Official Blog

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!

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)