High-end baby products e-tailer Poshtots.com increased online traffic 50 percent after running a full-page advertisement in the May edition of Pregnancy Magazine.
“That ad resulted in 12,000 unique visitors per day,” said Andrea Edmunds, president and co-founder of Poshtots.com, Richmond, VA — which made its online debut in November. “That's up from 8,000 unique visitors and we believe it's from the ad.”
Edmunds would not comment on how many of those visitors Poshtots converted to buyers.
The ad has no special offers, and instead shows images of products found on the site as well as its Web address. Visitors via the magazine ad are tracked when they come to the site for registration. Customer service representatives also ask shoppers where they heard of the site when they make purchases via telephone.
Pregnancy Magazine has a monthly circulation of 280,000. The e-tailer also will have a full-page ad in the June issue of Fit Pregnancy magazine, which has a 500,000 monthly circulation.
Poshtots's demographics are women in their 30s, with incomes of $75,000 and higher, highly educated and Web savvy. The majority are first time mothers.
The site, which features pricey designer and custom-made children furniture and accessories, has more than 1,000 items ranging in price from $19 for one heart shaped ceramic drawer pull to $5,140 for an elaborate “Your Majesty's Bed.” The average sales order is $891.
“Our sales are higher than other sites similar to us because our product line tends to be more expensive. It's nothing for our customers to spend $6,000 [per] order because they are usually buying more than one item,” Edmunds said. “We do have a few gift items, but there isn't much under $200.”
Before running the magazine advertisements, the e-tailer rarely did any advertising. It instead relied on word of mouth and partnering with online search engines Yahoo and America Online to attract customers.
The magazine advertisement, however, has introduced Poshtots to potential customers who are not typically online, Edmunds said. This has encouraged the e-tailer to begin looking into creating a catalog.
“We've been getting requests online for catalogs, and with this [magazine advertisement] we feel it's the right time to produce a catalog. Right now we're in the preliminary stages of researching and looking at what we need to have in place, but we're hoping to come out with a catalog later in the year.”
