The Ennis-based company was set up by Aine Gleeson in 2000, and her business sells everything from personalised gifts for christenings to dolls and Christmas presents. WowWee employs between two and six staff, depending on the time of year, and it sells its products to customers in Ireland, the UK and North America.
"My main customers are women between the ages of 20 and 45," says Gleeson. "Mothers of young families would be a large percentage of my customer base. Other customers include personnel managers in large companies who reward and acknowledge occasions in lives of their staff."
Design process
Most SMEs who've been in business a few years go through several iterations of their website. WowWee is on its fifth redesign and it has no plans to stop development.
"It's ten years since I had my first [website]. IT was all very alien to me. Back then, 'broadband' just meant extra large men's trousers! I did the site design all myself - it probably looked that way as well. Facilities for customers shopping online weren't really available other than in very large companies," says Gleeson.
Gleeson says it took five attempts to get the website she wanted. The current offering places an emphasis on soft colours, quality product images and a consistent navigation bar.
"It needs to look very good to the public but it also needs to have a functional back-end so my staff can manage it as well," says Gleeson. "The site also has the ability to enlarge or reduce graphics and the ability to [display] the back or the front of a product."
Gleeson hired online marketing agency WebResults.ie to optimise the site for search engines and to examine what kind of keywords are useful for getting to the top of page one on Google. Part of this process involved Gleeson showing potential customers her products. She asked this group of people to search for the products online and then monitored what search terms they inputted. The results informed Gleeson's choice of keywords.
"[Customers] focus on niche rather than broad phrases," she says. "If you type in 'baby gifts' you will get millions of search results, whereas if you type in something like 'baby blanket' you can narrow that down."
Putting customers first
WowWee puts a lot of effort into customer service. The most visible evidence of this is an online chat facility where site visitors can ask questions in real time about WowWee's products. This facility is provided by LiveHelpNow and costs less than ten euro a month.
"People said [through feedback] that 'I had a question but I had nobody to talk to so I went somewhere else'," says Gleeson. "If customers have a question and we can answer it, great. If not, they can raise a ticket and we get back to them as fast as we can."
This was just one of the ideas Gleeson garnered from her regular chats with customers. She makes a point of ringing ten customers at random each month and asking them about their shopping experiences.
"Sometimes you hear things you don't like but most time you hear positive feedback," she says. "I don't personally like [cold calls] either but when you get talking to customers, and reward them, they are happy to help you and build a customer relationship with you."
Exploring new markets
Gleeson markets WowWee on Facebook and Twitter. Although she regularly posts information about company products and offers, Gleeson found that asking questions relevant to her business can lead to active and lengthy online discussions.
"We recently asked 'What are your memories of your First Holy Communion day?' We got a tremendous response through Facebook and through Twitter. It was stories like 'I fell and broke my tooth on the way out the door of the church', 'My gran knit me an Aran wool jumper and it itched me all day - I couldn't take it off until she left in the evening.'"
Facebook is responsible for 8 percent of WowWee's revenue. However, Gleeson concedes it's harder to determine Twitter's impact on sales. As a result, she places a limit on how much time she spends tweeting, and she uses Nutshell (a tool supplied by email marketing company Constant Contact) to monitor the business's social networking profile pages.
"Twitter doesn't work as much as Facebook but it does build a relationship. I would spend between 20 and 30 minutes on social networking sites a day, max," she says. "NutShell saves me sifting through and searching for a lot of stuff on social media websites."
WowWee is continuing to develop throughout 2011. Gleeson wants to increase WowWee's market share in North America. To do so, she has contacted the Irish embassy in Canada to ask if WowWee's details can be included on a newsletter sent by the embassy to Irish people living in that country.
"The Irish embassies have a huge network of newsletters that they send to people out there. To hook up and get mentioned in their newsletters would be invaluable to me," she says.
WowWee also recently launched a wholesale website that sells personalised gifts to specific companies around the world. Gleeson is planning a big push for this new arm of her business. "We can offer a personalised product wholesale to selected companies," she says. "The project this year is to drive our products from our website to different stores and websites around the world."