Interactive Return - Dot Com Comes Good

Dublin City Enterprise Board, 5 October 2005

Looking back at 1999 is like looking through a telescope the wrong way. You see a distant, different place. In that different, distant place horizons were limitless and Ireland the land of opportunity with an economy that boomed and boomed: halcyon days in which to launch a dot com business.

Martin Murray, Chief Executive Officer of Interactive Return, made his way to the company via operational management and consultancy roles in Eircom and Ericsson. But in 1999 the nascent internet arena presented opportunities.

Good up-to-date content is essential if a website is to serve the interests of its owners. Equally, a badly maintained website says a lot about the company in question. This became more and more obvious to the founders of Interactive Return. A niche market was developing for the writing of website content and advice on website performance. To meet this need, Interactive Return’s predecessor, WebBusters, was set up in May 1999.

Within a few months the company made a real breakthrough obtaining a large contract to review sites for Doras, the Directory of websites that lists some 25,000 sites.

Initially the company concentrated on web content and auditing services but it soon became apparent that this was not enough. To get worthwhile traffic to a site it had to be promoted. It was also apparent that search engines had become the driving force in directing traffic to sites.

In an interview with The Sunday Times, Martin Murray explains the thinking that has led to Interactive Return’s current range of services. “You can have a very good Internet site, but unless you engage in online marketing activities, you’ll have very few visitors. Traffic is not an end in itself. It has to convert into quality customers. That’s dependent on the usability of the site,” he said.

To meet these needs, Interactive Return works with its client companies to ensure the achievement of their online marketing objectives through the exploitation of e-mail, search engine marketing, online advertising, traffic analysis, usability studies and visitor conversion.

That the strategy works can be readily seen in their client list, a veritable who’s who of blue chip companies. In Ireland and Europe, Interactive Return work with Dell, Diageo (Guinness and Carlsberg), eBookers, Iona Technologies, Jury Doyle Hotel Group and Siemens. The company was also quick to recognise that the United States offered huge potential and now gains some 20% of its revenues from U.S. based firms, particularly in New York and Boston.

“We have had particular success with the cable TV company, Cablevision in the Tri-State area,” says Murray. “Cablevision’s high speed Internet service, Optimum Online, wanted to extend its market reach within the Tri-State area. On their behalf, we researched the most popular, relevant words and phrases used when searching for high speed Internet services in the USA. We then implemented a strategy to ensure that www.optimumonline.com appeared at the top of the most popular search engines and directories. This strategy was implemented using optimisation skills, meta data development, directory placing, paid submissions and pay per visitor campaigns.”

The results of the campaign were spectacular. “Optimum Online’s Internet visibility soared from 9% to over 80% across a wide range of relevant keywords within eight weeks,” recalls Murray. “The traffic to the site increased dramatically as did the number of sign-ups for the service.” It is therefore hardly surprising that they had a happy customer. “We found that the people at Interactive Return were able to understand our online business requirements,” says Dermot McCormack, Vice President, Channel Sales, Cablevision. “The original goals and targets have been achieved and surpassed.”

A helping hand

With year on year growth of 35% over the past four years and an audited turnover of €950,000 for the year 2003, things look rosy. The company’s rapid expansion soon saw fourteen employees on the books. However, difficult trading circumstances, particularly in 2001 saw that figure trimmed back to ten working in Interactive Return’s Dublin headquarters today.

“Fortunately, we weathered the storm and made quite a reasonable profit last year. We continue to trade profitably,” he adds.

In surviving and growing, Murray is quick to acknowledge the help he received from Dublin City Enterprise Board. “Dublin City Enterprise Board have been behind us virtually from the start. We received two employment grants worth £5,000 each in 2002 and (their former) CEO Gerry Macken helped us to get offices at the Guinness Enterprise Centre. We have been helped with advice all the way through. We have now “graduated” from the G.E.C. to our own city centre office.”

Perhaps pivotal in the success of Interactive Return was the €60,000 Cumulative Redeemable Preference Share investment made in the company by Dublin City Enterprise Board in 2000. “This is a great scheme. It provided us with very good value working capital when compared to loan finance,” comments Murray. Certainly the investment provided a welcome cushion during the severe downturn of 2001. The business also availed of the Export Marketing Grant Initiative in 2006.

For Martin Murray, now Chief Executive Officer of Interactive Return, who wrote the company’s original business plan, many lessons have been learnt over the past four years. “It is critical to understand your real working capital need and get them right, just as it is vital to manage cashflow carefully. Don’t underestimate the time it takes to develop a new product or service. Development time is usually much longer than one estimates.

“Make sure you maintain a good relationship with your bank. You should also build a good relationship with support agencies as we did with Dublin City Enterprise Board,” says Martin Murray. “It certainly beats having to deal with venture capitalists.”

For Interactive Return the application of sound business principles, the identification and fulfilment of customers’ needs have helped this dot.com to reach the haven of success while many another foundered in the recent, and some say ongoing, high tech storm.

“I would advise anyone starting up to expose themselves to as much advice as possible and network actively,” Martin Murray, Interactive Return.

To visit the website of Interactive Return go to http://www.interactivereturn.com