Strengthening the customer/e-retailer bond with a desktop widget
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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