Online Company Uses Interactive Event to Move From Its Infancy
After Nancy Wurtzel’s daughter was born, she started a company that produced a personalized birth certificate product that she calls a “babyography.” The firm, which started as a traditional mail-order company, expanded to the World Wide Web about 18 months ago, and Wurtzel began experimenting with Internet marketing, quickly hitting the twin logjams of high prices and poor response rates. Then, she got the idea of running an Internet sweepstakes, and this year she has seen traffic at her site begin to spike. Wurtzel was interviewed by freelance writer Karen E. Klein.
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I was a marketing and public relations person before my daughter was born and what I really knew how to do was event marketing. We started out as a mail-order firm, using traditional advertising, catalog inserts and word-of-mouth. We have a customer base of just over 10,000 and have grown the company by 15% to 25% every year. Until this year, All About Baby had always put its marketing dollars into traditional, proven programs, but the Internet forces you to throw out a lot of the old rules and rethink how to spend your precious funds.
We investigated many online advertising options, like banner ads, pay-per-click, Amazon.com’s zShop and online catalog sites, but it quickly became apparent that our small business couldn’t compete with companies that spend more in a day on advertising than we do in a year.
Last fall, we began mulling over an online event to assist a pregnant couple in picking the best name for their baby. After much brainstorming, we decided to create a package that would include comprehensive new site content, such as baby-naming tips, birth statistics and more; a “name our newborn” event; and a sweepstakes contest with a modest payout ($1,000), but good odds for those who enter.
We felt that the combination of three event elements could create a winning marketing package for All About Baby and could also be ongoing, with a new couple and a new sweepstakes every six months or so. We started looking for a couple to feature, but many friends of friends had reservations about laying their lives open online.
In January, I switched Web companies and hired a young married couple to design my site and do Web hosting. I gave them my idea and said I thought the company could have some fun with this sweepstakes. The husband was really quiet for a minute, then he told me they had just found out they were pregnant with their first baby. We talked about it, and they decided to be our first sweepstakes family.
It was perfect, finding them, because they understand that we’re not invading their privacy, the contest is done in good taste and there’s nothing tacky about it. They are having fun with it too. We have a link to their wedding site on the Web page, so people can find out a little about their life story before the baby is due in the third week in September.
When people log on to our site, there’s a popdown list for first and middle names for a boy and a girl that they have picked out. Visitors to the site can vote on the names, and some have sent in their own name suggestions as well. We’ll keep updating the statistics on how the voting is going, and then after the baby’s born, there will be a drawing from among all the entries and the winner will get $1,000. We’ll let people know which names won the most votes and which the couple finally chose. They will be getting a free babyography and some other gifts from us.
What does the contest give us? It’s an interactive event that’s creating a buzz in the very crowded Internet marketplace. We registered at more than 100 contest and sweepstakes sites (and we can re-register every few weeks and get top billing at these sites again) and the response has been amazing. We debuted the event June 8, and within 36 hours, we had more than 1,200 requests for brochures--about the number we usually get in one year--and about double that number had entered the sweepstakes.
We set it up so that not everyone who enters has to request a brochure, and we promise them we will not sell or share their personal information. This is a way for us to build our mailing list, and it gives us a reason to go back to the customers in our database who have already ordered online and pitch our new site content and sweepstakes to them.
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If your business can provide a lesson to other entrepreneurs, contact Karen E. Klein at the Los Angeles Times, 1333 S. Mayflower Ave., Suite 100, Monrovia, CA 91016 or at kklein6349@aol.com. Include your name, address and telephone number.
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AT A GLANCE
* Company: All About Baby
* Owners: Nancy Wurtzel
* Nature of business: Personalized children’s products
* Address: P.O. Box 1648, Thousand Oaks, CA 91358-0648
* Year founded: 1995
* Employees: 2 part-time
* Web site: https://www.allbaby.com
* E-mail: nancy@allbaby.com
* Annual revenue: $67,000
