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!

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!

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)

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!

Smarter.com has just this week launched additional attributes in our Flowers, Gifts and Gourmet category! The addition of these attributes will help bring Smarter merchants more refined shopping leads!

Here are some of my favorite examples of our new attributes:

Flowers: Click here to visit Smarter’s Flower Category:

Occasion / Sentiment > Anniversary/Get Well/Prom/Thank You

Flower Type> Jasmine/Gardenia/Lily/Rose

Gifts: Click here to visit Smarter’s Gifts Category:

Collectibles>Movie Theme>Batman/Star Trek/Lord of the Rings/Harry Potter

Baskets>Gift Basket Theme>Pet/Gardening/Wine/Office/Popcorn

Gourmet (Food & Drink): Click here to visit Smarter’s Gourmet Category:

Candy & Chocolate>Chocolates>Dietary Needs>Low Sodium/Low Carb/Organic

Condiments & Sauces> BBQ Sauce & Marinades/Jams & Jellies/Salad Dressing

Coffee> flavor>Chocolate/Hazelnut/Butter Rum

Bakery & Desserts>Deserts & Sweets/Breads (!!)

**For some reason, I’m getting really stuck in our gourmet section –mmm, …must be hungry!

Feel free to bounce me an email or post here if you have any questions!

Besides a special offer for merchants outlined in the bottom of this post, I thought I’d let you in on a *few* of our proudest accomplishments over the last 4 years (in no particular order):

• First comparison shopping engine in US, China, & Japan simultaneously

• In Fall of ’07, Smarter was included in Inc. 500 Magazine’s top 500 fastest growing private Companies in America

• Smarter’s parent company (MeziMedia) was acquired by ValueClick Media in August 2007

• Smarter reached to #4 ranked CSE (comparison shopping engine) by traffic volume in just 3 years from launch

• Smarter was the first CSE to launch Video Product Reviews through a partnership with ExpoTV (Smarter is currently  featuring 63,251 live product reviews!) 

• Smarter was one of the first CSE’s to offer daily blogs (We currently offer blogs across six categories!) Go to: http://blogs.smarter.com to check them all out!

Over-all Smarter is very happy to be the first CSE to provide an integrated shopping experience for shoppers. We put reviews, rebates, coupons, videos, merchant reviews, product specs, and blogs all right at their fingertips!

Here are some additional key points that a merchant should know about Smarter.com:

• Merchants can add and manage bidding and special offers at the category OR product level!
• Merchants can utilize our ROI Tracker and see all their traffic results down to Cost-of-Sale with one easy account!
• Smarter can take feeds designed for other online sites and use them to populate our site with their products!
• Smarter has recently launched an expanded Ad Deck of additional advertising opportunities for our merchants including display ads and a newly updated Featured Merchant program!

And finally, here’s the moment that I’m sure you’ve been waiting for in this post (drum-roll) - our special B-Day celebration offer! It’s always nice to receive a little incentive, so for any merchant that open’s an account with Smarter within the rest of the month of July (moving forward from today for those who would ask!!), Smarter will offer $50 in bonus clicks to your account! What a great way to begin a profitable time partnering with Smarter.com!

image source: PinkCakeBox.com

Question:  How healthy are your sites online reviews?

To answer that question, please see the chart immediately below:

As you can see most of the shoppers they interviewed like to read 4 -7 reviews on a product before purchasing!  Do all your products have at least that many independent reviews attached to them?  Many of our top performing online stores literally have thousands of reviews to offer potential purchasers! 

In terms of reviews and Comparison Shopping Engines (CSE’s) like ours, these findings really point-up something that we’ve known at Smarter for quite some time!  Mainly that online reviews are critical for your sites success when it comes to the competitive landscape of eCommerce marketing!  Imagine the product you are offering listing on Smarter.com right next to the same or similar product of a competitor.  If all other factors were equal and your site offers no reviews and their site offers plenty – which click do you expect the shopper will make?  Getting that click is the first step to getting that conversion! 

