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What I learned from my trip to Silicon Valley… ideas from The ShoppeSimple Network

thegies — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 15:10:03 +0000

After returning from several days in Silicon Valley last week some of the social and mobile concepts and ideas that came out of our VC meetings are valuable business lessons and I wanted to share them. More specifically, because the social commerce space is being defined literally as you read this it’s very easy to get off track. If your resources are tight, like most merchants, here are three key takeaways that can help you apply them wisely . . .

Focus first on driving social and mobile sales from existing customers. Create a strategy to engage them wherever they are on social (Facebook, Twitter, Google, and mobile). Just like you create segmentation in other parts of your business, now is the time to begin segmenting your house file into social and mobile enabled consumers. Satisfy the existing customer group first and they will draw their friends into a new customer relationship when you give them the right social tools.

Capture and database social and mobile permissions around your customers and their family and friends. Then use these permissions to communicate future offers to your consumers on the social and mobile platforms they prefer.

Follow the analytics of your social and mobile consumers. Find out which programs are generating social and mobile transactions and from which campaigns and build upon your successes.

Yes. Our trip to Silicon Valley really helped us crystallize exactly what we do for merchants.

What we do to help your business…

Using sustaining social CRM principles we enable you to create, distribute and track relevant daily deals to your opt-in customers who buy and also share with friends on any social and mobile platform they prefer.

Now, have you thought about developing a new selling channel using daily

deals/offers or coupons? You may have considered it but do not have the margin to work with social coupon sites like Groupon and Living Social. By the way, most of the Internet 1000 do not either.

But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t move into a social coupon-marketing channel (already $3 Billion in market value and soon to be $6 Billion) leveraging your own consumers, website, email, Facebook traffic and mobile assets which you market to all the time.

Why do this? Because a certain segment of your customer file has defined themselves to be deal buyers and is already using social couponing/daily deals to save money in this economy. So why shouldn’t you cash in on this trend? Marketing to them will enable your business to capture new incremental business through more frequency of purchasing from these consumers who are interested in buying from you in your own daily deal sales channel.

The ShoppeSimple Network program makes this easy to do

We provide the SaaS software to help you create, distribute and track deals to your consumers using our “Push The Button” marketing strategy. We enable you to do this daily with consumer permission. For an affordable monthly subscription fee, we deliver our tools to you in less than 10 days without any additional start-up costs so you do not have to distract your IT development team. Your consumers then get daily offers on their homepage, Facebook, Twitter and mobile . . . wherever they want to receive them. Really it is that easy.

Also key to our program is you determine the discount so you don’t have to give up a margin hit for every deal/coupon sold. Now think about the sales potential to place daily deals or special offers or new arrivals in front of your consumers wherever they are on the web with you determining the selling margin where you’re not giving up a revenue split on every order. Plus our program drives traffic to your website as all orders are completed in your shopping cart.

Through our sustaining social CRM engine you also capture for future use your consumer’s permission to place your daily offers on their homepage, their Facebook wall (not just your merchant wall but their consumer wall) or on their Twitter page or text to their mobile phone.

So ask yourself, do you currently have a social and mobile marketing strategy in place which is capturing any of these new social, or mobile enabled consumer permissions (homepage, Facebook, Twitter, mobile)? Do you have a strategy in place that is maintaining permissions in a database which is permissioned by your consumer to send targeted social advertising to them in the future?

If not, you should be using the ShoppeSimple Network sustaining social CRM.

We have proven to our clients that we have raised average order values, increased order frequency, and/or bettered order conversion rates through our program. And, we know The ShoppeSimple Network sales channel is guaranteed to add significant incremental sales revenue for your business (thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars or more depending on your business size).

But we want to earn your business and as such would like to propose a test so you can see and learn for yourself. It will take your IT team less than a ½ hour of time to install a simple tracking pixel and Push The Button code snippet and that’s it. We do all the rest and without any set-up cost to you.

So here is where we put our skin in the game…

Let’s do a 3-month test and we will guarantee that you will receive a return on your investment of at least 4 times any cost you pay us or the test is free.

Now to sweeten our offer even more, if you move fast, by July 31, we will waive any fees on The ShoppeSimple Network program for the first month of your trial. So you SAVE an additional 33%!

You can start your ShoppeSimple Network trial by calling us at 612-349-2740 or by emailing me at jeff@shoppesimplenetwork.com. I look forward to hearing from you.

Best,

Jeffery

Jeffery Giesener

CEO/Founder

ShoppeSimple Network

P.S. Check out our Webinar by clicking here.

Pay Per Click vs. Daily Deals Sites…ideas from The ShoppeSimple Network.

thegies — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 15:10:58 +0000

Is your business bleeding from your pay per click program (PPC)? Are you thinking about doing a Daily Deal with one of the many Daily Deal sites but can’t give up the margin hit?

Google launched Adwords in 2000 and by far it is the most famous and largest PPC program in the world driven through keyword marketing. In fact, according to Google’s latest 10K filing – at $31 Billion of revenue, a majority of its revenue is derived from Adwords or PPC marketing. So in just 11 years you can see how the majority of the world has adopted PPC marketing.

How long did it take your business to adopt Google Adwords? What percent of your online revenue is PPC marketing today? And if your PPC marketing is generating more than 10% of your online revenues are you feeling uncomfortable with this exposure? What would happen if Google changed its pricing mechanism or algorithm and your PPC results fell off the cliff? Shouldn’t you be thinking about how to mitigate your channel exposure to PPC?

First let’s try and clear the analytics fog…..we will first determine a Cost Per Order (CPO) range for a business using pay per click marketing. Then let’s compare the CPO from a PPC deal to the CPO from a Daily Deal offer and I sense you will find the learning interesting and informative.

Calculating a CPO under PPC (an example)…

Let’s say you had a monthly ad budget of $5,000 to spend on PPC. You set an allowable, blended-per-keyword clickthrough rate at $1.50. So your number of clickthroughs would be 3,333 before you exhaust your budget. Your net product margin is 30% at an average product retail of $90. You convert 1.5% of your site traffic to buyers. What would your CPO from this PPC case study look like?

But first does your organization calculate your PPC according to CPO by keyword and by campaign? Or does it fall into a trap of keeping track of just cost per clicks? Now let’s have you put your own numbers into the template formula presented below. I suspect most of you will see a PPC CPO of around $25-50+ per order. This PPC CPO marketing analysis is vital to running your business especially if you have allowed PPC to be more than 25% of your marketing budget.

Read on…

So your $5,000 PPC monthly spend yields you 3,333 ($5,000/$1.50) clickthroughs to your website. You convert 1.5% of these site visits to orders or 3,333 x 1.5% = 50 orders. At your product margin of $27 (30% X $90) X 50 orders you have a total positive product margin of = $1,350 from PPC. So you have a media allocation of $5,000 media spend minus positive product margin of $1,350 = $3,650. $3,650 divided by 50 orders your PPC CPO = $73.

Wow…Ouch…can your business afford to spend $73 to capture a new customer? Now what is your plan to continue to build sales relationships with these customers? Most business receive just 1 to 1.5 orders from their 12-month buyer group. How would you plan to lower your customer investments?

Top 10 List For Not Doing Social…ideas from The ShoppeSimple Network

thegies — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 15:10:36 +0000

A few weeks ago, I spoke at the Minnesota Direct Marketing Association’s (MDMA) Annual Conference. Over this last weekend, I prepared another presentation which I would like to share an overview with you. This current presentation is the direct result of findings from the audience participation at the MDMA conference. It is titled “The Top Ten Reasons Why Your Business Is Not Ready for Social Media…”

10. Oh… we are already doing social sharing and we believe everything we are doing in social is right.

ShoppeSimple Network (SSN) ideas: When you drill deeper into what a prospective client perceives they are doing in social and what they are actually doing you discover they are two completely different things. It gets worse when the client has such arrogance to believe they are doing everything in social correctly. Just last week several prospective clients indicated they were doing social sharing and they were doing what The ShoppeSimple Network was doing. To cut to the chase they were using AddThis, a 3^rd party plug-in for their sharing tool. But have you asked yourself why the AddThis widget is free? There are only a few business models which work on the net. Those that are: 1. Pay me now or 2. Pay me later. AddThis falls into the latter.

What do you think AddThis is doing with your data that they are collecting? Are you getting this sharing data from AddThis? What’s going on in the background of AddThis with your data? Whatever they’re doing, it’s without the permission of your consumer. Consumers rely on your brand to protect them. By the way, I am not saying you didn’t agree to their terms of service, but did you fully understand their terms and the ramifications. In most cases, these sharing-tools companies and their widgets sell your sharing data to the highest bidder. Is this what you want your most trusted social consumers to know about your brand? To check out what I am saying, simply open up AddThis’s email-sharing tool and ask yourself what do you think they are doing with your consumer’s email addresses that they are capturing?

I would think that you would want to partner with a Social Management partner like The ShoppeSimple Network where we provide your business with our ShoppeSafe Social Management and Sharing tools and we fully protect your consumer’s data. Bottom line: we simply do not sell your social data or share with anyone.

9. You ask your consumer to “Like” you before you give them access to your Facebook page.

SSN ideas: Didn’t your website analytics tell you that not every first-time buyer wants to be forced to have an account with you? Not every customer wants their personal information including their credit card to be permanently stored on your server. Your analytics do show you that many consumers want to try you out first before storing personal data and then when they feel comfortable it will be their decision to move into a long-term buying relationship with you. Isn’t it appropriate for your consumers to be in control of the “when” and “where” they share their personal information with your business? Shouldn’t this be their choice and not forced upon them? Shouldn’t you be thinking the same thing about Facebook? If you put up your “Like” stop sign on Facebook before the consumer can view your content, what message are you sending to a consumer who wants to engage with you for the first time on Facebook? Less orders and less Facebook Likes.

8. Pushing a product catalog on Facebook follows the same traditional push marketing patterns of the last 25 years. But Push isn’t social, it’s anti-social.

SSN ideas: Investing in social media requires a deep-rooted belief system and a knowledge that you must engage in relevant conversations with your consumers. Conversations come first and then commerce. For instance, you don’t date and jump into “the will you marry me?” on the first date question. So jumping right into selling with your social consumers is abusing your social consumer’s desire to want to have a social relationship with your brand. So, before you jump into pushing a product catalog in front of your consumers on Facebook think, or better yet ask what your consumers want. Do they want the same old marketing from your brand or do they want you to know who they are, what they want to buy from you and where they want their offers delivered?

Now let your consumers self-select the Daily Deals they want, using ShoppeSafe’s Social Management services. For the first time your consumers are in charge of what they want to see from your brand and where they want to see it. Now for the first time your website goes wherever your consumer is.

7. You are not staffed for social media. If social media requires your staff to interact with consumers on a conversational level, are you ready to participate? Engagement and conversation goes well beyond Tweeting or slapping up Facebook wall posts about your latest offer.

SSN ideas: Your brand must be willing to add dedicated and motivated additional staffing who can speak in the normal non-formal conversational voice. Stuffiness and formality is not for social. Also a social community demands moderation to stimulate discussions, respond to comments and create an open, genuine dialog with your consumers. Your brand must be willing to unlock the dialog and not be scared of it.

ShoppeSafe enables you to manage all of your Social voice with just one click of your mouse. Plus, through ShoppeSafe your consumer shares your content simply and easily.Content creation within branded networks, including Facebook and Twitter, requires production time and dollars…so if you don’t have the in-house staff you can easily outsource this work to The ShoppeSimple Network.

6. Social Media cuts across verticals in your organization. In a recent sales meeting, I presented to a national financial institution. In discussing their approach to social, they mentioned that they put together a Facebook “Like” collection campaign. In order to do so, they created a direct mail and email campaign directed to a web-landing page, which then drove Facebook “Likes”. What was fascinating to hear was that it took a year to put this campaign together and over 52 approvals to accomplish. Yes, 52 approvals. How long would this campaign take to execute in your company? Can your company draw from resources across your entire company to respond to customer or PR needs? Are you set up to do this at a moment’s notice? Are you prepared to hear honest and sometimes not so nice comments about your business? And when you do, are you prepared to respond to them quickly? Can you do all of this everyday? That’s a lot of silos to work across. Would you win or lose in your organization?

SSN ideas:For real-time social initiatives to succeed, you need an advocate within your organization that is a key decision maker, a social stakeholder. He/she needs to drive the social programs through the organization. He/she needs to end the clutter over getting 52 approvals to move one social program into the market. In fact, social is all about frequency of contact and driving unique multiple content, 365 days a year to your social consumer. Can you do that? Do you want to do that?

5. Real-time means, like-NOW. Social media requires real-time responses that cannot be forecasted. Traditional marketers are used to classic marketing where programs are delivered and then results are tabulated. That just doesn’t work for social where programs are designed to be viral and spread in real time. So how does your business track a viral program? How do you use Google Analytics to do that? If you have a smashing success on your hands then congratulations; you now have an even worse situation. You’ll need people, more hardware, more analysis, more internal meetings, more funds. Well – do you think this can get any worse? Guess again. You’ll now need to do battle with. . .(see #4 below).

SSN ideas: You need trained moderators who can speak in a genuine voice on the brand. They need to feel comfortable, free from “Big Brother” concerns. They’ll need to come off as genuine, since they are speaking to a highly desirable segment of your brand consumer. And it’s okay to post, “I don’t know but I will find out.” Simply have a conversation with the customer.

To help you further understand your social analytics use ShoppeStats where you can track your social interactions at a deep level.

4. Procurement will freak. “You need extra funds approved for what social project by when?

Have you heard…”Aren’t Facebook and Twitter free?”

Chances are if you must expand scope to build on timely conversations your procurement department (tag teaming with legal) may not be in sync with you to accelerate this process. Plan accordingly, whatever that means. Watch out for legal and governance issues. Do you hear or fear that your social wheels are coming off your tracks?

SSN ideas: Pick up the phone and speak to the CEO for this one. Remember the Facebook and Twitter ad models are in their infancy. If you think they will be free 3 years from now, I have some swamp land to sell you. Do you really want to build your whole social model on these platforms without future knowledge of where the ROI will be?

3. Click to Purchase. Retailers are happiest when they are selling things. Have you had a hard time justifying all the social media budget requests and/or worse, cash outlays without any perceived or tracked success of social commerce revenue?

SSN ideas: Don’t get hooked into believing you need to create transactions at the social platform level. This is the lock-in Facebook and Twitter want you to believe their consumers want. At The ShoppeSimple Network we believe in just the opposite. And we have the years of experience being on the net to have seen what lock-in can do to a business. Using the ShoppeSafe social marketing services, your consumers are driven back to your website where they purchase. This way your consumers are your customers, not Facebook, Twitter or worse other major players that do behind the scenes deals with these players. Also we don’t believe that your customer should be leaving their credit card info on social media platforms today. Why? Because of its newness and the lack of consumer data protection. Your customers feel comfortable buying from you within your buying environs. It’s as simple as that.

2. Social Management. Would you say no to a social commerce program if you could increase your average order dollars, lift your conversion percentages, raise your frequency of ordering and greatly increase the exposure of your brand?

SSN ideas:Well, if you are hesitating contacting ShoppeSafe until now then perhaps for the above reasons you are not ready to move into social. But if you have been reading my blogs we have proven the above metrics for client after client. In fact, we have not lost a client since March 2010 and we are adding new clients weekly. So why are you waiting? Still hesitating to contact us? Why don’t you simply run a test with us to prove it to yourself? Check out The ShoppeSimpleNetwork to learn more about what we do and then give us call to set up a presentation.

1. Sustaining Social Customer Relationship Management. It costs you a ton of money to acquire a new customer. But what is your plan to put yourself in front of this customer in the future and how frequently?

SSN ideas: At The ShoppeSimple Network we have built a powerful Daily Deal engine, which puts your Daily Deals in front of your consumers who have given you permission to engage with them, 365 days a year. You also get to set the pricing. We are not interested in taking a piece of your product margin like the other daily deal sites do. Plus, there are no implementation fees and you just pay an affordable monthly subscription fee.

