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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!

Hope you had a great holiday weekend with lots of BBQ & patriotic fireworks!!

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!

Just thought I’d send you a QUICK reminder about coupons! Check out this latest blurb from Shop.org’s SmartBrief & Business Week:

**Coupon site traffic surges**
SHOP.ORG SMARTBRIEF | 05/12/2008
“Web sites that feature discount coupons for a range of consumer products are experiencing a resurgence in popularity. Page views on sites that offer money-off coupons jumped 38% to 281 million in March, as compared with the previous year.” - BusinessWeek (05/06)

High price of gas got consumers looking for just that right bargain? I think perhaps so!

Did you know that you can add coupons/rebates/discounts to your Smarter feed at the product level? That’s right, you can go into your SAM (Smarter Account Management) tool and add a timed offer to any product or product line that you would like! Or if it is easier for you, you can add your special offers directly into your feed.

Shoppers love a deal whether it is on shipping or just a percentage off for Memorial Day! So have at it, if you have an account with us, don’t forget to update your feed for special offers. If you don’t have an account with us, why not? Give me a quick shout via email the address listed here and we can get you set up in a heart-beat : )

Don’t forget, if you’re going to Internet Retailer ’08 let me know! It’s coming right up, (June 9th – 12th). Smarter.com will be displaying at booth #1014, so I want to invite you to stop by and say hello! I’ll give out my exact schedule as we get just a bit closer! For more information about the upcoming Internet Retailer conference, click here:

http://www.internetretailer.com/IRCE2008