Babysitting Babyelephant

In 2008, nine months after the birth of our first child, my wife launched Babyelephant.ie. The baby and the business have done well since then. Now with our second baby due in early September I have kindly/foolishly offered to launch it in the UK and she has kindly/foolishly accepted. This is first blog showing the successes and failures of the launch over next 9 months.

I will be business-sitting Baby Elephant for the next nine months and during this time will launch it in the UK, so the working name for the campaign is “9 Months to Impress my Wife”. Given online advertising’s claims of accountability I’m surprised by how little real sharing of numbers happens within the industry. Would love to hear of any other working ecommerce case studies, ones that share all numbers.

Through a fortnightly blog here I’ll be sharing our targets, results, campaign spend, successes and failures. For those that are interested, please comment – gentle/constructive criticism please.

Our ambition is not quite Amazon-like – looking to reach 200 UK sales per month within the next nine months. Some other numbers on it, from our Irish experience – 40% of new customers coming back to buy from us in the future so we need to keep that up, average spend per sale of £60, marketing cost of approx 20% of sales. Small stuff for many out there but it would be success for us – giving us a sustainable, scaleable platform that we could then build on. Although living in Dublin, I’ve some experience of the UK market – clearly a lot more competitive in all areas than Ireland. Google Adwords, SEO, eCRM etc will all need to be very well managed to return a positive ROI – easy to spend money and get nothing back in the UK market. Ireland is a lot more forgiving of inefficiencies.

Over the next two weeks we will be adding some further localisation, working on the UK site’s SEO, getting set up with an affiliate network, adjusting our Adword campaigns and trialling some Facebook ads.

Since the UK site went live four weeks ago, there have been 7 sales so we have a bit of way to go! So need to get on with online marketing. Will let you know how things are moving along in two weeks (by which time we should have a new baby). In the meantime check out www.babyelephantuk.com and let us know your thoughts.