Your consumers have requested your deals and then they socialize them to their trusted friends and family. This starts the viral social stream, which brings you more new business. It all starts by having your consumer “Push The Button”. Your branded Push The Button goes on every contact point (website, email, Facebook and mobile) …everywhere consumers turn, they Push The Button to get your great offers. The result: social commerce!

Here is what we know: with all the chatter across the digital spectrum your customers will come back to you if you’re truly helpful and your business is providing a social value exchange. So, what does 2011 hold for social media? Well, the great part is that the industry can pretend to know, but it really doesn’t because social is truly in the hands of the people – your consumers. Bottom line is you must listen carefully and respond quickly. Your consumers will appreciate it and your brand will reap the rewards.

At The ShoppeSimple Network we are here to lend you our expertise, marketing services and our ShoppeSafe Sustaining Social CRM and social management tools. All you have to do to learn more is set up a presentation with us on how to get into a trial program. We are also not here to replace your social media program but to simply enhance it with our plug-in tools. To learn how we can help your social commerce program grow email me at sales@shoppesimplenetwork.com or call 612-349-2740

Best,

Jeffery

CEO/Founder

ShoppeSimpleNetwork

PS. Check out our June Webinar “Your Social Toast is Burning“

Extreme Counponing....ideas from The ShoppeSimple Network

thegies — Tue, 14 Jun 2011 15:00:02 +0000

18 percent of site visitors report being influenced by social media to visit a website. Forsee Results’ research also showed that the resources companies put into social and mobile media and the results they receive vary wildly. Spending more money does not automatically lead to higher numbers of visits to websites, brand awareness or sales.

It is also ShoppeSimple Network’s findings that companies seem a bit confused about their objectives when it comes to social and mobile media. Internet Retailer Magazine surveyed 400 U.S. companies (19 percent of them retailers) in December 2009 and January 2010. It found that 74 percent of companies wanted social and mobile media to drive traffic to their websites, while only 56 percent wanted it to increase sales. Shouldn’t it be the other way around? We think so!

So from my seat, I see three distinct merchant groups emerging in this new world called Social and Mobile Media.

The First Merchant Group sees a big marketing opportunity because of the sheer volume of people active in social and mobile media. We are talking primarily consumers on Facebook, Twitter and mobile smartphones. Merchants see social and mobile media as a new way to increase reach and purchase. They see social and mobile as new media channels to market their products. But they tap into social and mobile media by doing the same stuff they have always done: promote, advertise, get noticed, make noise and do the traditional approach to marketing which is classic PUSH. We don’t see this as being particularly effective social or mobile marketing as consumers have or are turning off to this type of PUSH messaging.

The Second Merchant Group (a very small but growing group) recognizes that there is something different going on. They see social and mobile media as a new way to interact with their customers, prospects and stakeholders. A different kind of contact strategy is emerging. A communication channel, which is more intense and personal. More social just like having a conversation with your customer, and then moving these engagements into advocacy status. These merchants recognize that this socially engaged conversation changes the way they communicate and how they do business with their consumer. These merchants also pay attention to customer acquisition and couple this interaction with a Sustaining Social Customer Relationship Management solution.

The result for this second group of merchants is a social and mobile commerce channel that is already paying dividends for merchants using the ShoppeSafe Daily Deals and Sustaining Social CRM marketing service. Learn more about this here.

The Third Merchant Group is what I have defined as the “Extreme Coupon” group. Made famous by the TV show on the TLC cable channel called “Extreme Couponing”. With the advent of the social coupon sites (Groupon/Living Social/ShoppeByLocal and others) and digital coupons, small businesses are leveling the playing field with the behemoth national brands like never before.

It is sort of obvious, you just don’t build a $3 Billion dollar Social Coupon industry in just two years (estimated to be $6 Billion 3 years from now) if this social coupon industry isn’t a serious wave to catch. So where do you think this market share is coming from? What do you see in your site trend analyses around Daily Deals or Social Couponing? Have you done a Daily Deal or Digital Coupon for your business? What was your experience? Good, Bad or Terrible? Is this marketing approach even in your marketing vocabulary? If it isn’t…it is exactly why the Small Business Market (SMB) is jumping onto social and digital couponing so quickly and in such a big way and why they are using it to level the marketing playing field maybe with your business.

But when you analyze each of the three distinct groups something is missing from each. Each group has a singular focus around new customer acquisition. Nothing wrong with that but each group misses a huge opportunity to form a stronger long-term bond with their customer. Each should solidify both customer acquisition (front-end) and link it with a Sustaining Social Customer Relationship Management (CRM) marketing service (the back-end).

So how do you do this? That’s exactly how ShoppeSafe can help your business.

We provide the front and back-end Customer Acquisition and Sustaining Social CRM marketing linkage which will be driving new business for you in less than 10 days all at an affordable monthly rate.

ShoppeSafe provides your business with the ability to engage in social and mobile conversations with your consumers using a Daily Deal digital coupon engine multiple times a day, 365 days a year and deliver these deals to wherever your consumers are. Plus, we provide your business with a Sustaining Social CRM marketing service to keep both your new customers engaged with your brand and their “Trusted Referrals” buying from you wherever they are on the web or on their mobile smartphone.

You know a phenomenon is thriving when it becomes a reality-TV show. Enter the new TLC series called “Extreme Couponing” which points toward an important truth about today’s digital marketplace: Coupons and Daily Deals play a key role in the choices many consumers make, and marketers must be savvy about making use of them.

“Daily Deal and digital coupon use, while once perceived to be limited to a small segment of the population, may very well be adopted as the norm going forward,” stated an Epsilon Targeting survey.

Digital Coupons and Daily Deals Go Electronic

Meanwhile; the emergence of new digital channels for Daily Deals and digital coupons has further broadened the market according to a report by Morpace Omnibus which found 67 percent of respondents saying they’ve used digital coupons they accessed via the Internet. NCH also tracked a 37 percent jump last year in the number of digital-coupon offers–“the largest increase of all digital coupon media types. Mobile couponing, in which consumers use their smartphones to download digital coupons at a store or elsewhere, is also taking hold. Leading up to last year’s holiday-shopping season, an InsightExpress poll of smartphone owners found that 19 percent found they accessed coupons and deals via those devices.

In an Epsilon Targeting survey if consumers do start to feel better about the economy and their own finances, this won’t necessarily pull down their elevated interest in digital coupons. The aforementioned found 48 percent of U.S. respondents saying they’ll be more likely to use digital coupons than they were in the past, “even with the end of the economic recession.”

The rise of digital coupons is helping expand the base, partly because of digital’s upscale tilt. In the Morpace Omnibus survey, 71 percent of those with incomes of $50,000-plus said they use online digital coupons, vs. 61 percent of those making less than $50,000. A Coupons.com report earlier this year cited data showing that consumers who print out digital coupons have average household incomes of $105,000; people in households with income of $100,000-plus “are twice as likely to have redeemed digital coupons printed from an online source than adults with household income less than $35,000.”

Attracting New Customers

If a digital coupon or Daily Deal simply lets consumers save money without otherwise altering their behavior, then it will be a bust for marketers. But it’s clear that digital coupons or Daily Deal can shift people’s choices. One telling bit of evidence: In a Simmons DataStream report last fall, “fully 30 percent of adults said they are drawn to a store they don’t normally shop because of a digital coupon,” up from 26 percent at the start of 2008. A Knowledge Networks report last month, drawing on research by its National Shopper Lab, said 46 percent of people who redeemed a digital coupon “were prior non-buyers of the product,” as were 34 percent of those who redeemed a print coupon from a traditional free-standing insert.

For consumers, though, it’s not purely a matter of dollars and cents; people seem to draw pleasure from the sensation of being shrewd shoppers. In the NCH survey, for instance, 29 percent of respondents said they’re using more digital coupons for “the enjoyment of saving.” As Valassis’ put it, “Savings are sexy now. If you’re a marketer, you’ve got to respond to that consumer sentiment or you’re going to lose your position in the market”. Excerpts taken from Mark Dolliver – CMO.com

So what if your business had an opportunity to plug your Daily Deal or digital coupon efforts into a Sustaining Social CRM marketing service? Not only would you acquire new customers but you would be able to continue managing these relationships which will lead to additional frequency of ordering, higher conversions, increased average orders and more brand impressions multiple times a day, 365 days a year all with consumer permission.

ShoppeSafe Daily Deals engine plus its Sustaining Social CRM marketing solutions provides your business exactly this type of front and back-end marketing service.

ShoppeSafe is doing this for some of the largest ecommerce and multi-channel brands both domestically and internationally. But you don’t have to be a large merchant to use our service and get tons of benefit out of it. We have all types of small businesses using our services as well.

Why not check out ShoppeSimpleNetwork.com to learn more about our ShoppeSafe Daily Deals platform and Sustaining Social Customer Relationship Management marketing services. Then simply get in contact with us for a quick presentation on how we plug into your business.

We would be happy to present what we do through a Go2Meeting. Simple give us a call 612-349-2740 or emails us at sales@shoppesimplenetwork.com

Best,

Jeffery

Jeffery Giesener

CEO/Founder

ShoppeSimple Network

Is Your Business 70% N 7? Ideas from the ShoppeSimple Network

thegies — Tue, 07 Jun 2011 15:05:25 +0000

A Bain research study found that 70% of CEOs believe their business delivers a superior customer experience, but only 7% of their customers agree.

A recent IBM study shows a complete perception gap between businesses and why they think people connect with them on social media, and why people actually do connect with them on social media. Businesses think people least connect for deals and to purchase, whereas people most connect for deals and purchase.

Ironically, though, consumers say getting tangible value is the top reason they interact with a company, which is good news for those organizations hoping to monetize social media”

We have also found similar findings through our client cooperative, as customers connecting with you on social media should be about enjoyable shopping AND deals. These consumers want Daily Deals from your brand.

Social commerce is about managing customer relationships (we call it Sustaining Social CRM) – providing your customers with exclusive shopping opportunities and deals and not just pushing a barrage of self-congrats wall posts, tweets and ads.

At ShoppeSafe we do this not by filling up the Facebook Wall with deals but by respecting your consumer’s relationship with your brand on any and all of the social communities important to them. This includes mobile smart phone while also opening a special e-commerce channel on Facebook, Twitter, MyHome pages, specialized landing pages and our local, regional and national shopping portals. We call this enhancing your Social Management.

Our social commerce opportunity is also totally designed to move your best consumers to advocate status, those who want to do business with you and are happy to talk about your business. The result totally avoids treating social and mobile marketing like a traditional sales channel.

While exclusive Deal-of-the-Day pricing and couponing is the obvious way to do this…there are also good reasons to offer your best customers (your promoters) your best prices because they are effectively your volunteer viral sales force.

What if you could be easily guiding your consumers to buy more from you using Sustaining Social CRM marketing service which enables you to maintain complete control of your daily deal while consumers share it with others.
What if you could dynamically set the Daily Deals pricing, margin and frequency based on what makes sense for your business.
What if you could have at your fingertips a social and mobile management engine that eliminates the need for redundant social management headcount.
What if you could use a trusted social and mobile sharing engine that creates new conversations for your brand which leads to more business, more new customers, higher order values, higher order frequency and more daily brand impressions?
What if all of this social behavior was tracked with a sophisticated social and mobile analytical package so you can see how your social and mobile program is generating orders in real time.

Well, what I just described is ShoppeSafe. A focused and targeted enhanced Daily Deal marketing service for your business coupled with a Sustaining Social CRM remarketing engine. The ShoppeSafe service is designed for your business to not only get new customers but also to maximize the value of these customer relationships while also help you convert your current web traffic and email broadcasts not only into new buyers but help you increase their frequency of purchasing and lift your average orders. This has all been proven out through our analytics and client renewals.

Currently, a Deal of the Day site (like Groupon/Living Social) just delivers new customer traffic at your doorstep. This could be good or bad depending what you are paying for each customer. However, the fact does remain that you have made an investment in each of these consumers. This could be as much as $5-20 per customer. Now, the challenge for anyone’s business is how do you bring these customers back for another purchase and at better order levels. Bottom line: how do you generate a return on your customer investment while also building a lasting customer relationship so you are not just getting one order (your first) from this buyer group?

At ShoppeSafe we have cracked the code on how you can do all of this. And our clients are benefiting from turning on Daily Deals and Sustaining Social CRM engines all at the same time. Baked into our solutions is a seamless social management sharing tool your consumers will really enjoy using.

To learn more, simply give us a call 612-349-2740 or email us at sales@shoppesimplenetwork.com for a short presentation. I guarantee that you must be satisfied with the ShoppeSafe service or you won’t pay us a dime. Period End.

Looking forward to your call,

Jeffery

CEO and Founder

ShoppeSimpleNetwork.com

P.S. – Give us a call and ask about our June Try Us program.

Is Your Social Toast Burning? … Ideas from ShoppeSimple Network.

thegies — Tue, 31 May 2011 15:00:25 +0000

Let’s go back to the late 90’s and see which online marketing program was the killer app for customer relationship management (CRM).

Was it Database Segmentation and Management, or Email Marketing?

Many of you have invested in databases but the customer-facing program, the killer CRM app from my seat has always been email marketing.

But something in the last decade has changed. What happened? Unfortunately with all the economic pressures of 2000 present, email marketing is no longer laying CRM eggs that are golden.

You just have to look at email from a consumer’s perspective. When you do, that picture is certainly not pretty.

If you are like most online merchants we speak to, email marketing (although your number one or two most profitable sales/marketing channel) has likely seen a dramatic decline in efficiency and effectiveness over the last few years. If you would take it one step further and ask your consumer for their opinion about your email program, I wonder what feedback you would receive.

As marketers we have frankly blown it! Destroyed the golden goose of email marketing and all the CRM potential it holds. You simply need to answer these few questions to know the lack of its CRM scalability in the next few years.

Have your email captures been declining?
Have you needed to capture emails with questionable permission tactics to maintain capture levels?
Are you seeing email opens decline?
Have you seen your deliverable rate decline? (people setting up ghost email addresses to not be spammed)
How many personal email addresses do you have online to hide your identity?
Are you seeing your email clickthroughs declining?
Have you increased your email cadence in the last 2 years? Are you seeing better results per cadence?
Have you seen opt-outs remain flat over the last 2 years?

Now for an alternative view, if email ever were taxed as a revenue source for the internet (i.e. – sales tax nexus …yes, vision out what that would do to your decisions to use it) how would that affect your email channel and, on a bigger view, your entire online business? If you think taxation will never happen, policy-makers have made decisions before to the detriment of business. I remember when postage cost 12 cents. Let me ask you. As a result of the massive postage increases we had in the last decade, what does your catalog circulation look like today vs only 3 years ago?

I think we all, as marketers, need to begin thinking about how to respect our consumers email inboxes; how to effectively change our email programs to better benefit our consumers; how to right the email ship around making your email CRM program more effective.

So what is the next killer app for CRM in the age of Social Media?

Have you ever thought about your Social Media program in terms of Customer Relationship Management?
Have you thought about using your current customers to AMPLIFY your brand offers and conversations to acquire new customers and new social commerce revenue?

If you haven’t, it is time to jump on your bike and begin peddling hard and fast. No business can continue to churn up customer relationships and then allow them to simply slide into the 13+ month segment any longer.

#1 Have you looked at your 13+ month buyer file and viewed the relative numbers and percentage of one time buyers in this group?

#2 Have you determined what it costs to acquire each order?

#3 Have you totaled the cost of lost income from #1 multiplied by #2 to your business.

“The Path to Social Proof” is the theory that people will do something when they see others doing it. This applies even more when these people are similar to us. We often decide what to do (perhaps make a purchase) based on what others are doing. It isn’t the only factor in our buying decision-making process but it is a key one. Social media and Social Proof are tied at the hip.

