients with an unrealistic level of service and product quality. It was then that we formed reinforced concrete values ​​for ourselves. "

Colleagues decided that the product should be perfect the first time, both the goods being delivered and the delivery service itself. The freshest flowers, 100% correspondence of the ordered goods to the picture on the website, punctuality and neatness of the courier, convenience of choice and variety of payments. To make it easier for customers to pay for an order made, friends added back in 2005 the ability to pay through PAYPAL. It was convenient not only for the creators of the store, but also became a kind of guarantee for the provision of services for the buyer. In the event of non-compliance with any standards or the slightest dissatisfaction, the customer was expected to return the full amount and excuse delivery at our expense.

Another caveat: Sergey and his friend could make a redelivery, even if the clients decided to complain in a few days about the faded flowers. This attitude to the work performed was explained by the fact that reputation was more important, and the most important was that a person trusts the company with the most intimate moments of his life, sometimes fateful.

Sergei Semenov: “There can be no right for a mistake with such an awareness of the matter. There were no thoughts about money, about profitability at that time, there was drive and enthusiasm. We wanted to expand the offer of the web-showcase, include additional products in the assortment, improve the service, master new promotion tools. "

Meanwhile, the flower delivery project existed as well for two and still on enthusiasm to give emotions. Gradually, the main requirements for the project from the side of clients emerged. Sergei was still a courier, and Sasha was an operator, a receiver of orders and a kind of navigator, despite the fact that he was bedridden. Friends have been inspired by the project for a long time and have been constantly improving it. The number of orders grew, but slowly. However, in the form in which it was, the project brought in a negligible amount - the income turned out to be just over 5,000 rubles a month. And even this money young people used to improve and develop their store.

How the author of an online store was known as a scammer

There were black stripes in the history of the project. Once the creators of the project decided to say goodbye to it and put it up for sale.

Sergey Semenov: “A year after the opening, we decided to sell the business. We presented the project to several companies that sold flowers through offline stores. For a specialized company whose main activity is flowers, such a project could pay off in less than six months. "

The cost of the proposed project was also low - only $ 5,000. However, sellers faced misunderstandings from buyers. Some even dared to accuse Sergei of cheating and fraud. But whatever happens is for the best. Perhaps, if the author of the idea managed to sell his still crude project, then there would not be such a store now as Megaflowers. Or maybe it would have existed in a completely different format.

Sergey Semenov: “The potential buyers were retailers. But they were very far from the Internet and the promotion of goods through online commerce. You should have seen their surprised faces and round eyes when we presented the project. Their faces reflected a complete lack of understanding of what was happening, no one believed that the project was working and could pay off in a few months. I was accused of hack-work and was told that they would not play with these toys ”.

The most interesting thing is that now those companies that seemed then unsinkable giants of the flower business no longer exist. They have been strong players in the market for many years, but even their experience and knowledge, erudition and erudition mean little if there is no practical acumen. The founders of those companies did not look to the future, did not see the prospects and future changes, so they had to leave the business.

First difficulties and purchases

In the format of a small online store with its own call center, the future Megaflowers existed for 5 years. Serious changes took place only in 2010. Then the friends decided to work under the Megaflowers trademark and officially registered it. Along with this, they entered the retail market. Now they have their own network of 13 stores under their own management. And since 2014, there has also been a franchising direction - now there are 12 franchisees in different large cities of the country.

However, not everything was so rosy at the start. When the company switched to retail, there was a problem with finding suppliers and delivering flowers to Chelyabinsk. Friends had to buy bouquets from wholesale intermediaries. It was only when Megaflowers slowly settled into the retail market that supplies and purchases from international companies were established. Now flowers are delivered to shops from different countries: Holland, Colombia, Ecuador, Israel.

Sergey Semyonov: “Intelligence and sneakiness were our main competitive advantage. We wanted our service, our product to be the best, for this we looked for new suppliers, introduced new services, looking at the Russian, and by and large, the European online market. We didn’t stand behind the price ”.

But there were some complications. At the dawn of the development of the project, many things seemed incomprehensible, it was not clear how to approach the solution of this or that problem. According to the author of the project, before the flower business market was very competitive, and a lot of companies began to develop it by launching their own sites on the Internet. Now everything has changed, and you need to invest a lot of money to open your own store. But, according to Sergey, he and his friend did not care about competitors - they just liked to bring people happiness.

Franchise and retail store opening

The author of the project believes that the very direction of the flower business, the development of an online store, makes it necessary, regardless of the city, to keep a fairly high bar in terms of product and service. In addition, it is equally important to hone all the processes associated with the product itself and its features. Here the business creator can only himself, with his own hands and head, come to understand what and how it works, what are the bottlenecks and difficult places. Before opening a franchise direction, partners automated all processes as much as possible, collected all experience, knowledge and regulated all materials in a franchise package.

Sergey Semenov: “Now the launch of the store lasts from 14-25 days. Includes a full study of all the details: from the project and construction to training and running the franchisee. The entire learning process is now carried out by us in our franchisee school ”.

Omsk became the first city where a store was opened under this program. Moscow gave the management the most trouble in opening stores. As the CEO says, it was very difficult to find a good partner. I had to change the people with whom I tried to get started several times in order to arrive at the final result. Very few were ready to subscribe to the standards dictated by Megaflowers, and this is a guarantee of freshness of bouquets, quality of service and service.

