American Bronzing Co. is looking for the perfect direct marketing vehicle in which to cast its lot. This isn’t an easy task for the 72-year-old family enterprise, whose business relies almost entirely on bronzing baby shoes.
From the Columbus, OH company’s beginning through the 1970s, it marketed primarily through full-page ads in places like Parents magazine “But it got too expensive,” says owner Bob Kaynes. “We just got priced out”
A similar pattern happened with the firms” strategy of participating in co-op mailings like Madison Direct’s Young Families package.
Now, the $5 million company is looking into banner ads on Web sites, something it hasn’t tried before. And maybe it can find a way to make permission-based e-mail marketing work, although Kaynes admits the company hasn’t gotten the 4% response rate it would have liked from tests.
Kaynes is hoping such efforts will help bring American Bronzing back up to the $7 million volume it once had.
The target audience is parents of babies age nine to 15 months. American Bronzing has tried some co-op mailing programs aimed at new mothers but Kaynes concedes these usually don’t work very well. At that point, the infants are too young and their tired moms have too much else on their minds.
But the company does do okay with freestanding inserts put out by such companies as Valassis, he adds. And American Bronzing is also buying search words. A spot check last week on Yahoo.com of the words “bronzed baby shoes” placed the company’s www.abcbronze.com in the top spot.
Kaynes says what might be ideal for American Bronzing would be a two-step campaign that uses e-mail to direct a prospect to its Web site, mimicking how magazine ads successfully generated leads in days past.
The magazine ads had tear-off coupons explaining exactly how parents should send in their baby shoes and what safeguards American Bronzing would take to make sure the shoes did not get lost or mislabeled, Kaynes notes.
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