Social Sharing, “the broadcasting of our thoughts and activities”, is another new trend in Social media. According to Harvard Business Review it is part of a new more macro trend they call “ubiquitous sharing”. It’s not a fad — it’s growing and growing. Social Sharing is a social phenomenon.

• What are you doing?

• Where are you doing it?

• Who are you doing it with?

• What do you like?

• Who do you “Like”?

• Who are you “Following” and who are your

“ADVOCATES” (people who spread the message about you)

At ShoppeSimple Network we have fused the concepts of Social Proof with Social Sharing into a powerful and proven Sustaining Social CRM program we developed and call Push The Button.

ShoppeSimple Network’s Push The Button program plugs directly into your business and enhances what you are already doing with social and mobile media. Quickly through Push The Button, your consumers will be having conversations with their “Trusted Referrals” AMPLYIFYING your brand offers to consumers you know and, more importantly, consumers you don’t know through Facebook, Twitter, email, MyHome pages, ShoppeHub, ShoppeSafe and, certainly not least, mobile sharing.

Through Push The Button, you will see higher average order values, increase order conversion rates, find new social consumers and reactivate older ones by delivering permissioned, brand messaging multiple times a day, 365 days a year. We do all of this for your business turnkey. You will be up and running in less than 10 days without any up front implementation costs. We simply work with you for an affordable monthly subscription fee or revenue share, whichever works best for you.

Why not let us show you how Push the Button will work for your business and drive new incremental social and mobile commerce in as little as 30 days or you don’t pay. That’s our guarantee.

Best

Jeffery

P.S. - This week, I spoke to a full house of marketers at the Midwest Direct Marketing Association’s Annual Conference. My talk was entitled “Is Your Social Toast Burning?”. It was a really fun presentation and it gave me an AHA moment or two.

The first was when I asked the room by a show of hands, “How many felt that their business was Doing Social Right?” The answer was no hands raised. Not surprised!

The second was when I asked, “How many in the audience were generating at least 1% of their online sales volume using social media?” Hands raised… ZERO…yes ZERO!

This led me to think maybe your organization would like me to speak directly to your Team and help your business take the necessary steps along the path to Social Commerce success. If this makes sense, just call me at 612-349-2740 or email me at jeff@shoppesimplenetwork.com.

P.P.S. - You will be able to view the MDMA presentation on June 3rd by clicking here.

Sustaining Social Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

thegies — Wed, 25 May 2011 02:12:03 +0000

Dictionary.com lists the following definitions for the words:

“Sustaining”

to support, hold, or bear up from below; bear the weight of, as a structure.
to bear (a burden, charge, etc.).
to undergo, experience, endure without giving way or yielding.

“Social”

pertaining to, devoted to, or characterized by friendly companionship or relations: a social club.
seeking or enjoying the companionship of others; friendly; sociable: gregarious

“Customer Relationship Management (CRM)”

The practice of building a strong relationship between a business and its customers and potential customers.

Dear Erin,

I hope this question has a resounding positive answer: What if your business could get higher average orders values, higher frequency of ordering, higher conversion percentages, more new customers, reactivate of older buyers and have multiple brand impressions that are permissioned every day?

Would you test a program that could deliver to your business any one of these metrics or any combination of them? Of course you would under two conditions:

First, the program would generate an ROI your business could afford; and second, you are not just moving dollars from one channel marketing program to another.

So if it can be proven to you that both case 1 and 2 occurred. Should you test this program? Of course you should. This is what the exact nature of market testing is all about. I sense your business does this all the time. If you could get these returns would you make this market testing a priority?

Well, this is exactly what The ShoppeSimple Network program is providing our clients and what we would like to test with your business.

In fact, we are so convinced that this program will work for your business (like it has worked for every other client) we have a special and guaranteed offer for your business.

I will tell you about this guaranteed offer in a minute please read on…

Have you done a Groupon/LivingSocial offer? Have you sent out a catalog or a direct mailing with a planned 60-70% list rental and 30-40% buyers? How many of your do a PPC program?

In any of these cases, what do you do once you land a new customer? What do you do to capture another order from this first or repeat buyer? How much money are you willing to invest to get another order?

So let’s look at the Social Coupon business model which is essentially a revenue share, new customer acquisition business and let’s run some simple math

Let’s say you have a product and you gave 50% off on this offer and you had a 50% product margin. So a product which sells at $50 retail is now being sold to the consumer for $25. Now these Social Coupon businesses take another 50% so you are left with $12.50 to cover your new customer acquisition. Let’s say you were very successful with your offer and landed 1,000 customers. That would mean you paid 12.50 times 1,000 customers or $12,500 for this offer. A revenue share deal. But when you planned this offer did you consider you would be out $12,500?

But you are now also under water by $12,500 and what do these Social Coupon sites do to help you recoup your new customer investment. NOTHING…NADA… ZILCH! The only thing that could make this scenario worse, is if your existing customers are also the ones redeeming the deal.

What do you do to maintain a Sustaining Social CRM program with these consumers?

For those in the catalog space or pure ecom space…I can hear you thinking, “I would never do a deal like that.”

Well, let’s take a look at a pure ecom company who uses Pay Per Click (PPC) marketing. You manage 100 keywords and you pay .75 per click on average. You spend $12,500 a month on PPC instead of social couponing and you get a 1% conversion. So what does this look like from an initial customer acquisition cost perspective?

Let’s keep the same margins and spending level. $12,500 dollars is 16,666 clicks and the number of orders at 1% conversion is 166 orders. At 166 orders you brought gross profit to the business at $25 per sale which is $4,125. So your out of pocket loss to do PPC per customer is $8,375 ($4125-$12,500)/166 orders = $50.45 (LOSS) Gulp. If your conversion is 2% just half this number.

Would you have guessed that PPC cost per order was $50.45/12.50 or 4X more expensive than Social Couponing for your business?

It’s no wonder that in two years Social Couponing has exploded to a 3 Billion industry and is projected to be 6 billion in 2 years.

Pareto’s Principle from Wikipedia…(also known as the 80-20 rule, the law of the vital few, and the principle of factor sparsity) states that, for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. You can restate the 80/20 as it applies to CRM where your customers drive 80% of your revenue so why is there such a missing focus on retention marketing (CRM). Now, adding the Social layer, why are you not focusing energy, resources and budget on building lifetime value of your business? They would argue that they are, just maybe not in the coupon space yet

Proof in point

The ShoppeSimple Network’s Sustaining Social CRM

Now, for the first time you can manage your consumers’ Lifetime Value efficiently and effectively. We simply plug into your business and in less than 10 days you are driving Sustaining Social CRM eCommerce sales. We don’t replace what you are doing in social and mobile commerce we enhance it.

Let me show you how…Let’s follow what we are doing for Signals.com. Signals has loaded our “Push The Button” widget in their website header and in their email and Facebook Store. Because of this, they are also mobile enabled and their consumers can mobile order through The ShoppeSimple Network’s digital properties directly to the Signals website shopping cart. It is important to note ShoppeSafe doesn’t collect any personal identifiable consumer information/data.

Take a look at the top right of the Signals website. Consumers see this Push the Button everywhere they go on their website. By the way, you can manage the copy as you would like and you do not have to focus on deals. This is client dependent.

When Consumers Push the Button they are taken to a trusted 3rd party page we build for every client and it can match the look and feel of your branding. From Push The Button widget to your branded ShoppeHub page, consumers now can Pull-Place-Buy-N-Share relevant and targeted offers. These offers can also be pulled by the consumer to appear on their ShoppeHub page which they bookmark or subscribe too. Click here for an example.

On Facebook ShoppeFans Store.

The consumer can also place these offers on Shoppesafe.com, their personal home pages on iGoogle, MyYahoo and MyMSN. Plus from the merchants ShoppeHub page consumers can text, email, Like, Tweet offers to their “Trusted Referrals and print or enable digital coupons with barcodes.

You may be thinking, “why would I want to direct my valuable traffic away from my site and onto your ShoppeHub page?” The answer lies in our secret sauce. As I said at the beginning of this blog post, would you do this if you could increase average order values, conversions, order frequency, new customers, reactivations and brand exposures? Of course you would.So now is the time to provide your business with a “skin in the game” guarantee. You must be happy with the program results or you just don’t pay us. Period End.

My hope is that you will contact me to start your Sustaining Social CRM program for your business. Please reach me by phone at 612-349-2740 or by email sales@shoppesimplenetwork.com.

Best

Jeffery

PS. Please join me for our June Webinar “Is Your Social Toast Burning” on Wednesday June 22nd at 2 PM ET.

Feel free to forward this eNewsletter to colleagues who might find the topics covered here of interest or would be interested in learning more about working with The ShoppeSimple Network.

Social Paradox...ideas from ShoppeSimple Network

thegies — Sun, 22 May 2011 00:00:27 +0000

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a buzzword that has been around for a decade or more. Most businesses have invested heavily in CRM but have your thought about your Social program in terms of CRM?

In fact, social commerce is all about managing customer relationships and a more broadly defined consumer relationship. Why consumer relationships? Well, the opportunity to speak to consumers through a “Trusted Referral” network is what Social and Mobile Commerce is all about.

Over my career, I have looked at more site analytics than I would care to disclose (it shows my age) and these analytics are continuing to wobble.

We know that home page site defectioncontinue to be at an all time high. But unfortunately for many merchants legacy website architecture precludes fast changes and therefore appropriate defenses for these consumer defections are necessary.

Email opens and clickthrough rates continue to go south; however increasing your email’s send frequency is not the answer. For instance my wife signed up for LivingSocial and she used to get one email deal a day. Now LivingSocial is sending her 4 emails with deals per day. How has your email cadence changed over the last 2 years?

Back to my wife… she is just ignoring all LivingSocial emails now. So are opt-outs the behavioral analytic metric to look at anymore? … she said, I am just not opening LivingSocial emails anymore. So what is your open rate vs. opt-out rate? Have you been looking at this and tying it back to email cadence? Perhaps like above you should now look at these metrics from a CRM perspective and determine what message does your email cadence send to your consumer about your brand? Is it a sustaining social message?

And now merchants are rushing to the Wild, Wild West of f-commerce (Facebook commerce) and soon m-commerce (mobile commerce). How will these marketing platforms drive new revenue channels for your business? What lessons should we marketers not bring to f-commerce and m-commerce from our years of experience in CRM?

I will tick off just a few and see how many stick.

Are you putting up a barrage of self-congrats wall posts and ads on your Facebook page?

Are you putting up full stores on Facebook (like JC Penny/ASOS) and asking your Facebook consumers to wade through 1400 products just like you do on your website? How are you protecting your consumer’s credit card and behavioral data on Facebook from leaks?

Are you truly gaining marketing permission from your consumer and letting them decide what they offers/content they would like to see from you?

Are you forcing a consumer to “Like” you before you let them enter your brand page/store on Facebook?

ShoppeSafe can enhance your social marketing programs and help you get up and running with a new Sustainable Social CRM program which will drive incremental social and mobile commerce revenue.

ShoppeSafe can assist by helping you build a truly unique and fun shopping experience for your consumer that is not only highly relevant (CRM) but is permissioned by your consumer everyday, 365 days a year. We call this Sustainable Social CRM. Now through ShoppeSafe your business will deliver relevant and highly targeted offers by category directly to your consumers on Facebook through our ShoppeFans program and to a multitude of other online communities where your consumers want to review your offers and content including their smart phones. We enable your message to go to wherever your consumer is online and on mobile. And we enable you to do it with just a simple one-click.

We do not recommend that you follow the traditional marketing model of dumping your product catalog on Facebook or on mobile. This is simply Push-N-Pray marketing. And it is dying. But instead through ShoppeSafe you now can provide the opportunity for your consumer to self-select the relevant offers and/or category of offers they would like and have then add it to their profile pages on Facebook or to the mobile smart phones using our ShoppeFans Facebook program. Then since these offers are highly targeted your customer will increase their frequency of purchasing, raise their Average Order Value and have more brand exposures. This has already been proven time and again with our current clients. Plus the sales gains are incremental not channel shift.

Additionally since your consumers are interested in your offers, ShoppeSafe enables them to engage in “Trusted Referrals” with their friends and families causing your offers to go VIRAL. What that means is new customers drive new revenue coming to your business through “Trusted Referrals”.

Would you ask a customer on your website for their email address before they are allowed to shop? I see this as a stop sign to effective Facebook brand marketing.
I hope you wouldn’t but everyday I visit brand Facebook pages that require me to “Like” the brand before entering. I get that building a “Like” database is important but not as important than having a trusted conversation and sharing your offers with others who would be interested in what you are selling. It is somewhat like putting the cart before the horse.

Instead why not focus on creating a unique and private offer channel on Facebook/Twitter or mobile and turn your Likes and Followers into true fans that will spread your offers virally. Then since you are providing unique value to them, they will organically and holistically want to Like/Follow or text others about your offers.

For those of you who were around the net when we began marketing through email this is exactly how email marketing took hold. The circle of web marketing repeats itself.

Now you may be thinking Social is different or our CEO sees this so differently then for you and your CEO there is an interesting Whitepaper recently published by IBM, which may spin your head around. “From social media to Social CRM: What Customers Want” The study, by Carolyn Heller Baird and Gautam Parasnis, conducted on the back of the finding that customer closeness is new the top priority for CEOs, shows a complete perception gap between businesses and why think people connect with them on social media, and why people actually do connect with them on social media. The study shows that, Businesses think people least connect for deals and to purchase, whereas people most connect for deals and purchase.

Perception versus reality

“Sixty-five percent of businesses view social media as a new source for revenue but, at the same time, many believe receiving discounts or coupons and purchasing products or services are among the least likely reasons a customer would seek them out on social sites. Ironically, though, consumers say getting tangible value is the top reason they interact with a company, which is good news for those organizations hoping to monetize social media”

To this point, this week I attended and spoke at a meeting for CEO’s and truth be told their understanding around social was surprisingly lacking. In fact, not a person in this group has yet to crack the code on making money in social not that they said they haven’t tried. In fact comments like it is too complicated was more the norm than I need to figure out how this will work for us and how it will make us money.

So my talk looked something like this… ShoppeSafe integrates and enhances with your social marketing by leveraging existing assets of traditional marketing with powerful new Sustaining Social CRM tools, which we have developed that are adapted for your specific business.

We call these marketing tools Sustainable Social CRM.

We don’t just create social and mobile widgets.

We don’t just build Facebook shopping pages.

We guide you in maintaining control of your message at the same time it is being talked about by your customers.

Then these customer views are considered to be honest, trustworthy and credible. They are not self-serving corporate brand messages. They are not spam or slapping stuff on a Facebook wall. It is all about and around Sustainable Social CRM where consumers help define your brand. They help you spread your brand virally because a brand is more of a perception than a logo or a product.

Customers connecting with you on social and mobile media should be about shopping AND deals. Just throwing up a Facebook store with tons of products we have found through our A/B split test analytics simply won’t maximize the selling opportunity for your business – we believe you need to offer what your consumers want and then deliver it to wherever they are online or on mobile.

You should also use special Facebook Fan pricing too. Offering special fan pricing provides a unique incentive for your fans (promoters) of your business. In fact those that are should be qualified to be your viral Facebook/Twitter and mobile Sales Force. We also think Facebook ShoppeFans stores, offering fan-first offers (get it before others) and fan-exclusive offers (fan only merchandise) are obvious and major ways to grow a platform that is the largest selling opportunity on the planet.

This is why we have developed a Sustainable Social CRM marketing program to target consumer and deliver your product content/offers through our ShoppeSafe program wherever they are online or on mobile smartphones.

Why not take a ½ hour to learn about the ShoppeSafe program in a personal presentation. Or you start to learn more about ShoppeSafe.com at ShoppeSimplenetwork.com Check out the webinars and online tutorials.

Please give us a call 612-349-2740 or email sales@shoppesimplenetwork.com to schedule a presentation. We would welcome the opportunity to share what we are doing and you can see us in action on shoppesafe.com our consumer direct portal.

