Due Maternity Connects with Customers and Drives Traffic with Yahoo! Widgets

The following post is an interview with Albert DiPadova of Due Maternity. Albert alerted us to his use of Yahoo! Widgets as another tool to help build community, engage with new and returning visitors, and drive traffic through providing valuable content to customers.–Paul

Tell me a bit about Due Maternity? How long have you been in business and what is your market?

Due Maternity has grown into a collection of five retail boutiques in Atlanta, Austin, Santa Barbara and San Francisco. We launched its online ecommerce website in the summer of 2003. Now in our fourth year we are currently ranked no.1 on most all maternity industry key word terms like “Maternity Clothes” and all things related.

This was due to our partnership with Yahoo! where we have been able to enjoy the traffic and marketing opportunities available to merchants.

Here’s our latest press release about it: www.marketwire.com/mw/release_html_b1?release_id=250643

Due Maternity Widget brings visitors from the desktop to the website

Tell me about the Widget you built. What are the features and how does this tie into your store?

Due Maternity chose Yahoo! Widgets because they run on Macs and Windows and they are very easy to download and install. We authored the Widget on the Macintosh using a text editor and Photoshop, and deployed the Widget through the Yahoo! Gallery and our own marketing efforts.

How did you get the idea for a Yahoo! Widget?

We were looking for a way to reach out to our customer in a meaningful way. Widgets are one of the simplest and yet most effective ways to keep your brand top of mind and provide our customers a useful and fun way to reconnect with our site.

Our Widget tells you how many months, weeks, and days left before your bundle of joy arrives, and you get to customize it with your baby’s name and choice of pink, green or blue face.

The most important thing our Widget does is alert our customers on the first day of each trimester with a link to our site that has important information about your baby’s development.

How long did it take to build roughly and what level of knowledge was required?

The Widget required about a day’s worth of effort from a good graphic designer and programmer who was familiar with JavaScript and Yahoo! Widgets. Because Yahoo! Widgets are built using XML, JavaScript and graphics files, they present a really accessible way for web developers to provide desktop functionality.

What are the hopes for this in terms of driving awareness or traffic? If you are seeing results, are they better than expected or not quite to expectation?

We’ve seen more than 3000 downloads the first week and it is quickly become one of our leading sources of new customers. This is truly amazing response. I was a little worried that newly expecting moms might be a bit intimidated by downloading a program, then downloading our Widget, but I was dead wrong. Or maybe there are another 3000 that couldn’t figure it out but I hear in the next release there will be a single download and install button for all Widgets…. Either way, it’s more traffic than we ever expected!

How much traffic are you getting from this?

Five days into it we’ve seen 5000 clicks and $1500 in sales. Not a tidal wave but it’s still growing.

Are you doing other viral tactics and if so what?

We are producing some really fun media that will be the first of its kind in the Maternity industry, but I can’t tell you what it is until next month.

In terms of ways to promote your store, what else do you do (SEO, PPC, social networking, etc.)?

We’re doing everything right now, National Print to Paid Search but I think the real break through is in unorthodox media projects that not only advertise your company but also really give the customer something useful and entertaining to play with.

If you could offer new merchants one tip for building traffic to their store, what would it be?

Create a community with relevant content, build your customer base using all the free new media out there: YouTube, Del.ic.ious, Vertical Response, MarketWire, MySpace, Facebook, iMovie, PodCasts, Slide, Blogs and of course Yahoo! WIDGETS!

Paul Boisvert
Yahoo! Small Business