Welcome to Day 6 of the ‘How to run a Valentine’s Day Promotion Campaign’ workshop. This workshop runs between 27th January to 17th February 2010. Designed specifically for Zen Cart store owners, each day we will focus on one task to guide you as you run a Valentine’s Day promotion campaign.
Today we will be looking at the marketing value of both Comparison Shopping Directories and Discount Coupon Directories.
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Jump to today’s task – Marketing your Valentine’s Day Promotion Campaign using Directory Sites |
Yesterday we looked briefly at using social media to market your Valentine’s Day Promotion Campaign. Today we will expand our marketing with comparison shopping and social shopping sites.
Comparison Shopping
Comparison shopping sites provide product listings from a wide range of retailers, together with product prices, product descriptions (including their photograph) and even consumer reviews allowing consumers to search and compare products across different categories. Comparison shopping sites are very effective in driving highly qualified leads to your online store.
Here is an example of Google Product Search:
Major Shopping Comparison Sites include:
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Google Product Search
Google Product Search helps shoppers find and buy products across the web. Product Search connects your products to the shoppers searching for them, helping you drive traffic and sales to your store. Inclusion of your products is completely free.
The Google Base (Froogle) Feeder, an Add On for Zen Cart by Numinix Technology can be installed to generate your product feed and submit it automatically to Google Product Search.
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Bing Shopping
Bing Shopping (formerly Live Search Products and Windows Live Product Search) is a products search service and part of Microsoft’s Bing search engine. Unlike Google Products, listing yourself in Bing Shopping is NOT free. To sign up for Bing Shopping, you need to contact a rep.
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Shopping.com
Shopping.com offer price comparisons, product reviews and online store reviews and bills itself as the 4th largest shopping site. It is owned by eBay and has a small start-up cost. It is free to list all your products on Shopping.com but there is a cost-per-click when they drive a lead to your store.
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Shopzilla
Shopzilla is another pay-per-click shopping search engine. They are one of the larger shopping search engines and the pay-per-click fees are deducted from the $50 start-up balance it takes to register as a merchant.
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Yahoo Shopping
As of 11 March 2010, Yahoo! Shopping is partnering with PriceGrabber. This will give you the opportunity to list your products either on Yahoo! Shopping only or on both Yahoo! Shopping and PriceGrabber. When a product offer is clicked by a user, there is a cost-per-click fee.
Discount Coupons
Discount coupons can be an inexpensive form of marketing for your store, with benefits including:
- increasing numbers of new customers
- increasing sales of a particular product
- increasing your brand awareness
- rewarding your current customers
- creating opportunities for up-selling
There are a myriad of coupon sites to which you can submit to list your coupon and the details. Try a Google search for one of your products with +coupon to see how perhaps your competitors are using coupons for promotion and marketing.
A couple of coupon sites to look at:
- RetailMeNot
- CurrentCodes
- CouponCabin
- Coupon Chief
- Savings.com
- Coupons.com
- SmartSource.com
- CouponMom.com
Today’s Task
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Comparison Shopping Sites
Discount Coupon Sites
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After all these tasks recently we are going to have a quick and fun task tomorrow – installing a ‘Countdown to Valentine’s Day’ sidebox in Zen Cart.
Good luck! Any questions, please use the comments section below.