Best,

Jeffery

PS. You can be up and running with the ShoppeSafe Sustainable Social CRM program in less than 10 days and without any implementation costs. Plus the cost is affordable and is based on a simple monthly subscription model and fits all sizes of business from small-mid-to even very large businesses.

Social Sharing The Next Big Thing?...ideas from ShoppeSafe

thegies — Thu, 12 May 2011 15:59:34 +0000

Social Sharing according to Harvard Business Review is part of a new more macro trend called ubiquitous sharing: What are you doing? Where are you doing it? Who are you doing it with? What do you like? Who do you “Like”? Who are you “Following” and who are “Followers” of you? These used to be things we kept to ourselves or shared with only our friends and family. Now we’re willing to broadcast them to whoever is willing to listen.

Social media has led to “social sharing,” the broadcasting of our thoughts and activities. It’s not a fad it’s growing and growing. Social networking is a social phenomenon.

For further proof, just take a look at Nielsen research. It says Americans spend nearly a quarter of the time they’re on the Internet, or about six hours a month, on social-networking sites and blogs. That’s a quantum leap from a year ago and underscores the growing power of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

The research also reveals U.S. consumers spend the plurality of their time online, or 36% of it, communicating and networking across social networks, blogs, personal e-mail and instant messaging.

The rise of social networks has enhanced consumption of videos, movies and news and sports articles. “Friends and family are endorsing content to others,” says Dave Martin, vice president of primary research at Nielsen.

And the face of that audience is getting older: Twice as many Americans over 50 visited social networks than kids under 18, Nielsen says.

It’s a sociological phenomenon, accelerating at light speed. For even more data points you just have to look around the Social Coupons sites and the players who are deeply involved with them from Google to Amazon and now Facebook. One just wonders how long will Groupon be able to stand on its own?

All of this points to just how social sharing is and will continue to change the ecommerce landscape.

So let’s step back and ask the obvious questions what is your Social Sharing strategy? How much time and expense will it take before your Social Sharing strategy is online? How will measure your Social Sharing Success?

Struggling with those answers…hold the thought as ShoppeSafe has an offer for you and it is guaranteed…simply see below!

Social Currency. Sharing on the social web acts as a form of currency. Sharing useful information that might help someone within your network scores you points and builds equity. Sharing is also the new giving. Finding a deal and sharing that with others can put you in someone’s favor, and maybe then they will find you a deal. It’s important to recognize that all this sharing isn’t some useless impulse. There are reasons why people are willing to share so much. Creative expression is part of it but also, there’s often a benefit, value, to the individual who shares. Sharing is the new giving.

Social sharing according to the Harvard Business Review is a major behavioral shift, the most important so far of the 21st century. And the information we choose to share with friends, co-workers and even strangers, is re-defining the idea of what’s private and public before our very eyes.

Charlie Brown ShoppeSimple Network’s – VP of Interactive and Creative Services weighs in with his blog post.

Social Sharing: Sharing is a part of our DNA.

We are hardwired to cooperate and to share. If someone has something you fancy…you offer to share it. Now, sharing isn’t like trading–you don’t have to give up something to get something else (unless it’s your money you are giving up to buy something).

Sharing is a way of getting along–we share a meal– we share a border with Canada and Mexico. It makes us feel good to share. Facebook didn’t invent sharing–they just exploited it.

Sometimes sharing is boasting or bragging. We take pride in the fact that we got a good deal. It’s one of the ways we make ourselves feel good and someone else at the same time.

If I don’t share I am keeping a secret–it’s difficult to keep a secret–it takes energy. It’s a relief when we can finally share it and release the burden of not being able to tell anyone. I can hardly wait to get home and share with my wife what I just heard–now don’t tell anyone (of course, I will).

As cavemen we sat around the fire at night (like sitting in front of our brightly lit monitor at home) and sharing hunting stories (shopping is like a hunt). Sometimes we embellish the hunting story–like making a comment on Facebook. We add our part (part of our personality) to the story. And then the story gets retold many times at it becomes a “legend” (a huge story that we love to listen to again and again).

Sometimes they become rumors and everyone loves a big fat juicy rumor. It’s like telling a joke. It’s entertaining, people laugh and we get accepted into the community of our friends.

But you may be thinking just how does ShoppeSafe help our site with Social Sharing and how do we get started?

Well it is really quite simple and it starts by placing a ShoppeSafe button on your website or your email or on your Facebook page. Then your consumer just pushes the button…

But wait a button on my website? Why would take the consumer away from my website. Why would I do that?

Another colleague Steve Neseth had a dialog with a prospective client on just this point this week so I am going to quote his response…I couldn’t have said it better myself…”This is a common concern we hear as traditional thinking says drive more traffic to your website and you will generate more sales. The trend, however, is that website traffic for many merchants is a struggle to maintain let alone increase. At least some of this is due to the growing amount of time consumers are spending on social media channels and on their mobile devices away from merchant websites. The ShoppeSafe program is geared to complement everything you’re doing online already by linking your online store to these exciting, new marketing channels that consumers can access easily wherever they are.”

“One of our best practices, as we discussed, is to put a ShoppeSafe button on the merchant home page and on each product category page (Signals.com, for example, has placed a button on all of these pages). This enables consumers to subscribe (or bookmark) to receive relevant product offers by category. Consumers then receive products of interest multiple times a day/365 days a year that they buy and easily share on Facebook, Twitter, through email, or text. They literally extend your marketing reach to their friends by creating “trusted referrals”. Sales builds virally. A recent survey by Lightspeed Research reported that 61% of the consumers they polled said opinions, referrals and experience of other consumers play a vital role when considering a purchase. Our program can help a merchant create these trusted referrals that sell more merchandise.”

“Having said all that, placing a button on the website home page is not required to participate in our program. We would not recommend it but that choice is yours. Some merchants actually prefer to step into our program through email or Facebook to prove that we can drive sales before they put any links on their website. So, a merchant has several options available in our program all of which will build online sales very cost effectively.

Putting Our Money Where Our Mouth Is!

I know that many of you have been reading my blog posts on a weekly or monthly basis. But what is also interesting is to watch are your behaviors. To understand why you have not kicked the ShoppeSafe program into gear or at least formulated a trial program with us to see for yourself the benefits of the ShoppeSafe program.

So in our internal meetings this week, I asked our Sales Team what do they think they needed to do to make a sales deal happen and the following is another real life example that went to a prospective client.

And from my point of view if this opportunity is good enough for a prospective client it is good enough for any of you who are reading this today. All you have to do is get in contact with me to start your test program.

“Mary, the forecasted amount of sales that I provided and that would come through the ShoppeSafe program you indicated was higher than you thought it could be. You pointed out that our monthly minimum meant that you’d have to hit a monthly sales target that was higher than you thought you could attain given your other online program’s performance.

I told you that I’m so confident that the sales forecasted was reasonable based on what others are generating in the program. I also want to reiterate that these forecasts are not based on channel shift but on real incremental program increases from higher average order or more frequency of purchasing plus adding new customers and reactivating older buyers. In our call, I was so confident that I actually told you on the spot that we’d cut the minimum in half because I don’t think it will even come into play. But, I’ll do even better than that. We won’t charge you a dime until the sales generated in the program covers the monthly minimum for an unlimited amount of time as long as this is a win/win for both our companies. I also feel strongly that a company of your size would easily build up to a level that exceeds this minimum very soon. This assumes, of course, that we’re implementing some of the best practices we would recommend during the start up of the program so the program has a reasonable chance for success. But you’ll have the final say on what we do.

We also talked about order attribution and how difficult it is to differentiate one ecommerce program’s impact from the next. Here again, we’ve had success separating out the incremental gains we create through our program like I showed you in my initial forecast. The ShoppeSafe program produces higher average order values, higher frequency of ordering and improves conversion rates. Improvements in any of these areas will easily cover any cost of the program many times over as my conservative forecast illustrated.”

So there you have it. And I will say it again…what is good for this prospective client is good for your business too. So this opportunity is available to you because we know and have proven time and again that we can help you drive incremental social commerce. We know this because we haven’t lost a client since March of 2010 and we are so confidant we also do this for your business we are putting our skin in the game to prove it to you and as such I hope you will give us a try.

What do you have to loose? And remember we are not recommending to replace what you are doing in social but we have found a successful way to enhance what you are doing.

So why not check out ShoppeSimplenetwork.com to learn more about what we do for you. To get started all you have to do is email at sales@shoppesimplenetwork.com or call me at 612-349-2740.

Looking forward to hearing from you,

Best,

Jeffery

PS. Your ShoppeSafe Social Sharing program will be plugged into your business in less than 10 days and without any up front implementation fees

From a post - Geoff Cottrill - CMO Converse

thegies — Sun, 08 May 2011 14:12:26 +0000

Converse now has more than 15 million fans on Facebook, which is almost four times the number for its parent company, Nike and about eight times as many as Adidas.

Social media has the potential for companies to act more like human beings and be forced into thinking about marketing and message control in a different way. But social media has the potential to mature into a powerful hybrid of traditional marketing techniques and community engagement, especially if that community becomes your brand advocates. Which is why we focus on a couple of core marketing truths via social –- be relevant, make a connection, be useful, etc. From Mashable.com

thegies — Sun, 08 May 2011 13:48:00 +0000

From SocialMediaExaminer.com

When Content Science sends their quarterly e-newsletter to their mailing list, their email open rate is 50%.

“Well, of course,” I hear you saying. “Sending an e-newsletter to subscribers who have opted in would most certainly have a fairly high open rate.”

Exactly.

So why would you want to broadcast your online message to millions of people who couldn’t care less, and be happy with a 3% click-through rate? Why are you still marketing online the same way you marketed offline?

A 2010 article in Harvard Business Review states the case clearly. “To compete in this aggressively interactive environment, companies must shift their focus from driving transactions to maximizing customer lifetime value. That means making products and brands subservient to long-term customer relationships.”

This is exactly what we help you do at ShoppeSafe and let us show you with an online presentation how to use trusted testimonials to grow your social commerce channel. Simply. email me at sales@shoppesimplenetwork.com or phone 612-349-2740 to set up a presentation.

How does ShoppeSafe help our site with Social Sharing?

thegies — Sat, 07 May 2011 16:47:52 +0000

But you may be thinking how does ShoppeSafe help our site with Social Sharing and how do we get started?

Well it is really quite simple and it starts by placing a ShoppeSafe button on your website.

But wait a button on my website? Why would take the consumer away from my website. Why would I do that?

”This is a common concern we hear as traditional thinking says drive more traffic to your website and you will generate more sales. The trend, however, is that website traffic for many merchants is a struggle to maintain let alone increase. At least some of this is due to the growing amount of time consumers are spending on social media channels and on their mobile devices away from merchant websites. Our program is geared to complement everything you’re doing online already by linking your online store to these exciting, new marketing channels that consumers can access easily wherever they are.”

Steve Neseth

SVP – Business Development

ShoppeSimple Network

Sharing is a part of our DNA.

thegies — Sat, 07 May 2011 16:42:27 +0000

Sharing is a part of our DNA.

Sharing is a way of getting along–we share a meal– we share a border with Canada and Mexico. It makes us feel good to share. Facebook didn’t invent sharing–they just exploited it.

Sometimes sharing is boasting or bragging. We take pride in the fact that we got a good deal. It’s one of the ways we make ourselves feel good and someone else at the same time.

Sometimes they become rumors and everyone loves a big fat juicy rumor. It’s like telling a joke. It’s entertaining, people laugh and we get accepted into the community of our friends.

Charlie Brown – VP of Interactive and Client Services

ShoppeSimple Network

Opinions Matter...ideas from ShoppeSimple Network

thegies — Wed, 04 May 2011 12:41:43 +0000

According to a recent LightSpeed Research study most consumers consult the Internet while researching products and services, with online reviews and referrals playing a vital role.

During the purchasing process price comparison may well be the most popular research activity online, with 75% of those surveyed by Lightspeed Research having compared prices online in the last six months, but the online opinions, referrals and experiences of other consumers play a vital role, too, for many (61%).

Consumers expect to find product reviews on shopping websites (72%) while around half (47%) seek them out on company websites (trusted referral pages) and 43% on price comparison sites. The majority use search engines to also find reviews and referrals.

So influential are the opinions of others that over two-thirds (67%) of consumers would be deterred from purchasing a product or service if they were to encounter two or three negative reviews, found Lightspeed’s online survey.

In fact, a quarter (24%) said they had changed their mind about buying a product or service after reading two bad reviews while a further 39% said three negative reviews would deter them from making a purchase.

What are you doing to stimulate ‘Trusted Referrals’?

At ShoppeSafe we know the incredible power of reviews and more importantly ‘Trusted Referrals’ as we’ve built our business around “Trusted Referrals”. They are deeply integrated into every offer or content feed from our ShoppeHub merchant network pages and as such an integral part of our selling engine for both merchants and consumers. Why do we know how powerful 3rd-party ‘Trusted Referrals’ are? Because our ShoppeStats social and mobile analytic reporting metrics shares and supports our business model as each of our merchant shopping/content pages generate visitation from our website, email and Facebook merchant Power Buttons to their specific ShoppeHub pages which then generates higher order conversion, increased average order and enable new consumers to find merchants of their choosing.

How does all of this work so well? Well for the first time consumers are in total control of the offers and content that they want to receive and has given the merchant permission to reach them multiple times a day, 365 days a year wherever they are. They have opted-out of traditional Push-N-Pray marketing efforts and now opted-into the new world of Pull-Place-Buy-Share(tm) marketing.
Pull – consumers receive only the offers or content they want. They allow targeted and highly relevant offers of their choosing.
Place – your offers or content and in some cases your website goes where your consumers are. You only have to look at the growth of Facebook, Twitter, MyHome pages and mobile selling to know the world is no longer hanging out or exclusively coming back to your website.
Buy – through our ShoppeStats analytics we see consumers buying more from ShoppeSafe merchant posts and starting the program than they did and this has been confirmed by A/B split tests and at greater frequency of purchasing while also feeling better about your brand.
Share – Now with one click, consumers can easily move your offers and content to their friends/Likes on Facebook, Followers on Twitter, email their contact list, text their address book or print an offer and bring it into your store.
At ShoppeSafe all of these options are now easily and efficiently available to participating merchants and they provide new social and mobile sharing tools, which also immediately open up the opportunity for your business to engage in facilitating ‘trusted referrals’ with your consumers. Why wouldn’t you want to further engage with consumers who are already stopping by your stores, sites, Facebook and email not to mention now also shopping with their smart phones. These are the next obvious waves of marketing opportunities for merchants.

And you know for yourself when you are in the market to buy, probably one of the first things you do is seek a “trusted referral”. So influential are the opinions of others that over two-thirds (67%) of consumers would be deterred from purchasing a product or service if they were to encounter two or three negative reviews, found Lightspeed’s online survey.

With these ShoppeSafe “Trusted Referrals” tools from ShoppeSafe’s ShoppeHub along with the consumer’s understanding that their shopping experience is safe, private and anonymous your business through the ShoppeSafe network will engage and have new levels of social and mobile conversations with not only your consumers but their friends and family as well. Imagine the exponential leverage of that marketing opportunity and its selling power.

So why not give The ShoppeSimple Network a try? Your ShoppeSafe business channel will be up and running on the ShoppeSimple Network including ShoppeSafe.com, your Facebook ShoppeFans Pages, your Twitter Store pages, new Personal MyHome pages on iGoogle, MyYahoo and MyMSN, email, mobile smart phones and your very own merchant ShoppeHub pages. You will get all of this up and running for your business in less then 10 days with zero implementation fees and at an affordable monthly rate based on your business size. Plus, we guarantee you must be successful or you don’t pay us.

What could be more simple than that. Plus if you give me a call 612-249-2740 or email jeff@shoppesimplenetwork.com by May 30th, we will also provide a FREE social and mobile consultation for your business.

