Official Blog

As many advertisers are realigning budgets for greater efficiencies in 2009, we wanted to take a moment to remind merchants of the many ways in which Smarter.com listings can be optimized for greater efficiencies and revenue growth.
The following best practices are brought to you by CJ Search:

1. Verify that your products are properly categorized within Smarter’s taxonomy. This will ensure that products are showing up in the right category and that you are paying the appropriate cost per click for each listing.

2. Continuously update your data feed! Consumers need to see the most updated information in regards to pricing, inventory levels, new products, etc.

3. Take advantage of special features such as adding your company logo or highlighting lower prices.

4. Optimize, Optimize, Optimize! Not all products perform at the same level of return. Some listings may generate great ROI, others may show lower than average return, yet others may perform under the allotted threshold. Weekly rounds of ROI optimization will certify that the highest level of revenue is achieved while meeting your ROI objectives.

Start using these best practices today! Login to your merchant account.
Not a Smarter merchant yet? Create an account.
Need help optimizing your feed? Contact our preferred partner: CJ Search.

This is my final posting for Smarter.com as my last day in the office is this Wed, November 26th! I have enjoyed writing this weekly newsletter and getting the responses back from you as well!

I want to take this opportunity to thank those of you who have opened accounts thru me in the past for your partnership with Smarter.com – I wish you continued success in your relationship with Smarter as well as great success with your online business overall!

For those of you who still haven’t begun an account with Smarter, I’d love for you to open your account with me this week! In fact, I wasn’t planning this, but as a farewell offer, if you sign-up a new account before 3pm tomorrow, I will extend our $50 in bonus-clicks offer to you! I’ll be sure your account is credited as soon as you let me know that you’ve completed the registration process here:

https://sam.smarter.com/register/sign_up_step_1.php

I’m starting my own boutique marketing agency, so if you’d like to stay in-touch, please feel free to request to link with me (Georgia Sanders) thru LinkedIn. For information about beginning an account with Smarter after the 26th, please feel free to contact Melissa Rivero at mrivero@mezimedia.com. She is the newest addition to the Smarter sales team and will be happy to help you!

Here is your friendly reminder that with everything going on in the economy and the timing of the holidays fast approaching –we want to encourage you to do all that you can do to highlight your sites coupons & special offers! Last week The Center for Media Research pointed out the following results from a Harris Interactive / RetailMeNot.com survey. Using the chart below as a guide, you can see that a full 35% of online shoppers plan on using coupons this holiday season!

So, with Smarter, you can add your coupons and special offers right into your feed or add them manually thru your SAM (Smarter Account Management) account – whichever way is most convenient for you! This will give your products more prominence on our results pages for the shoppers that are looking to find them!

Also, check out the percentage of people planning on using Comparison Shopping Engines (CSE’s) Like Smarter.com for their holiday ‘good deals’ shopping!

But here’s the graphic I really like the best from the Marketing Charts site:

Click Here to view the whole article!

If you don’t already have an account with Smarter, please let me know if I can offer you my support for a Smarter account set-up in time for the holiday traffic rush! You can also register online here:

Register Now for Smarter.com!

Good news! Smarter.com has just updated our feed specs to allow our merchants to highlight and display sale/discount prices in their feed! Now Smarter merchants will have the chance to show both the regular “retail” pricing of an item, but also indicate the current sale/discount pricing! Please check out the following live examples below!

Click here for Smarter Sale/Discount Price Example #1

Click Here for Smarter Sale/Discount Price Example #2

For current Smarter merchants we hope that you will start taking advantage of this new field right away, so please feel free to give me a call if you have any questions regarding this new feature.

Also, just a reminder to tune into Smarter’s own Joanna Estacio talking with Merchant Advantage’s Thomas Romeo about optimizing your Holiday Marketing! This FREE webinar is being held online Thursday, Nov. 13th at 2pm PST! You can register at the link below!

Free Holiday Webinar from Merchant Advantage featuring Smarter.com!

And finally, please let me know if I can offer you my support for a Smarter account set-up in time for the holiday’s! You can also register online here:

Register Now for Smarter.com!

I hope everyone has fully recovered from Halloween weekend! We sure had fun here at Smarter! 

