Official Blog

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!

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!

Always trying to keep the pulse of the latest trends and information available in order to keep our merchants performing at their most successful level, I’ve decided to write a Part II on the subject of Back to School spending this year. It is the story of NOW!!

Please check out the following links:

Nielsen Forecasts Back To School Spending at a 2.6% Growth for ‘08 and Sales of Nearly $1.6B

Mom’s Predict Spending Up 8% Overall, One-Stop Stores & Footwear Retailers Take Note!

So, if you’re an online retailer (and most of you are), there are dozens of questions that are coming to mind regarding your Back-to-School, rake-in-the-dough scenarios : ) Here are just a few:

1. Are you listing your products on CSE’s like Smarter.com? Breadth & Depth!
2. Are you advertising a Back-to-School ‘Special Offer’ on your site and in your feed with Smarter?
3. If you are a Footwear retailer, are you listing with Smarter.com? Great time of year for footwear buys!
4. Are you talking front and center on your site about “saving gas” and the convenience of shopping online (- combined with your “free shipping on orders over $50” special offer above - ) and featuring loads of adorable photos of little school boys & girls in back-packs and brand-new tennis shoes??
5. If not, why not? The other news item to take note of (check the following link) is that Online Advertising spending is NOT going down! So, what are your competitors up to for BTS? I think we know:

LA Times: Online Ad Spending Doesn’t Stop for “R” - Word : )

If you are not this prepared for Back-to-School, what are your plans for Holiday and Q4?? You’d better call me quick!

We all know that every day can’t be your birthday, so today it’s back to the practical! One thing that always pays is to listen to people in the same field that are experiencing the type of success we desire!

Here are four recent articles that all exemplify the idea of following a good example:

From The New York Times (7.19.08)

From CNNMoney.com (7.21.08)

From USA Today (7.21.08)

From the Indianapolis Star (7.22.08)

There are tips and pointers in these articles that cover many of the important aspects of online retailing! From tips like this one from the USA Today article, “Jeff Zimmerman also pointed me to an interesting study which found that the average cost per acquisition for search engine advertising was $8.50 per customer, as opposed to $20 each for Yellow Page advertising, $60 for email and $70 for Direct Mail. (Source: Piper Jaffray & Co.: “The New eCommerce Decade: The Age of Micro Targeting” 2006.)” to information cited by The New York Times article such as the chart below showing the recent increase in online sales vs. walk-in sales for the Gap:

There are also general tips regarding boosting your traffic using SEO and other online marketing found in the CNN & IndyStar article. It is my hope that by a little reading you will find useful, current information to help you maximize your site and bolster your online marketing efforts!

As always, please let me know if I can be of any support to you with opening an account with Smarter.com! (And yes, the $50 in Smarter ‘birthday bonus’ clicks is still in play for accounts that sign-up between now and the 31st : )

Image Source: Gap, The New York Times

This month marks Smarter.com’s *fourth* birthday!!

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

 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!

 Happy Spring!

If you’re in Southern California as we are, you’ll know that we are enjoying beautiful spring weather – I think it was a very nice 80˚ yesterday for Easter Sunday : ) I hope you enjoyed a beautiful day as well!

Continuing on from last week’s newsletter where I wrote about our new Ad Deck Display Advertising opportunities, now it’s on to our Blogs, Videos & Coupon Sponsorships. All three of these areas are located on our Homepage: http://blogs.smarter.com/official/wp-admin/www.smarter.com

For our Blogs, there are six separate blogs to choose posting sponsorship from, all written by our own blogging staff:

Fashion
Sports
Home & Garden
Gadgets
Beauty
Babies & Kids

With this sponsorship, you are free to give direction toward a product or event that our writers will include in their post.

Our Videos present an awesome opportunity since our merchants are free to submit their own videos that they have created themselves! These videos will display for an entire month on our Homepage and merchants are free to change them out up to once-a-week during that period. Please give me a ring if you’d like pricing and specs for this area.

Our Homepage Coupon area is also available for month-long blocks, with the option to change out the coupon up to once-a-week. This area provides a great way to call attention to your stores special offers as well as to highlight up to six different categories that your products appear in on Smarter!

Remember, several of these areas for sponsorship are four weeks of advertising time, so beginning April 1st, we’ll be taking bookings thru the end of ’08. Now is the time to plan ahead for your Twice-Yearly Sale, Back-to-School event or Holiday Special! Once the dates on the calendar are reserved, they will no longer be available.

I look forward to hearing from you soon, please feel free to email me at the addy on this page!

Image Source: (Daily Mail Online)