Best,

Jeffery

Are Consumers TRUSTING You?...ideas from ShoppeSimple Network

thegies — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 01:30:10 +0000

Do consumers TRUST your brand?

How would you know?

What TRUST measurements/analytics are in place to prove what you believe? If you are right have you asked yourself and organization then why are site analytics and comparables down year over year? Perhaps, you’ve asked the question; Why are my channel marketing costs rising yet, we are not seeing more traffic coming to the site at a cost per visit we can afford?

If you have your consumer’s TRUST why are email opens just 20% and declining. Why are email clickthroughs at the lowest level in years? Why are orders being touched by multi-channel and therefore the marketing spend per order is higher this year than last? What channels are providing my orders at the lowest cost per order?

Why do we have less than 1/10 of 1% of our traffic “Liking”, “Following” or Sharing our content on Facebook and Twitter. Why have we yet to find a way to engage with our Mobile consumer? If we have our consumer’s “TRUST” then why are we not doing something with them in mobile? What is our mobile strategy for 2011? When is it executing? You mean we don’t have one to launch in time for Holiday 2011? Lost time in our business is obviously lost revenue.

Does this all sound like a broken record…well it is designed to be…in repetition comes glimmers of aha moments and then breakthrough moments of geezz finally…We Got It… This is why I continue to pound home on these concepts week after week. It is what we coach our new clients on too. Deftly taking them over their “Bridge to Believe” around Social and Mobile Commerce, which obviously isn’t easy for them either. Who said it would be easy to change your culture? Who said it would be easy to go where you haven’t gone before?

But The ShoppeSimple Network (SSN) has 3^rd party marketing service tools that make it really simple, easy and timely to have TRUSTED conversations with consumers which inevitably drive incremental business. In fact, your SSN program soup to nuts will be up and running in less than 10 days without any implementation fees. Your social and mobile conversations will begin that fast and in less than 30 days you will have new incremental revenue coming to your business. We also have a growing collaborative merchant network; ShoppeSafe.com now 126 strong who are defining social and mobile best practices. You get to be part of that too.

A pure-permission portal, the first of its kind, where consumers get to select the merchant(s) they want to have a conversation through Pull-Place-Buy-Share™.marketng.

To gain a sense of how the consumer experience works click over to http://www.Signals.com and click on the SSN Power Button at the top right of the page. Then click on the + sign and play with the consumer sharing tools for Social and Mobile sharing. We are excited about this ShoppeSafe.com growth and we are pacing at around 50 new client relationships each week.

I have been asked all the time why are merchants inclined to work with The ShoppeSimple Network?

One of the key components of our success is that we enable consumers to gain control over their advertising, since traditional marketing methods, such as push-n-pray no longer work. For years merchants believed that the best way to reach customers was to spray them with a fire hose of untargeted, or irrelevant offers something we’ve termed Push-N-Pray marketing model. Why would you want to do this when you consumer has already said please stop doing this! No Mas!!

Again look at your metrics are they going in the right direction? Consumers see value in seeing relevant offers that are highly targeted and decide to buy more frequently because of this targeting. They then Share these offers with their friends on Facebook, Twitter, email and through mobile contacts.

Social conversations and Sharing is by far the new marketing game today. So are you participating in this game? What do you need to do?

Will you wait to reorganize your website and have your IT accomplish this for you? How long will that take? How frustrated are you willing to get? Do you also receive pressure from above to accomplish social and mobile? Isn’t it time to look at outsourcing this important function?

We met with a client this week that said it would take a year for us to incorporate social and mobile capabilities to our website Do you hear the same response from your IT folks? What is your work around plan?

Does your website or store channel marketing enable this level of consumer control, trust, anonymity, data protection (not selling their data online or off) and even a bigger question are you forcing today’s consumer to come back to your site or is your site moving to your consumer

If your answer is yes…then to whom?

These are the Conversations and TRUST factors that are key to marketing to today’s Social and Mobile enabled consumers. So where is your TRUST check list?

At The ShoppeSimple Network through our Shopping Portal ShoppeSafe.com for the first time consumer are in control of their marketing. They can see your offers and passively Pull-Place-Buy-Share them their Facebook Wall and share with their Likes, Tweet their Followers on Twitter and through email and mobile text and send to their contacts. All of this leads to several ShoppeSimple Network key ingredients, which are guaranteed to grow your business.

1. You will get new customers from social and mobile sharing.

2. You will get higher average orders from your consumers because they are continually seeing offers from you multiple times a day, 365 days a year.

3. They are giving you permission to reach them where they are. Not where you are!

4. You will get more frequency of buying from your consumers due to repetitive target marketing.

5. You will reactivate older buyers who have left you. They come back because you are treated them differently….

6. You will positively affect your brand consumer’s user experience.

7. You will positively affect your customer service.

All of these are guaranteed because The ShoppeSimple ShoppeHub page makes all of this happen. Check out this link here <Claire add a link to the Signals Hub>

What is the ShoppeHub Bridge Page?

As you can see from this link <Claire pick a link from a direct merchant>, when you join The ShoppeSimple Network you get a position on ShoppeSafe.com and a ShoppeHub page to display your targeted product offers or content

How do you know it is so? Well simple stop thinking about email being so cheap and look at your open rates of email. Now if it would cost you 25 cents to send an email could you afford to use this channel as you have been doing…Push-N-Pray, then add in the declining site traffic numbers and the obvious growth of Facebook, Twitter and Mobile and what are your conclusions about continuing your Push-N-Pray marketing.

But if Push-Pray isn’t working, what is? The ShoppeSimple Network is, we’ve invented Pull-Place-Buy-Share™ marketing and here’s how it works…

Why the SSN ShoppeHub bridging page is better than your Website’s landing page.

The ShoppeSimple Network offer a a chance for the consumer to choose relevant merchandise based on the category that they are interested in, (such as men’s, women’s, etc. in the case of fashion merchandise). Allowing consumers to gain control to select targeted offers/content they are interested in is the ultimate marketing lever and tipping point. Again it is all about TRUST.

Yes this type of marketing is different from the past. So what is wrong with that? The past should be in the past. The new game is all about TRUSTED REFERRALS and with all due respect…your toast is burning around your consumer’s TRUST with the style of your Push-N-Pray marketing and now you have an opportunity to earn it back using a 3^rd party to help you

That 3^rd party is The ShoppeSimple Network. Also consumers are already bypassing traditional website pages or landing pages and want to pull relevant and highly targeted content that they control. That means your offers need to find your consumers on their social communities or on mobile.

Because consumers can now control their content/offers and select the ones that are highly relevant they will also want to buy and share them with their friends in all social media communities and mobile. The ShoppeHub page makes it incredibly easy for consumers to anonymously browse your offers and select what is relevant for them with clicks. They then can also easily send trusted referral through Facebook, Twitter, email and mobile texting.

What are the advantages of the ShoppeHub Bridge page for the merchant?

Because consumers can “shop” as you would “window shop” in an anonymous fashion (like not having a sales person approach you if are outside the store), and only shop for the items they are interested in as in the “correct aisle” of a brick and mortar store for specific items. The Average Order will be higher, new customer and reactivation will be higher, conversions will be greater, frequency of orders will be much higher. We have seen these metrics in case study after client case study. And since they can easily share offers and content with their friends you will see a whole new flow of new customers driving incremental sales to your business. Wouldn’t you buy from a website or store your friend told you about? Of course you would that is the TRUSTED Referral component of Social and mobile conversations and sharing

A further advantage to the consumer is that once an item is selected they can use any or all of our sharing tools at the bottom of the “drop down box” to share them with their friends, thereby virally increasing the reach of that particular offer. We know that most people have “friends” on social media sites because they have some sort of a relationship with that person and likely have similar interests.

Location is everything

We always suggest to merchants that they can increase social captures 10 fold if they place the ShoppeSafe power button at the top of the page on their website or email or Facebook pages. It’s the old saying Location Location, Location. In this way the button is visible and doesn’t get lost in the clutter of the page. Now let’s take that one step further. If you are looking for a particular item on the merchant’s web site (for example, let’s say “men’s ties”) and you see a button directing you to sale items in that particular category you are more than likely to make a purchase. Again we have proven this time and again with our services.

In fact, to prove the value of The ShoppeSimple Network to your organization through April 30^th you have a couple choices to get started with us. Your business can be on ShoppeSafe.com simply and easily and can get started with your Free monthly trial and learn how your business can benefit from the marketing of ShoppeSafe.com and The ShoppeSimple Network through solid data and real time sales. You can also immediately decide to try us for 4 months for the price of 3. That is a 25% savings. And we will include the entire ShoppeSimple Network suite of services with this trial program. Your monthly subscription fee is determined by your compete.com traffic numbers,

Simply fill out the form <Claire Free trial Link here> and we will be in touch to begin your Trial.

So bottom line, if you would like to see your average orders go up, drive new incremental business and gain new customers, reactivate older buyers and increase frequency of with new incremental business.

Call me at 612-349-2740 or email sales@shoppesimplenetwork.com to get your Free Trial started now

Best,

Jeffery

Crash Cart Please…ideas from The ShoppeSimple Network

thegies — Sat, 09 Apr 2011 03:59:40 +0000

If you run your web metrics, web analytics, customer satisfaction stats as diagnostic tools for when things go wrong, then is your company a company who wants to stay in shape and work tirelessly to improve your business metrics?

If you put your business metrics in this winning category, are you then treating your websites and/or stores in the same way?

Unfortunately, I have sat through enough prospective client meetings where the prevailing tenor was…as long as the website is not broken, it must be working. As long as nobody is complaining, there’s no need to worry. We will reset our store(s) after the next season or the next…you know it is a cash flow thing. So have you asked yourself when was the last time your website or store(s) had more than just a facelift with a few Botox injections to pretty it up?

Unfortunately, the answer is usually the same…TOO LONG and in many cases it also comes down to the fundamentals of analytics and business intelligence driving these decisions. If you can’t see where you need to go how will you manage the decisions to get there? If it is not crystal clear how to get where you need to go then the obvious and less risky choice for many is to just to stay in neutral.

But staying in neutral now, when there is a new super highway of Social and Mobile Commerce developing could be devastating to your business or at least highly disruptive. Here’s why…

What would happen when you ask your best and brightest analytical minds to tell you?

§ What they are seeing in their analytical views and Key Performance Indexes (KPI’s) as it relates to Social and Mobile Commerce marketing?

§ How are they getting to the data?

§ How are they seeing the Social and Mobile data converting into orders and from where?

§ How is Social and Mobile Commerce affecting other Channel Marketing?

§ How is the viral component of Social and Mobile being tracked?

It’s right here where you start to see how the traditional analytical models and its tools begin to break down. For most businesses, most of these questions take them to an uncomfortable place and ones that are typically not positive for the business. What’s worse is that many companies have made significant investments in analytics already but unfortunately without the anticipation of Social, Mobile and Viral Commerce capabilities or plug-ins and/or the “right” people who understand the effect of Social, Mobile and Viral on their current analytic tendencies?

When you are left with no clear path to take…how do you know where to go? What do you do? Where do you go?

Are you up for an analytical test for your Social and Mobile Marketing Teams to determine where your business stands today? Their answers may surprise you?

Can your Analytical Team answer all of these Social and Mobile questions?

How is Social and Mobile marketing affecting…

Ø Site or Store Visitation metrics,

Ø Time On Site and/or In-Store metrics,

Ø Shopping Cart and Check Out Abandonment/Store Conversion metrics,

Ø Site and/or Store Mapping metrics,

Ø Top 10 Page Path Views,

Ø Average Ticket by Channel metrics,

Ø New Customers Rate metrics,

Ø Reactivations of Older Buyers metrics,

Ø Overall Conversion by Channel metrics?

Ø Coupon Redemption Rate Store and Web?

No doubt, I bet you will have serious analytical work to do. Even more telling… what are challenges and obstacles you have to getting to and at the data sets you need to make the informed Social and Mobile decisions? If you are like many of our clients, I suspect that you will find out you may not even have all the right tools to even get your business to these answers?

But unlike the postponement of website or store decisions mentioned above once you know the challenges are going to be more Botox injections applied or is it finally time to deal with the real issues of why you can’t get to the answers?

In the world of e-commerce and multi-channel marketing, yes, we do have some of the brightest analytical minds in the business. As such, our clients also challenge us to prove the incremental value through analytical analysis of The ShoppeSimple Network. That’s just great and we love it. Our Company is filled with e-Marketers who relish analytical challenges. We also have domain expertise in every online channel as well as retail selling so we never shirk away from the proof positive of what we bring to the table for a merchant. In fact, we have not lost a client since Q1 2010 and we are also proud of this milestone. We are also much more than a suite of marketing tools for your business to use we also provide your business with solid marketing intelligence derived from our internal expertise along with The ShoppeSimple Network Cooperative (SSNC) of merchants all driven through our ShoppeStats proprietary analytical program.

But why are more and more merchants joining the SSNC? Well, for several reasons and in this post, I will speak about one of our key differentiators and that is our proprietary analytics suite (ShoppeStats) and what it shows our clients about their Social and Mobile business.

Now before we go on we should step back for a moment and ask an even more obvious question is Social and Mobile Commerce even material to your overall sales revenue? If not…why not? TODAY…we have clients deriving between 5-8% of their entire company’s business through Social and Mobile channels using The ShoppeSimple Network? Yes, these numbers are also incremental to their business (not channel shift).

To compare this stat, those of us who have been around long enough to remember the time that ecommerce was only 5-8% of your total company revenue and that was only 10 years ago. Now I suspect for many of you it is 50% or much more. Trends like this don’t lie. And if you are not at these numbers you are behind your competitors. So reforecasting what would your revenue spike look like if you could use The ShoppeSimple Network to add 5-8% of Social and Mobile incremental revenue to your business right now? What if we guaranteed you a 4X in revenue lift to investment? Would you do it?

Why wouldn’t you do it? We guarantee it!

Now to those who make a living in the analytical world we have built a proprietary Social and Mobile analytical package called ShoppeStats, which ties all of your social and mobile marketing efforts into a dynamic real-time dashboard and reporting tool supporting by our Relationship Management Team. ShoppeStats isn’t designed to replace your analytic tools in fact you can integrate our tools with yours since you can bring data into your platform easily using a CSV or Excel download. ShoppeStats is designed to provide your business with a high-end Social and Mobile analytics at a fraction of what the Big Boys charge in this analytic world.

ShoppeStats is also integrated into our SaaS ShoppeSimple Network Suite. Before you choose to look at other analytical tools or expensive plug-in extensions look at ShoppeStats. We will share with you how ShoppeStats can be bundled with the 6 other service offerings from The ShoppeSimple Network all for one affordable monthly fee without commissions, maintenance fees or “tolls” of any kind. You will also have our ShoppeStats up and running for your business in less than 10 days without any implementation fees.

In fact, through April 15^th you have a couple choices to get started with The ShoppeSimple Network. Check out ShoppeSafe.com and enjoy the consumer shopping experience. ShoppeSafe.com is the first shopping portal which completely protects your consumers identity and privacy while allowing them to share offers to their Facebook “Likes”, Twitter “Followers”, email and mobile contact lists. Consumers select the offers that are relevant and highly targeted from your “Trusted 3-Party Branded” page and then place them on any social and mobile media they choose. This also makes it simple, easy and convenient for them to share them with family and friends through Facebook, Twitter, Home Pages Widgets and mobile texting,

Your business can be on ShoppeSafe.com simply and easily and can get started with your Free monthly trial and learn how your business can benefit from the marketing of ShoppeSafe.com and The ShoppeSimple Network. You can also immediately decide to try us for 4 months for the price of 3. That is a 25% savings. And we will include ShoppeStats with this trial program. Your monthly subscription fee is determined by your compete.com traffic numbers just fill out the form <Claire Free trial Link here> and we will be in touch to begin your Trial.

So bottom line, if you would like to see your average orders go up, drive new incremental business and gain new customers, reactivate older buyers and increase frequency of purchasing you will see new Social and Mobile metrics along with KPI analysis as you watch The ShoppeSimple data come alive.