Now that it’s the first of November I know that for most of us its full-steam ahead for the holidays! I’ve gathered a couple of resources for you this week to help in your efforts for a successful holiday season!

Free Holiday Webinar from Merchant Advantage featured Smarter.com!

 #1: Merchant Advantage offers a free Webinar featuring Smarter’s own Joanna Estacio on hand! Just click on the link above and register. The date/time is Nov. 13th, 2008 2pm – 2:30pm EST.

Marketing Charts Brings Us Deloitte’s ‘08 Holiday Findings

#2: Deloitte’s 23rd Annual Holiday Survey of retail spending and trends. Take it from the experts, Deloitte is trusted by industries across the spectrum! Gift Cards still reign on shoppers lists, but a huge spotlight will be focused on discount & value! For current Smarter merchants this is a great reminder to make sure and include your gift-cards in your feed with us as well as any and all rebates & coupons!

Regarding Mercent from Seattle Tech Report

 #3: All about Mercent! If your site is already doing a robust e-commerce business but you are looking for an agency to pull your online/data-feed marketing and reporting together for you, read on about Mercent, they’re doing a great job for their client list!

And finally, please let me know if I can offer you my support for a Smarter account set-up in time for the holiday’s! You can also register online here:

Register Now for Smarter.com!

Once more, no Trick, just Treat!

Smarter.com is looking forward to working with you for the holidays! In fact, I want to remind you of our little pre-holiday gift I am offering as an incentive to any account that signs up before noon on Oct. 31st! Smarter will be having our office Halloween party that day, so make sure your account is in-place before noon and I’ll credit it with $50 in bonus clicks!

(speaking of Halloween Party, here’s a photo of some of us from last year : )

To make it easy, here is our account sign-up link!:

Official Smarter Sign-Up!

I have to tell you, we are still having temperatures here in the mid-80’s, so it still doesn’t feel quite like fall! But the truth of the matter is that it is that the first day of autumn did come quite a few weeks ago and NEXT WEEK is (finally!) election day! So, we are actually clipping along thru Q4!

Okay, I saw this article and just had to share (never fear, I’ll tie it back to comparison shopping at the end):

Read the full Recessionista New York Times article!

The New York Times Fashion & Style headline reads, “A Label for a Pleather Economy” I love it! So now I can really be on the cutting edge of style with my ‘boutique-Target’ (pronounced “TAR-shea” for those not in the know!) purchases!? The truth of the matter is that in a down-turn economy, budget and value is at the top of most shoppers minds!

Here’s the circle back!

At Smarter.com, we give every opportunity for our merchants to let shoppers know about all their special offers, coupons and discounts! We have a place for coupons in our data-feeds, and there is also a mechanism for adding them to products thru our back-end SAM (Smarter Account Management) accounts! Also, something new that we’re adding is the ability to list both the regular price of a product along-side the sale or discounted price of a product! This will serve to visually reinforce the great value that purchasing the product from your store over your competitors store offers!

E or ring me and I will be happy to explain these benefits to you further or walk you thru your Smarter account set-up.

Happy haunting until next week!  For more Recession Chic, visit Mary Hall’s blog at:

therecessionista.blogspot.com

How’s your Halloween marketing going? Great I hope! On Smarter.com we have a homepage feature called, “What’s Hot” - so, if you haven’t seen it yet, please check out some of the best Halloween decorating buys and creative costumes online by visiting this area of Smarter! This is what our “What’s Hot” Halloween area looks like from our homepage:

Only a week and a half until November!

I hope you’ve been able to visit and download the Holiday Survival Kit that I gave out the link to awhile back! If anyone missed it, it’s an annual guide put out by National Retail Federation and its full of great information and tips for maximizing your site’s potential during the holidays! You can find this kit for free downloading at the NRF “Holiday Headquarters” here:

Click here to find the full Holiday Headquarters report for downloading!                                                                                 

Also available on the NRF site is the latest Holiday Shopper survey, if you haven’t seen it yet!

