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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!

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!

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

I came across a great article recently posted by eMarketer talking about the importance of online reviews to today’s shoppers.  Here is one of the charts they published together with Opinion Research Corporation to illustrate how popular reading online reviews is, broken down by category: 

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

Here is a link to something you don’t see every day! 5 tips for performing better on Google’s search return results! From an employee of Google, Matt Cuts!

Click here for 5 Google Performance Tips

The article contained in the link above comes to your courtesy of USA Today. But for those that want a quick overview, here’s the gist of what Matt talks about:

1. Spotlight your search term on the page!
2. Fill in your “tags”!
3. Get other sites to “link” back to you!
4. Create a blog and post often!
5. Register for free tools!
6. List your products with a high-performing comparison shopping site like Smarter.com to help deliver even more traffic to your site! (oh wait, that’s my additional suggestion : )

Hope you find the article informative and helpful!

It was great to meet so many new people at Internet Retailer! The roof-top Cubs game wasn’t bad either ; )

But seriously, if you haven’t been to Internet Retailer yet, I highly recommend that you plan on attending next year. (I think it will be held in Boston). To my observation, there was a noticeable difference between this year and last year’s show. It seemed that there were more people, more excitement and the tradeshow area seemed much larger with more companies displaying informative approaches to help your online business succeed! For those of you who attended, what did you think?

As always, please let me know if I can answer any questions for you regarding Smarter.com and how we can put our significant muscle (over 24 million visitors each month) to work for your online store!