Now isn’t it time to discontinue Botox treatments and instead try a real Social and Mobile solution — The ShoppeSimple Network.

Call me at 612-349-2740 or email sales@shoppesimplenetwork.com to get your Free Trial started now.

Best,

Jeffery

Why Not?...ideas from ShoppeSimple Network

thegies — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 01:31:55 +0000

Last week was an exciting and interesting week after participating in more sales meetings than anytime in the Company’s history. There was a tremendous amount of learning from these sessions and I thought my notes from these visits would be of benefit to you as well. My conclusions in many ways were not surprising and they are also typical of what we see happening in the Social and Mobile space as marketers-as-brands try to deal and/or cope with the monumental marketing challenges being thrust upon them today.

At The ShoppeSimple Network we not only assist in providing you with answers to these challenges, we help drive more incremental revenue to your Social and Mobile Commerce channels. We help your business think strategically about where you should be going and how you should be getting there. That is exactly what “Ideas from The ShoppeSimple Network” weekly blog intends to do.

We educate our audiences on the best practices of Social and Mobile Media. We do not look to replace your social and mobile efforts, just enhance them.

Reserve your spot in our April Webinar. Using Social and Mobile Analytics As Your GPS To Drive More Social Commerce To Your Business. Wednesday April 20th at 2 ET by clicking here.

In preparation for these meetings, my due diligence took me to http://www.compete.com where I sized the client’s opportunities from a year to year Unique and Repeat Visitor perspective. I then reviewed each of the respective websites looking for their social icons like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube and their page positioning. I also looked and tested the site’s Mobile Apps. From there I reviewed their Facebook Like number, and whether they had even built a Facebook Store. Next, I went to Twitter and looked at what the brand presence looked/felt like and whether there was a robust presence there. Then onto YouTube to understand how the brands were using YouTube?

By the way…when was the last time you ran your own social and mobile test drive as I did above?

Conclusion: The State of the Social Nation; Not Pretty…

Why not check off what your site findings looks like on each point below then call/ping me 612-349-2740 or sales@shoppesimplenetwork.com and we will be happy to assist you in building a Social and Mobile strategy and execution plan for your business. Trust me, it is affordable and worth your time to do it. Why Not?

Findings: Declining year after year Compete numbers on most of the sites we spoke with.

Answer: Look at the growth of Facebook, Twitter and Mobile. Where do you think your consumers are hanging out when Facebook makes up more than 12.8% of all time spent online? If this is the case how are you touching consumers in this new and changing social and increasingly mobile environment? How are you engaging with them, listening to them and conversing with them? Or are you just falling back to the traditional methods of Push-N-Pray marketing in these new channels? Hitting consumers with the same technique…hitting consumers with a fire hose of product offers? A fire hose of unfiltered product offers. Consumers want relevant content delivered when and where they are at. Your website must now go to them and not the other way around. But most importantly you must deliver relevant and targeted offers to them. Are you doing this? How do you plan to do this?

Findings: Social/Mobile Icons are given basement space, far below the fold, despite their increasing popularity and huge market share. Jeff, I do not believe findings can be formed as a question.

Answer: I do not believe this has been answered. By working with The ShoppeSimple Network we help you harness the power of Social/Mobile by guiding you through our Best Practices on placement, socialization and promotion.

Let The ShoppeSimple Network help you build the “Right” social platforms and determine positioning and you will see a minimum 10X increase in social captures. Why Not Test Us?

What I found most surprising in my due diligence is that sites are now moving their email capture to the bottom of their pages. Here is another question…why would you take the marketing channel that is the least costly, probably one of your highest revenue channels and also one of the new drivers to your social efforts and constrain your email captures by putting the email capture below the fold?

Findings: More of the same Push-N-Pray marketing on Facebook pages for those who have built a Facebook Store. I just don’t get why you would continue to Push products like you always have in Social and Mobile? Products that are irrelevant or un-targeted for your consumers? Just because you have product on your website doesn’t mean it is relevant to your consumer in their social spaces.

Answer: There is a tidal wave of change that your business is experiencing around the fact that your consumer wants to control the offers they receive and where they want to receive them. Push unwanted offers at your consumer and watch them change their advertising channel.

To this point, check your “time on page” stats over the last couple of years and you may see that they have already changed the channel.

Take the “time on page” negative change multiplied by the number of visitors per year multiplied by order conversions and you will find out what your negative impact on sales is. Analytics don’t lie.

At The ShoppeSimple Network we have perfected Pull-Place-Buy-Share™ marketing where consumers preselect the offers that are of interest and place them on the social/mobile media of their choice. By doing this consumers tend to buy more because these offers are of interest – highly targeted – which increases their likelihood to share them with friends on social and mobile. Why Not… try us for this reason alone? We guarantee you will be successful with Social and Mobile Commerce.

Findings: Merchants typically have ½% of Facebook likes compared to their UV Count. Many of which do not even have Facebook presence or further to that point a Facebook Store.

Answer: Other priorities…X?!%$#??

If that is your thinking or doing just outsource your Facebook program to The ShoppeSimple Network and we will make you money on Facebook…It is also guaranteed with our ShoppeSocial program. Why not?

Findings: The use of Twitter is low to non-existent for some merchants.

Answer: Twitter is the biggest social platform opportunity that is being missed by brand merchants today. Of course, Tweets fly by like jets dotting the globe, but the opportunity is to figure out how to harness the power of Twitter marketing to your consumers not to mention its use for customer service, and to distribute your content/offers using tools like Bit.ly is very critical to social marketers. Yet, I haven’t found a merchant who is using both effectively. Remember there are now over 200 Million consumers using Twitter and they are your customers.

Findings: Despite the rapid growth of m-commerce, many merchants do not have a solid m-commerce plan devised and/or implemented. What consumers can see from your site, regarding how to use mobile to shop with you in my due diligence, is mostly non-existent or worse.

Answer: Using our ShoppeMobi enablement SaaS your ShoppeHub page will enable all your consumers to use any smartphone platform to shop with you. And you don’t have to spend six figures to get there; just a very affordable monthly subscription fee. Just call us to discuss. Why Not?

At The ShoppeSimple Network what we do best is first help you think through the strategies behind your social and mobile commerce approaches. First and foremost, we are not here to replace your Social/Mobile efforts or your teams. We are here to provide additional resources and tools to make your business successful in these new social and marketing environments.

Plus as a cooperative business, your business benefits from the learning of the entire cooperative. We prevent you from making the mistakes others have made in this space. We provide positive marketing ideas that will help you leap frog in social and mobile.

In essence, just like you use a trusted third party to do merge/purge or to clear and place media, we act as a “Trusted Referral” partner for your business to reach more of your Social and Mobile consumers. These consumers use your branded social and mobile enabled bridging page (ShoppeHub) within The ShoppeSimple Network to enable your business to reach new consumer Likes, Followers, mobile and email contacts of your consumers.

The power of The ShoppeSimple Network model is that consumers can enjoy lurking and find relevant offers without having to give up their personal data or signing in with their email address, as we are a pure-permission, anonymous network for consumers who love to shop. Consumers trust us so they will also trust your business. Plus all of the transactions are done on your site so all credit cards are secured and their data is protected according to your Privacy Policy.

The proven results are more Social and Mobile Commerce business from your customers and a new channel of consumers who buy from you. You will also benefit from higher average orders and more order frequency.

• So how and when are you going to be making investments in social and mobile?

• Why don’t you just simply test into these markets?

• We all know we vest in our tried and true marketing channels but why would we allow them to prevent you from trying new things?

• Are your internal resources too vested in trying new things?

• If you do not move and you are not the top three in your market space you could soon be in last position.

Why not give The ShoppeSimple Network a test? What do you really have to lose? You can NOW test The ShoppeSimple Network Absolutely Free for a month to see for yourself what our other clients have seen;

1. More Social and Mobile Business.

2. Higher Average Orders

3. More Order Frequency and More Customer Loyalty.

What we do really well is drive incremental and new Social and Mobile consumers to your business and you will see this happen in less than 30 days. Simply click above and fill out the simple form to start your Trial.

There are no strings attached. When you are satisfied and want to start the program we will work out an affordable monthly subscription program (based on your business size) without commission or implementation fees of any kind.

I am often asked why doesn’t every business just try The ShoppeSimple Network? Well, it wasn’t always like this but now 100′s of business are joining and for good reason our business works for them and makes them money.

Now it is your turn. We guarantee it. Why Not?

Best

Jeffery

Remember Checks and Phone Calls…ideas from The ShoppeSimple Network

thegies — Fri, 25 Mar 2011 22:28:11 +0000

Those of us who have been around long enough will remember the following…

1. Merchants took cash,checks and later added credit cards. Why?

2. Merchants replaced direct dial phone numbers with 800 numbers. Why?

3. Merchants opened an ecommerce website. Why?

Well, there were incredibly compelling reasons to spend money on new marketing services like the above, despite the skepticism of the operation’s people. In fact, today you wouldn’t even consider opening a business without using any or all of the above services.

When each of these services launched, there were lots of skeptics including IT, Operational, Financial Skeptics and Managerial but the reasons why the marketers won them all over was that these new services either increased new customers, raised average orders, created more orders or all of the above. Bottom line they generated more profits than their respective costs.

<Claire insert the Webinar mention here and invite click> Title is Using Social/Mobile Analytics to Drive Your Business 4/20 2PM EDT

So why am I bringing up the past and placing it onto the discussion table today? Well, if you could increase your business using the next ground breaking marketing idea and it worked like 1, 2, and 3 above would you do it? Would you slay the skeptics in your business? My hope is you should! History does repeat itself…

So what is the next new marketing idea?

Well you may know it as the Pareto Principle: that 20% of our consumers make up 80% of your sales.

If you are aware of Pareto than why is your business so interested in attracting brand new customers over selling more to the customers they already have? If so then shouldn’t you be maximizing the opportunity to drive more sales from consumers that are already touching your business?

You may be thinking, so where do I find these consumers? Here are four places to look…

1. Consumers who come into your stores and leave without buying

2. Consumers who visit your website but defect without buying

3. Consumers who have given you their email address but have not bought

4. Consumers who are lurking on your Facebook/Twitter pages but have not bought

But identifying these consumers is simply the first phase to marketing to them and converting them to be a new customer. First…let’s step back and realize that at this point you have zero revenue from any of these consumers even though they have touched your business.

So how do you turn these consumer touches into new BUYERS? Well that is where The ShoppeSimple Network becomes your Trusted TESTIMONIAL solution to help drive new consumers to your business.

At The ShoppeSimple Network through ShoppeSafe.com (our consumer portal) your consumers can now browse offers that you put in front of them. These consumers pull and place these offers/content where and when they want to receive them. They also buy with more frequency and at higher average orders because these offers/content are highly targeted and relevant to them.

Through your branded ShoppeHub page on ShoppeSafe.com, (Claire show a link to the ShoppeHub page here > consumers enjoy choosing exactly what offers or content they want and then place these offers on their personal social pages like Facebook, Twitter, Google, Yahoo for their group of friends to also see and share. This is the power of Trusted Referrals They can also text these offers/content to their mobile friends and/or email the contact list.

What happens next is the exciting power of viral marketing…

What do I mean, well the ShoppeHub facilitates new customer orders from consumers you never knew because customers and their friends share your offers through your ShoppeHub page on ShoppeSafe.com. The ShoppeHub page develops Trusted Testimonials for your business and new customers.

ShoppeSafe.com has become the consumer’s “TRUSTED” connection to your business because they know their data is protected; as consumers stay anonymous, private and enjoy this new shopping experience. It has proven time itself to work time and again and it will work for your business too.

And it works fast because our program can be up and running for your business in less than 10 days with no implementation fees of any kind nor any IT resources needed from your side. You just pay one affordable monthly fee without any commissions, maintenance fees or tolls of any kind.

Yes…we all know the POWER of REFFERALS…they SELL!

So are you still a skeptic?

To slay the skeptic in you…here is a personal offer and opportunity for your business to benefit from the ShoppeSimple Network. Through April 15^th, simply sign up with our FREE Trial offer by clicking here http://shoppesimplenetwork.com/pricing and you will receive a store on ShoppeSafe.com, your branded ShoppeHub page, our suite of social and mobile sharing tools along with our ShoppeFetch Engine all Completely Free for one month so you can test drive The ShoppeSimple Network program for your business.

Just fill-out the online form for your Free Trial and we will deliver everything you need to start your program in less than 10 days with no hidden fees, Period. We will also lock in pricing for the remaining term based on the size of your business. It is that easy to start your social and mobile testimonial program.

Social Commerce is more than the latest buzz word its all about Trusted TESTIMONIALS

To get your store on The ShoppeSimple Network just <click on this link> to start your Free Trial in 10 days.

Best Regards,

Jeffery

What Stays in Las Vegas…ideas from ShoppeSimple Network

thegies — Sat, 12 Mar 2011 19:48:29 +0000

Would you bet $3,000 dollars on a new advertising channel which will get (no could) $53,000 in incremental business in less than 30 days? Having been in Vegas, it dawned on me that perhaps their tagline line “What Stays In Vegas” is a good one for Vegas but having sat in sales meeting after sales meeting, keeping secrets in the online space doesn’t benefit any of us.

In fact, all of us who make a living in this industry need to have open minds to new ways of thinking that can drive new Social and Mobile Commerce revenue.

Your invited to our Webinar scheduled for March 23^rd at 2 PM ET Entitled: How To Tap The Power Of Your Consumer.

I would take this week’s blog post and discuss how The ShoppeSimple Networks is changing the face of online advertising and share with you the fact that these ideas are working for our clients and we want them to work for your business as well.

Additionally we are also not here to tell you we are going to replace what you are already doing in Social and Mobile, quite the contrary, our programs will enhance your consumer social/mobile marketing efforts. If you do not yet have a Social or Mobile marketing program The ShoppeSimple Network can provide you with one in less than 10 days. Our overall program/service offering can be done without implementation cost or the use of your IT resources. You will be up and running with your own Social and Mobile Commerce program — one that has proven to work regardless of client or industry.

I will also point out the differences between The ShoppeSimple Network and our competitors and before we are done I sense you will have a better understanding of the power of The ShoppeSimple Network.

As the Leader in the Social and Mobile space, and unlike Vegas where the secrets stay in Vegas, I will tell you our secrets. I am going to reveal the “Secret Sauce” that will drive your new Social and Mobile Commerce revenue, or enhance it and we will prove it to you within 30 days or you don’t pay us.

So first let’s lift up The ShoppeSimple Network hood and give you 3 client success stories from January 2011. I have purposely picked these e-merchants so it would be easier for you to create direct linkage to your business. I have also included Key Performance Indexes (KPI) and picked a slow month so you can scale the opportunity for your business.

Client #1: According to Compete.com our client, a female giftware company, had 52,000 unique visitors to their website in January 2011. They did $53,000 dollars, 616 orders with an increase of 38% in average order through The ShoppeSimple Network. This equates to $1.01 of revenue for every unique visitor to their website in the month. The cost of their program is $4,000 per month.

Client #2: Client doesn’t have an analytic package because they are small, so they use our ShoppeStats program for their tracking purposes. As such, they had 1,800 visitors to their branded ShoppeHub page and these visitors provided $16,093 of revenue in January to the client. That is $8.94 in revenue per unique ShoppeHub visitor. The cost of the program for them is $3,000 per month.

Client #3: Client had 5,228 visitors to their branded ShoppeHub and these visitors provided $45,000 of revenue in January to the client. That is $8.67 in revenue per unique ShoppeHub visitor. The cost of the program for them is $4,000 per month.

So what exactly is the “Secret Sauce” that will make your business velocity really scale like the examples above when you join The ShoppeSimple Network?

First let me tell you what we are not….