The cost of a turnkey franchise is from 1.3 million. This includes: existing service standards, exclusive to receive orders from the Internet, project, equipment, franchise, automation, maintenance, development. Franchisees receive a concept proven over the years with economic indicators 2-2.5 times higher than those of similar players in the niche. In addition, business partners are offered an additional stream of orders from the Internet, round-the-clock call-center support, automation of business processes, updating catalogs, development and training of personnel.

Now there are more than 1500 partner points throughout Russia, 300 - all over the world. In total, 25 stores operate under their own brand in our country. The most profitable for Megaflowers were large cities with a population of over one million: Moscow, Yekaterinburg, Ufa, Omsk, Chelyabinsk, Penza.

Plans for the future

Now a lot of effort and money is spent on the development of three areas. Despite the crisis and difficulties in business, the Megaflowers project continues to grow. Various advertising methods help to promote stores, both offline and on the Internet.

Sergey Semenov: “We actively use lazy marketing offline, on the Web we focus on targeting, retargeting, SPI, Google AdWords, Yandex.Direct, SEO”.

Now one of the most important tasks is to break your own record. The company's management wants to receive revenue of more than 0.5 billion rubles in 2017.

In addition, work will be carried out on the development of three areas, it is also planned to open new stores and increase the scale of the network. The authors of the project also want to change the culture of giving bouquets, to change the attitude of people to the profession of a florist. He should not be perceived as a seller of a flower stand, but be a specialist in the creative profession.

Megaflowers in numbers and facts

Opening year

The emergence of the Megaflowers brand

2010 together with the registration of the company.

Attachments at the start

1000 rubles (for the purchase of books).

State at the start

2 people - courier and call center operator.

Profitability

Payback period of the franchise

6-12 months.

The cost of opening a store for a franchise

1.3 million rubles (turnkey).

Average check in a retail store

850 rubles.

Average purchase amount on the Internet

3700 rubles.

Turnover for 2016

300 million rubles.

Online store promotion is not an easy task in a highly competitive environment. But with a qualified, thoughtful approach, you can achieve the desired goal, and quite quickly. A practical example is the promotion of a new online flower shop in St. Petersburg.

To bookmarks

How did it all start and what is the result? Let us consider below what works were carried out by the specialists of the internet agency sivov.ru.

History, goals, main stages of work

About a year ago, the owner of a chain of flower shops in St. Petersburg contacted us. He already had a stream of customers in an offline boutique chain of bouquets.

He planned to expand by introducing a new sales format to the St. Petersburg market - a warehouse store with the ability to sell flowers and roses at extremely favorable prices. Naturally, the task was to attract customers from the Internet.

For several months, the owner, together with the developer, prepared the site. Consultations were carried out on technical issues important for SEO, which made it possible, upon completion of the site preparation, not to redo it, but immediately proceed to filling and optimization.

An important stage - during the preparation, a domain with an already functioning website was selected and purchased. This was done so that there was no "sandbox" of the new site in the search. The owner was satisfied with the name, the technical parameters of the resource were suitable for further promotion.

Within a few months after the launch, we added about 500 different landing pages with different types of flowers, bouquets, descriptions of different situations and cases in which flowers are bought. At the same time, the semantic core is about 600-700 queries, including both HF and MF formulations.

In the photo, there is a part of the Mind map (connection diagrams) to determine the direction in which people can come to buy flowers.

Where and how do you buy flowers? Reasons, situations, places.

And this is a table that was prepared to generate the "correct" names and descriptions for the bouquets.

Table with data to generate

What exactly did you do in practice?

For each added page, we set:

Optimized meta tags;

Text (in most cases);

A set of interesting bouquets so that you can immediately make a purchase.

IMPORTANT! We paid special attention to the Description tag. Various attention-grabbing signs were prescribed in it, symbols that distinguish the site from the general row in the search.

In addition, we:

• Restyled product card;
• Added the ability to view several photos, including using the function to enlarge them;
• Included information about the composition of the bouquet (what it consists of specifically);
• Added payment options;
• Created a list of the advantages of ordering in this company with a graphic display;
• We added the ability to buy a bouquet in one click, as well as the ability to see other similar flowers.

In addition to the above, we have significantly worked on the technical parameters:

• Optimized the website loading speed as much as possible;
• Added presentation of information on the site to increase the trust of visitors;
• We installed catchy triggers informing about the quality and speed of delivery.

It should be noted that links to the site were not purchased either through exchanges or directly. Only work on registration in thematic and general directories with high trust and attendance was carried out. In the fall, in accordance with modern trends, a secure connection was set up for the site. This is especially important for online stores so that when making a purchase, customer data is protected from possible attacks from third parties.

It is worth noting that the customer actively used other sources of traffic attraction:

• Working with coupon sites;
• Advertising in popular urban publics and so on.

What are the results of our work?

Active engagement of the audience at the first stage allowed us to quickly show a good behavioral factor, as well as increase growth in search engines.

Growth indicators

As you can see from the graph, initially the number of clicks from social networks was very high, but over time, the share of clicks from search has significantly exceeded them. But the coupon sites did not make a big contribution either to the number of clicks or to the number of orders.

The Yandex search engine responded in the best way to our actions.

Referrals from search engines

Positions in Yandex by tulips

In the direction of the roses, these are the positions.