2008 Holiday Consumer Spending Survey

Smarter.com is looking forward to working with you for the holidays! In fact, as a little pre-holiday gift (for those of you that have read this far!) I am offering an incentive to any account that signs up before noon on Oct. 31st! We’ll be having our office Halloween party that day, so make sure your account is in-place before noon and I’ll credit you with $50 in bonus clicks! Here is our account sign-up link!:

Sign Up Here to Begin a Smarter.com Account!

No Trick, just Treat!

I found a great comparison study poll for you this week from our friends at eMarketer.com and Universal McCann:

So, this begs the question: If your products are on the list above, how well are you optimizing your online reach? Reach is key; your products need to be found and your site name and brand re-enforced when shoppers are researching! What Smarter offers is another avenue for your site to pull in highly educated online shopping traffic. So basically, if you aren’t participating in comparison shopping sites like Smarter.com, you are neglecting a whole range of shopping traffic that we pull in!

Opening an account with us is simple and inexpensive (you can begin an account with as little as a $100 deposit, and this comes back to you in your first $100 worth of clicks) and there is no long-term obligation if you are not happy with your results! You can give me a call and I can help you set up your account or you register online here:

Register Here for your Smarter Account!

Lastly, knowing how important Q4 sales are to our eTail merchants, I want to include this link to a very practical article from yesterday’s Wall Street Journal Small Business section, especially the part about optimizing NOW for the search engines like Google, Yahoo & MSN:

Read the full Wall Street Journal article here!

I look forward to hearing from you!

 Image Source: (eMarketer.com)

In light of the recent events in our economy, today I want to highlight some of the expert guidance I’ve found for those of us involved in Holiday online selling and marketing! Based on what I have researched and read, my perspective is two-fold right now:

1. Lower expectations – everyone from large publicly-traded companies to online marketing experts in the blogosphere have been lowering their expectations for Q4 of this year. Even our friends at the National Retail Federation have recently lowered their Holiday Season forecast to an over-all Holiday Sales gain of just 2.2 percent, that is the slowest growth-rate since 2002. So - focusing creatively on spending strategies is key right now! But this doesn’t mean stopping all spending on advertising, it means to pay more attention to being strategic! See the following link on the NRF Holiday Forecast:

Read the NRF Holiday Forecast here!

2. Be careful, but don’t stand-still – shoppers are going to continue to purchase holiday gifts this season, and they are going to need to find your store to do it! Carefully checking-off all the major “to-do list items” for the season, like making sure that your product landing pages and over-all site pages are completely up-to-date, your inventory & shipping systems glitch-free, that you are effectively touting any sales, price-discounts and special offers both on-site and within any data-feed marketing you are participating with and etc. are fundamental. Here is a link to the most practical resource I have found for retailers regarding strategic holiday selling:

Read more about strategic holiday selling here!

Also key is proceeding with a carefully planned holiday marketing campaign spend for your site! So where does it make the most sense to place your allocated online marketing dollars? I’d like to suggest placing a portion of those dollars with the site like Smarter.com! Smarter.com and other comparison shopping sites (CSE’s) like ours give you access to great ‘shopping-targeted’ shelf-space and generate solid sales leads at a fair cost to you! Following is the link to register your Smarter.com account today:

Sign up for your new Smarter account here today!

Do you love to shop?  Are you addicted to Facebook?  If so, I don’t have to tell you that you are not alone and in fact there are millions of others just like you, starting with your own circle of friends!

Smarter.com has created a fun, new Facebook application designed to allow you to share your love of shopping (and your love for finding just the right products) with your ever-growing list of Facebook friends!  Here’s a screen-shot of what our new application looks like, or you can just follow the link for it here: 

Click here to see Smarter’s new Facebook application!

Smarter’s application called, “What Would You Buy?” helps you poll your friends for their opinions on things like, “Should I try wide leg jeans or stick to skinny?” to “What movie should we watch tonight?” or “Which digital camera is best for me?” - it’s like spending time at the local mall with a couple of your best friends! 

Products to compare are pulled from the millions listed on Smarter.com or you can pull them in from your online store of choice, it’s up to you!  Also, there is a privacy setting that can keep your polls and wishlist exclusive to just your designated circle of friends!

Why not start first with getting your friends to weigh-in on just the right costume to wear for this year’s Halloween party?  Download Smarter’s new Facebook application today and let the fun begin : )

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