We are not a technology solution. Over time you may have heard IT people say they can build solutions like this internally. Frankly for 25 years, I have heard IT Managers tell me this too. Heck, what IT person doesn’t think they can build anything and everything internally? Of course, there is always a build or buy decision tree. There is always an endless queue of IT projects and decisions around ROI, which ones get built and when. But we always know that objections like these get raised when looking at any third party solution and it is an appropriate objection that we overcome very easily.

Here is why: IT departments just can’t replicate the non-IT nature of our marketing services solution. Yes…they can try like Walmart, BestBuy, Target and others have done but they have all failed or not optimized the opportunity available to them. Why? Because they fail to get The ShoppeSimple Network consumer experience right. This is exactly a key major point of differentiation between your internal IT team’s answer and The ShoppeSimple Network.

More to the point, can your IT department deliver a total turn-key social and mobile solution in 10 days or less that costs an affordable monthly cost of $1,000—7,500 per month? If I were a betting man, I wouldn’t bet your money on it.

So who is The ShoppeSimple Network and exactly what do we do so well?

I am sure you have asked your friend for a recommendation on where to eat, get your hair done, shop for a handbag? Of course you have and frankly it is the preferred way you would want to buy. Getting a trusted third-party referral creates buying behaviors. It’s also less risky and fun to engage in shopping conversations with your friends and family. It is also proven that testimonials from friends drive sales.

Well, this is the essence of what drives the The ShoppeSimple Network experience. We provide a bridge between your consumers and the sharing of your content/offers with their trusted friends on Facebook, Followers on Twitter and mobile texting lists. We are essentially the conduit, which facilitates buying and sharing of your content.

So when your consumer enjoys buying your brand they want to talk a lot about you to their friends and family and the result is a Social and Mobile Loyalty program that brings you new customers, increases buying frequency and increases your average order. We do all of this through an elegant suite of marketing services tools, which we provide your business.

Our Secret Sauce…

Ø We let your consumer control the content they want to see and where they want to see it on any social community and mobile smartphone including iPads and Tablets.

Ø We don’t Push products at consumers. Consumers Pull, Place, Buy and Share your content/offers. Essentially we deliver your content to wherever your consumers are.

Ø We protect your data and your Privacy Policy as all of your transactions and credit card information are kept on your site.

Ø Your consumer stays anonymous and has a fun and safe shopping experience until they are ready to buy. Their data also remains safe.

Ø Since you have your consumer’s permission they allow you to communicate with them everyday of the year with content they want to know about.

So the short story about The ShoppeSimple Network —and it is worth repeating— is that we have created a simple and easy way for consumers to carry on social and mobile conversations with their favorite brands.

The ShoppeSimple Network program is built entirely for your business in less than 10 days with absolutely no implementations fees. You just pay an affordable monthly subscription fee and if the program doesn’t make sense after you try it FREE for a month you easily disconnect and that’s it. It’s guaranteed.

So why not let us personally show how you can reach a new level of listening, engaging and have new Social and Mobile conversations with your consumer on The ShoppeSimple Network. We know you will see what our other clients have seen… new Social and Mobile incremental revenue.

To learn more, let’s set up a personal phone visit to learn more. Just drop me a reply to this email or phone me at 612-349-2740.

Best,

Jeffery

PS: If you could bet $3,000 and get a guaranteed 30% return in a month would you do it?

A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To Your Site…ideas from ShoppeSimple Network

thegies — Sun, 06 Mar 2011 14:14:40 +0000

I had the pleasure of taking part in a few prospective client pitches last week and the consistent theme was that site traffic was either down or flat year over year. What was also discussed was that company’s had higher online sales in 2010 than 2009. So what is going on? How can you have more sales with less or flat site traffic? Was their average order higher? Both said no. Was order frequency higher? Both said no. So what is going on…?

Two sidebars:

#1: Facebook surpassed each of the top three web properties Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft based on time spent. Facebook now accounts for 12.3% of all time being spent online, up from 7.2% in 2009.

#2: According to Forbes, Twitter surpassed 200 million registered users who now post more than 110 million tweets per day. Twitter is also increasingly becoming a critical communication channel for brands to win customers, drive sales, find/solve problems, and manage customer service. In fact, hundreds of brands across every vertical market industry – including automotive, travel, sports, entertainment, finance, technology, food and beverage, and retail – are now actively building a Twitter strategy and integrating this powerful communication channel into the marketing mix.

It was also interesting to hear them say they were very happy with the growth of their Facebook Likes and their Facebook activities. In fact, they had exponential growth with Facebook Likes. One went from 40,000 Likes to 800,000 (yes 800K) and the other from 407 Likes to now over 60,000 Likes.

Where oh where are your consumers?

So let’s take a closer look at what is happening here. Hmmm…site traffic is flat to down year over year but Facebook traffic is exponentially up. It is what I have been coaching our clients to understand about their online businesses for several years now. Consumers are changing their online behaviors. They are no longer coming back to websites for brand messaging and conversations.

On the contrary, they are demanding that you engage and begin a conversation with them wherever they are in social media and/or on their mobile smartphones. Site stats and Facebook Like numbers from clients are absolutely spot on in support of this position.

Now all of these discussions got me wondering…

Ø is your business experiencing the same behaviors?

Ø do you even track your social and mobile behaviors outside of your website?

Ø how do these social and mobile behaviors impact on your online sales efforts?

So like these prospective clients, you too many be thinking just how does The ShoppeSimple Network work? In a nutshell, we give consumers control over what they want to see and where they want to see it. We call this marketing Pull, Place, Buy and Share.

At The ShoppeSimple Network we have created an integrated network where the consumer are in control of the advertising, content or offers they want to see. They also stay anonymous and keep their data private. Consumers have told us and demonstrated with their velocity of buying just how important this is to them and something that is truly empowering to them. They are truly tired of having their data and information sold to 3^rd parties without their consent.

Have You Lost Your Consumer’s Trust?

We don’t push advertising at them…What they get is what they asked for and then they Pull, Place, Buy and Share the advertising they want to see everyday, 365 days a year. It really is as simple as that. And if you look at it from the merchant perspective we give you a suite of elegant SaaS tools to reach consumers wherever they are on social communities, mobile smartphones and iPads/Tablets. Additionally, we protect your data as all checkouts and credit card captures continue to be done on your site. So you are in control of your data and large platform providers aren’t sharing it. This also protects your Privacy Policy with your consumers. So it is all a win/win/win.

To learn more check out our February Webinar titled: Who Is Stealing Your Consumer click here http://shoppesimplenetwork.biz/casestudy

Additionally, we build your Social and Mobile Loyalty Program for an affordable monthly subscription fee with no commissions, tolls or maintenance fees. There are also no implementation fees of any kind and your program will be up and running in less than 10 days. Plus, we guarantee that your program will return 30% ROI in 30 days or you just don’t pay us. It doesn’t get any simpler than that.

But this answer didn’t satisfy the skeptics in the meeting and they said Jeffery wait a minute, for all of the years, I have been in internet/online marketing we have been taught and experienced that online marketing success comes from minimizing the number of clicks to a buy. Not moving consumers off the website. We have always pushed product at them and it has always worked.

And yes, I agree to a point, but that worked in the past. That was then and this is now. You only have to look at your site analytics. Lower or flat site traffic, cannibalization of channel programs, declining email opens and clickthroughs and I can continue…

To further see the tectonic shift in how consumer online marketing is changing, you only have to look at success stories like Facebook, Twitter, Groupon, iPhone, Driod, Blackberry’s and the Tablet product category. Baseline is that the consumer internet population is moving away from being forced to return to websites. In fact, Facebook has 550 Million subscribers and many of these subs are your consumers and buyers. Morgan Stanley in a Mary Meeker Trend Report predicts by 2014 that half of all ecommerce will be done on a smartphone. Not to mention 50% of all phones sold this year (2011) will be smartphone.

So why do you want to wait, hold out and cling to the past marketing ideas when you can test new ideas easily and quickly? Isn’t this what Internet Marketers are tasked to do? Help me understand why would you allow your competitor to leap frog you when you can run testing that is painless with The ShoppeSimple Network?

And that is the big difference around why The ShoppeSimple Network program works. It isn’t rocket science that when you give your consumer more of what they tell you they want they inevitably buy more frequently and at higher amounts. That is the Social and Mobile Loyalty Program we plug your business into. Not to mention these consumers, tell their friends about your brand and we all know a friend’s advice is worth tons in helping others into a buying decision. This is about stimulating viral selling. Wouldn’t you do the same as a consumer? I would. So would my wife and so do your customers!

To help you understand what The ShoppeSimple Network does, we put together some video tutorials, simple click here http://shoppesimplenetwork.biz/about

We are also pleased to announce the next Webinar scheduled for March 23^rd at 2 PM ET: How To Tap The Power Of Your Consumer. To register mailto:sales@shoppesimplenetwork.com.

Social Commerce is more than the latest buzzword. It works! A case in point… we have a client that after three months in The ShoppeSimple Network program netted over $900,000 in revenue using ShoppeSimple Social Commerce. That’s right and they paid only $5,000 per month!! Another client is doubling their Social Commerce program every month using ShoppeSimple.

Can you do the same? We know you can as we have seen similar and dramatic results for each of our clients!

I’d recommend that we set up a time over the phone where we can get to know your specific online objectives. With that understanding we can begin to design a Social and or Mobile Commerce program that will fit your company’s unique situation and strategy.

I sense that if you are like other merchants you may be planning to start investing aggressively in Social/Mobile Commerce.

The bottom line: To start the process, just indicate your interest in a no-obligation phone discussion by replying to this email or giving me a call at 612-349-2740 and we will be in touch with you to start the process immediately.

Best Regards,

Jeffery

thegies — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 01:51:56 +0000

0-17 – 19%

18-24 – 9%

25-34 – 18%

35-44 – 25%

45-54 –19%

55-64 – 10%

65+ — 3%

Just like every merchant we speak with, I am sure you have your website age demographics mapped out like the chart above shares. But more often than you can imagine, we are surprised when a prospective client says that their customer demographic is just not actively on social media or ready for mobile.

· Have you been in meetings and heard the same thing?

· Has your organization been using these same excuses to not move forward into Social and Mobile Commerce?

If you your business is geared to selling to an old demographic (55+) would you believe that your audience is not into Social or Mobile yet? And if so…that it is too soon for you to devote time and company resources to Social or Mobile? …or you may have thought you have higher priorities for your online business.

Interestingly enough, the demographic age dispersion data shown in the chart about is not taken from a typical client website, it is taken from the Google Research Report on the demographic age dispersion from all Social Media for the US during 2010.

So let’s relook at the data and determine exactly where your customer is hanging out in Social and Mobile?

But first things first, I can tell you that more and more of your consumers are no longer coming back to your website as the preferred path to hear your brand message. Yes… you may get a jolt from that one… but statistics show that your consumers are no longer relying on your website or opening your email. But you don’t need me to tell you that. You can see this everyday in the defection reports from your website’s analytics, site time studies and your declining opens and click through reports from your email broadcasts.

So what does this Google Report mean for your business?

Ø 44% of Total Social traffic is within the 35-54 age demographic group.

Ø 27% of Total Social traffic is within the 18-34 age demographic group.

Ø 13% of Social traffic is within the 55+ age demographic group.

Further according to “Moore’s Law” which states 5 years from now is a factor of ten meaning that technology will be capable of far more in five years than they are today. I would suspect with the exponential growth of social and mobile over the last 5 years the “Moore’s Law” factor for Social and Mobile is an exponential three year time period. So to this point, by 2014, (just 3 years from now) Morgan Stanley in their Trend Study predicts 50% of all e-commerce will be accomplished on a smartphone device. And you must also already know there is a natural affinity between Social and Mobile. In fact, Facebook indicates 40 Million+ US Facebook subscribers access their pages through their mobile device.

So now let’s reapply the above metrics to just the Facebook platform and look at the relative scale using Facebook’s 146 Million US subscribers as of January 2011.

Ø In the 35-44 age demographic with 44%; Facebook has 66 Million subscribers (est).

Ø In the 18-34 age demographic with 27%; Facebook has 39 Million subscribers (est)

Ø And in the 55+ age demographic with 13%; Facebook has 19 Million subscribers (est)

These are today’s numbers now scale them to a 3X.

So what do the above demographics tell you about your business? If in as little as three years and with a Moore’s Law factor of 3 about where will you be servicing your consumers in the future? I think the answer is very clear. But is it clear to you? Your Marketing and IT Team?

Social and Mobile is not going away…it isn’t slowing down or disappearing and if you are ignoring Social and Mobile in 2011 it is at your own personal peril not only your compan’ys.

Bottom line: Don’t you want to begin a social/mobile conversation that engages and listens to every demographic? don’t you want to begin starting a conversation, engaging and listening to every demographic Social and Mobile segment above including your young and older ones.

So do you think any of the above excuses hold any water when you look at the enormity of the opportunity for your business to start having Social and Mobile conversations today…Waiting only will enable your competitor to seize upon the current opportunity and leap frog your business.

At The ShoppeSimple Network, we help our clients get started in Social and Mobile Commerce by simplifying the process. Essentially we have put together a Plug-N-Play Social and Mobile Loyalty Program that delivers guaranteed results. Results like the following…

๏ Client A - hit the $2,300,000 mark in ShoppeSimple Network social commerce sales after less than 6 months in the program. (cost of the program to the client was $13,000 per month). Client prior to the program had 1 order from his 0-12 month buyer file. During the six month program period 40,400 consumers bought an additional order and 13% bought 2+ orders

๏ Client B - launched before Thanksgiving and sold $475,000 in social commerce sales through The ShoppeSimple Network. (cost of the program to the client was $5,250 per month). The ShoppeSimple Network program generated 5,380 orders each at a 38% increase in average order

๏ Client C - hit $296,000 in m-commerce sales in 75 days using the ShoppeMobi service of The ShoppeSimple Network (cost of the program to the client was $2,000 per month). The ShoppeMobi program generated 1,816 orders at $162 per order which increased average order by 25%

We do all of this for an affordable monthly subscription fee and we will have your program up and running in less than 10 days without any implementation fees of any kind or your IT resources required. There are also no commissions, tolls or maintenance fees of any kind. It is just that simple and we guarantee results… like a 30% return in 30 days or you just don’t pay us.

What also separates The ShoppeSimple Network from other Social or Mobile companies is you simply can outsource the overall program operation to us. With just one click all of the Social and Mobile outlets your consumers use will receive instant content from you. So if you are resource constrained we have you covered there too. Also all of your transactions are completed on your website so your data and your consumer’s information including credit card data stays safe and secure. No checkouts on Facebook or Mobile hosts. The ShoppeSimple Network therefore aligns with your website’s Privacy Policy.

Why not take the next step and reply to this email or phone me up 612-349-2740 and we can get a discussion going so you and your team can see firsthand how we can help you drive new unbudgeted sales for your business in 2011.

Best,

Jeffery

PS. We just finished our February Webinar entitled “Who Is Stealing Your Customers” if you are interested to receive it just send me an email and we will deliver an electronic copy right to your desk.

Network Intelligence…ideas from The ShoppeSimple Network

thegies — Sat, 19 Feb 2011 17:35:30 +0000

In his new book…The Network Is Your Customer, David Rodgers shares fives steps any business can use to create value (Social Value) and reach its consumer.

Access: Be faster, be easier, be everywhere…be always on. Be where your consumer is.

Engage: Be a source of valued content.

Customize: Make your offering adaptable to your consumer’s needs.

Connect: Become a part of your consumer’s conversations.

Collaborate: Involve your consumers in every stage of your enterprise.

Before we look at your business and your business’s Social Value let me take a moment to first look at you.

I suspect you have a laptop or desktop at both your home and office. If you are like 50% of the US population by the end of this year you will have a smartphone (yes 50% according to Nielson). If you already have a smartphone, I doubt you would ever give it up. Having a Droid myself, I know you use it to send and receive both personal and professional email, text, navigate, use it for video and photo sharing plus you are on this device more than your significant other wants you to be.