Time and again, we see the merchants that are offering reviews receiving the traffic for their products over those sites that do not offer reviews. 

Smarter offers two ways for you to incorporate reviews into your product listings with us.  First, we do aggregate reviews from all over the web for your site.  So, if you have online reviews posted, even in a variety of places, Smarter will do the work of going out and finding them, and bringing them for display on Smarter once your account is open with us.  We update our reviews approximately once a month. 

Secondly, Smarter offers 5 basic ways to increase your Merchant Reviews on Smarter.com.  The tools that we offer for collecting reviews are all available once you open an account with Smarter.  They are listed in your backend SAM (Smarter Account Management) account.  Just sign-in to your account and then click on the tab marked, “Feedback Survey Info” for more information! 

BTW – here’s the link to the full article I’ve mentioned above:  Click here to see full eMarketer article!

Questions?  Give me a ring or email at the info provided!  Also, if you do not have your account set up with Smarter.com yet, please let me know and I can help you get that started as well! 

Happy Reviewing!!

Image Source: eMarketer

Something that has been on my mind to mention for some time now is the importance of adding coupons, rebates and special offers to your CPC (cost-per-click) data-feed when listing with a comparison shopping site like Smarter.com.

As a merchant listing your products on a CSE (Comparison Shopping Engine), a large part of your success in terms of performance is going to include your visibility and the resulting click-thru & conversion rates.

If you think about Smarter.com as a “shelf” in a traditional brick and mortar store, (let’s take a grocery store for example), you can draw some parallel’s.

For instance:

• In a grocery store, you may walk down the pasta isle, for example, and notice that Brand “A” Fettuccine is on sale that week for $4.99 for a 12 oz bag, vs. their regular price of $5.89! This is done thru a little tag on the shelve just below the product. Same thing with Smarter.com!

• When you add your coupon, discount or special offer into your data-feed, it appears just below your product listing on our product pages with a special, eye-catching coupon icon. I’ve included an example from our books category that you can see right here:

Notice the coupon icon showing with the scissors below each of the book entries and then the “blown up” version I imposed on top the graphic shows it larger -

We have seen some great results for merchants by simply adding a coupon/rebate or special offer to their products! Adding one of these options really helps draw attention to your listing and gives one more way for you as a merchant to set YOUR product apart from the others on the page (think shelf)!

Keep in mind that any offers you list with us can be date-sensitive (start/end date).

And finally, there are two ways that you can add these offers to your feed with Smarter.

1. Incorporate the offers right into your data-feed before submitting (go to: www.smarter.com/datafeed for more information)
2. Add these offers in right at the product or category level thru your back-end SAM (Smarter Account Management) account with us. We are one of the only CSE’s that allows you to add these offers at the product & category levels!

Hope this helps! Please feel free to forward any specific questions my way!

 Happy Fourth of July! Hope you have a great holiday weekend planned!

This week I’d like to let you know that two of critical areas of advertising on Smarter.com have come down in cost!

They are:

1. Our Featured Merchant (Product & Detail Pages) program and
2. Our site Display Ads

The Featured Merchant program allows for your listings to be optimally displayed in your participating categories. In addition to having your items highlighted on both category and product listing pages you will receive:

- Your Company logo featured on all of your product listings
- Prominent product placement
- Featured Merchant Logo
- Link to Merchant Store page (Exclusive to all Featured Merchants): Benefit Featured Merchant Store

The Featured Merchant program can be opted into at the category level, and can run as short as 48 hours. Perfect for promoting your upcoming sales!

Also, we offer 4 different areas for you to participate with your Display Ads:

• Search Results Pages (Run of Network)
• Category Search Results Pages (great for a more targeted approach!)
• Blog Pages (check out our blogs at: Smarter’s Blog Home Page)
• Buying Guides & Special Interest Pages

We are currently taking placement orders throughout the end of the calendar year for Display Ads!

Please let me know if I can answer any questions for you regarding Smarter.com and how we can put our significant online marketing muscle to work for your online store!