Earlier this year, clothing merchant Due Maternity was considering ways to foster closer ties with its expectant mother customers. It wanted alternatives to traditional marketing, advertising and other well-worn tactics because those can be very expensive.
This summer, the retailer introduced a desktop widget, a tiny, downloadable web application that sits atop a user’s computer desktop. The application graphically renders for a mom-to-be a clock that counts down the time to her due date and provides links to DueMaternity.com for information on pregnancy as well as products, coupons and special offers.
“We needed a way to get our customers coming back to our site. We needed to reach out in a meaningful manner without spamming them with e-mails,” explains Albert DiPadova, vice president of marketing and co-founder of Due Maternity. “You have to give customers something fun to play with these days.”
And so the retailer’s Countdown Widget was born. Due Maternity hired a graphic designer to dream up the look of the desktop application’s clock; in-house technical staff handled the Java programming required, with an assist from a free Yahoo widget-making tool, to create the wee application and link it 24/7 to DueMaternity.com. The e-commerce site continuously feeds data to the application.
During the first 45 days after launch, the application was downloaded around 10,000 times—customers were enticed with a 10% discount on select purchases—and sales directly attributable to click-throughs from the application to the e-commerce site hit $7,500.
The cost? $600. “We’re on track to realize more than $75,000 by the end of the year,” DiPadova says, “through traffic driven to the site from the widget.”
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