When you use your desktop or laptop to search or surf and that puts you within reach of over a trillion interconnected web pages by using any one of the major web browsers. Last year, you also probably bought from the iTunes Store as you are one of the 5 billion transactions that Apple reported for iTunes in 2010…you are also probably Twittering, Skyping, watching streaming video, or viewing on-demand movies using Comcast/Hulu or Netflix. You were also probably one of the consumers who spent more than $36 Billion online during the Holiday’s last year. And maybe…just maybe last Christmas you treated yourself and family to a new TV Internet appliance like Apple/Google TV so you can bring the whole web experience to your new 42” or greater “3D” Flat Screen TV including shopping.

Wait…last and certainly not least… you are on both LinkedIn and on Facebook where you’re sharing your personal and professional lives with your interconnections, family and friends.

The point here is that you personally are already vested in a large Network and the Network is us.

But unfortunately along the way something happened. Something truly strange… something odd which is completely opposite of what you are doing in and around how you use your personal electronic network everyday…what is it?

Well… you walked into your office and for the most part your office unplugged your business to the outside-networked world, which includes your social and mobile consumers.

Then attended a senior meeting shouldn’t be wondering why most or the entire cool consumer networking platforms that you have been using personally are not in use by your business to engage, converse, connect and collaborate with your consumer? And from an outsiders view of your business… it looks like you have hit the “UnNetworking Wall”. A Wall, which may by default been installed to prevent engagement and conversations with consumers in the social space.

So how do you expect your consumers to engage, converse, connect and collaborate with you if you make them continually jump your UnNetworked Wall?

Is your business using Social networking tools to reach your consumer? Do you have a Facebook Shopping Tab? Are you protecting your consumer’s data and their credit cards by creating transactions on your website from all social platforms (not closing sales on social platforms)? Do you feel placing offers on your consumer’s Facebook’s Wall is how they want to have conversations with your brand? By the way, research says otherwise. How is your business benefiting from the current craze in couponing? What are you doing with YouTube, Podcasting, On-Demand Video Streaming, Facebook and Twittering…?

Are you enabling your consumers to access your content and have conversation about your products and offers/deals/coupons on their smartphones? A mobile plan should be in place since 50% of the consumers in the US will be surfing the web on a smartphone by the end of 2011. As Morgan Stanley predicts in its 2010 Trend report that 50% of all e-Commerce will be done on a smartphone by 2014. Is your business moving just as fast to engage with consumers in mobile and deliver a mobile e-Commerce or local store experience?

The answer to any of these questions is to have your business simply take a look at itself in the social and mobile mirror and determine whether you are appropriately engaging with your consumers.

It’s all about the Mirror Test…

So ask yourself and your Marketing Team this question: If we personally use all of these Network tools in our daily lives why are we not aggressively going after the opportunity to add Social Value by engaging, conversing, connecting and collaborating with our consumers in our daily marketing efforts. If you aren’t doing this now… then WHY? If we can’t do it then WHO in the organization is preventing this from happening? If it’s not YOU who will be the heretic… WHO should it be?

The HERETIC or the SHEEPWALKER…

At The ShoppeSimple Network we help you hurdle the Mirror Test. Yes, we have heard all the excuses as to why a business shouldn’t do social or mobile now…

Here are just a few:

Ø We haven’t seen the return on Social or Mobile to date so it is just not a priority

Ø Everyone else is doing it this way so we are just copying them

Ø We do not have the resources at the moment to add another initiative to our marketing mix

Ø We are looking to build these social and mobile systems in house

Ø Other marketing initiatives are of a higher priority

Ø We do not have buy in from Senior Leaders since they are not on Facebook or using a Smartphone for e-Commerce

Ø Our business is B2B not B2C

Ø Social and Mobile isn’t my responsibility

But do any of these points make sense when you personally are so engaged in the social and mobile worlds. Since you personally utilize all of these electronic network tools, why would you think your consumer is any different?

At The ShoppeSimple Network we provide a marketing service, which is totally guaranteed to drive business profits that are incremental (not coming from channel shift). How do we do this? We find social consumers who are interested in your brand, who want to have a conversation with you, want to buy from you and tell their friends about your brand. We deliver these consumers to your website for transactions which not only protects your data security (and your privacy statement) but also makes the consumer feel good about shopping safely and securely.

In essence, we build a new Social (Facebook/Twitter/Google/Yahoo along with your digital properties) and Mobile loyalty program and have it online for your business in less than 30 day. Plus…The ShoppeSimple Network program is affordable with the entire program available to you for a reasonable monthly subscription fee (without any commissions, tolls,maintenance or implementation fees of any kind).

Just like every other client, your program will drive new business, new customers, higher average orders and more order frequency all in less than 30 days. In fact we guarantee you a return of 30% in 30 days or you just don’t pay the bill. And since we launched our new marketing SaaS solutions around Social and Mobile no client has left the program nor have we had to make good on our guarantee.

What does that say…that you are indeed missing something? Something that consumers want and enjoy!

Additionally all of the transactions through The ShoppeSimple Network are done on your site and with your credit card processing.

We do all of what we do by enabling what Rogers speaks too… engage, converse, connect and collaborate with your consumers.

Bottom line: with The ShoppeSimple Network you will have a new social and mobile loyalty program that is essentially turn key up and running in less than 30 days without any IT resources or expense. So if you want to simply plug into The ShoppeSimple Network simply reply to this email or phone me up at 612-349-2740. We will set up a quick demo and show you how our clients are driving new social business to their brands.

Best,

Jeffery

$10 in and $13 out…ideas from ShoppeSimple Network.

thegies — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 00:21:22 +0000

From: Jeffery Giesener – CEO – ShoppeSimple Network

During a strategy meeting last week the topic of discussion went something like this: Would you invest in a marketing technology if for every $10 you invested you would get $13 back in less than 30 days? In other words; invest $10 and get back $13 dollars. This is like going up to an ATM and putting a $10 bill in and getting $13 bucks back. At first it would surprise or shock you and perhaps if you’re like most people you would find another $10 and see if this would happen again. So what would you do if it did happen again and again and again?

But the BIGGER question is would you continue to put the $10 in the machine and take the $13 back into your business?

Sidebar: Interesting enough you have been reading my blog posts for several months now and I haven’t seen an email ping or gotten a phone call from you, so I am wondering why you’ve decided not to contact me and learn more about how The ShoppeSimple Network can directly assist your business. Are you the person who decided not to keep putting the $10 into the ATM?

This is exactly the case study of Social and Mobile marketing simplified. It is unfortunately the opportunity you have passed up on to date and if you would have moved ahead during the holidays you would be enjoying a completely new revenue stream for your business. At least this is exactly what each of our clients are experiencing. Yes, and I can say this without any concern, every client in the ShoppeSimple Network program has seen a minimum of this 30% return in 30 days or a 360% annualized return

Here are some client milestones you may want to consider and ones that can be working for your business

๏ A client hit the $2,300,000 mark in social commerce sales after less than 6 months in the program. 40,400 consumers buying an additional order and 13% buying 2+ orders

๏ Client launched before Thanksgiving sold $475,000 in social commerce sales. 5,380 orders at a 38% increase in average order

๏ Client hit $296,000 in m-commerce sales in just 75 days. 1,816 orders at $162 average order up 25%

So if you are still not connecting to the above, let me allow you to see how Social and Mobile Commerce will work for your business through a different lens.

Ø Every order, which comes through The ShoppeSimple Network, is captured and now you have a new identified buyer segment for Social and Mobile Commerce… Do you currently have any other program that is doing this for you?

Ø Consumers through The ShoppeSimple Network have told you what they want to be sold… do you have another program doing this for you?

Ø Do you have a totally permission-based Pull, Place, Buy and Share program that is welcomed by your consumer and that delivers relevant content to them multiple times a day, 365 days a year on any of the following social and mobile platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Mobile smartphones, iGoogle and MyYahoo home pages and the ShoppeSimpleNetwork Portals?

Now what makes all of this happen and happen so quickly (in 30 days or less) is consumers want a social and mobile commerce experience. They want to engage with your brand, have a conversation and they want you to listen to them. They have been wondering where has your business been regarding Social and Mobile? That is the consistent voice we hear from consumer after consumer in the program.

Merchants once in the program say…”only if I would have started using The ShoppeSimple Network sooner”.

And after all of the above, we guarantee you will get your $10 in and $13 back we have made an introduction to The ShoppeSimple Network so simple, efficient and affordable you just can’t say no to doing a trial. If I am reading your mind…don’t worry you can set your renewal program terms up front so you won’t get hurt. Working with us is really that simple and easy.

Other merchants are jumping into our Introductory Trial Program and now is the time for you to do it too.

Bottom line is all we want to do is make your business successful with Social and Mobile Commerce and as the Leader in the space we will put our skin in the game to prove it.

So simply ping me or ring me up at 612-349-2740 and your ShoppeSimple Network program will be up and running under our best practices in less than 10 days.

Best,

Jeffery

PS. If You Could Get A 30% Return In 30 Days Why Wouldn’t You Do It?

Unmarketing…Stop Marketing and Start Engaging…ideas from ShoppeSimple Network

thegies — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 02:17:27 +0000

From: Jeffery Giesener – CEO – ShoppeSimple Network

I have been reading Scott Stratten’s book called UnMarketing*…Stop Marketing…Start Engaging.

Engaging, that’s a word I frequently use to discuss Social topics along with Conversation. Stratten also focuses on “Listening” to your consumer. This is a terrific book and it advocates a very different approach away from traditional marketing. Two thumbs up.

In the book, Stratten discusses how Traditional Marketing is dying a slow, painful death. He makes a strong passionate statement: “that when you go the route of UnMarketing, you’ll find innovative ways out of the old “Push Marketing” ways of the past, which assumes messages sent out blindly and broadly will magically lead to loyal and long-tem clients.

Instead, why not discover a new approach called “Pull Marketing that brings consumers to you through listening, conversation and engagement enabling you to build trust and position your company as their logical choice when they need your services.”

Engaging, listening and conversing with consumers is exactly what makes The ShoppeSimple Network so successful in driving Social and Mobile Commerce for our clients.

Thinking about Stratten’s words, have you determined when your Facebook Store is launching? When are you going to put muscle behind your marketing on Twitter? What are you planning to do with m-commerce? On Facebook, are you building a self-contained Facebook Store where checkouts are being done on Facebook or are you wanting to drive the Facebook traffic back to your website? Have you thought about data protection issues on Facebook and are you concerned about your consumer’s data security on Facebook? When are you going to start using YouTube to market your business?

After saying all of the above, I hope you are not one of the 75% of brands/merchants who have yet to even put together a Social/Mobile Marketing strategy? If not now…when?

Listening, Conversation and Engagement…

It took Facebook, YouTube and Twitter just a few years to amass mega-millions of consumers on their platforms? Are they/have they perfected the art of listening, engagement and conversation?

Have you thought about your Push Marketing techniques and whether they are the reasons why consumers are defecting off your website (you know around 80-90% of your visitors never move beyond your home page from the link into your website)?

Why do think you have a minimum of 70% non-open rates to your emails? Is it also because Push Marketing is raising its ugly head?
Why have your E-mail click through rates been steadily declining (now continuously moving south to <8%); is it more Push Marketing?

Push-N-Pray on Facebook…Yikes

What a pity that we are now witnessing the positives of merchants moving their business into social environments like Facebook with the builds of their Facebook Store and then choosing the old school approach of Push-N-Pray Marketing. Believing by pushing their product catalog at their consumers on Facebook, Twitter and Mobile they can maximize their social commerce. Then they wonder in the Marketing Meetings and Boardrooms why they are not seeing social sales or social is not generating a ROI for them. No surprise here!

Are merchants/brands Listening to their Consumer and asking them if pushing a product catalog at them is what they wanted out of their social Engagement with the brand? Are these merchants trying to build Conversations with their consumers or are they are just assuming one exists?

Push-N-Pray just won’t work in Social and Mobile. And if you do it, I am afraid these platforms will just eat your business alive. You will be rowing your social boat in the opposite direction of your consumer’s social tide.

Stirring your coffee

In the age of Social and Mobile, “fire hosing consumers with your product catalog” just doesn’t cut it anymore. Just look at what your marketing trends are telling you. Doing what you have always done and not realizing that it isn’t working anymore is like someone never trying a Starbucks. It’s also probably the most significant reason why consumers will be defecting from you and into your competitor’s business.

Pull, Place, Buy and Share Marketing…

There is another marketing approach in the Age of Social: one that doesn’t require consumers to arm themselves to defend against the push marketing arms race.

At The ShoppeSimple Network we call this “Pull, Place, Buy and Share™” Marketing where your consumer gives you the permission to market to them everyday. As Seth Godin wrote in his ground breaking work Permission Marketing, it doesn’t take much to build a great relationship with your consumer if you would only ask them for their permission and then not take it by assumption. And because you further respect their Digital Rights, we have found that these social consumers will not only buy from you, but also share your offers with their Likes, Followers and Mobile friends.

At The ShoppeSimple Network we integrate your business into a network of social and mobile portals including building you a Facebook Store that enables your consumers to pre-select the products they want to see on your Facebook Store, in Twitter and on their mobile smartphones; products that are highly relevant and targeted to their wants and needs. Then we send your Facebook/Twitter and Mobile consumers back to your website to complete the purchase. We do not do check outs on Facebook so your consumer’s data is protected and not shared with Facebook or other Facebook partners. http://bit.ly/9Qi8v1

So what will happen when you get in front of your consumers with your offers that are welcomed and fully permissioned? Your consumers will buy your products through The ShoppeSimple Network, will bookmark your offers on their iGoogle, MyYahoo home pages, their Facebook and Twitter pages, share them with their Facebook Likes and Twitter Followers, email and text their friends multiple times a day, 365 days a year. The result is new unbudgeted sales for your business.

What you will quickly find is that The ShoppeSimple Network builds a new social loyalty program for your business without causing channel shift. Your business will also quickly build a highly scalable Social Commerce channel. Why? Because using any one of our 5 Social and Mobile components will enable your business to experience higher average orders, more order frequency, increased consumer loyalty and higher conversion rates than you are getting today. Trust me…our clients have done the A/B split tests to prove the above points and we guarantee results.

We do all of this for one low monthly subscription fee without any commission “toll” or monthly maintenance fee. And you will be up and running in less than 30 days with no IT involvement.

As the leader in the space, we would welcome the opportunity to engage in a conversation and listen to your social requirements. We guarantee that we will build a social program that will meet your needs. Of course we know that a program like The ShoppeSimple Network needs to be presented to be fully understood and we do that in an interactive online presentation 1:1 or with your marketing colleagues. We’ll clear our schedules to do just that so give us a reply ping to set up the virtual meeting or call us at 612-349-2740.

Best,

Jeffery

Burning Heretics at the Stake…ideas from ShoppeSimple Network

thegies — Sat, 22 Jan 2011 01:38:48 +0000

Everyone is becoming interconnected and the lines between Social is Mobile or Mobile is Social are blurring at warp speed.

Social is Mobile

A recent survey conducted by Co-Tweet and ExactTarget on the Top 10 Motivations for Consumers to “Like” and Follow a Brand on Facebook are:

1. 40% want to receive discounts and promotions
2. 37% want to show support for the brand/company to their friends
3. 36% hope (want) to get free samples, a coupon (a.k.a. freebies)
4. 34% want to stay informed about the activities of the company
5. 33% want to get updates on future products
6. 30% want to get updates and information on future sales
7. 27% like to get fun and entertainment out of it
8. 25% want to get access to exclusive content (private content)
9. 22% mentioned they were referred by someone to follow the brand
10. 21% want just to learn more about the company

Mobile is Social

A study just released by ForeSee surveyed visitors to top e-retailer sites, found that 11% of them made a purchase using their phones in the 2010 holiday season, compared to only 2% at the same time last year. This was almost a 6 times increase!

30% of visitors used their phones to compare product details, look up prices, get deals, find coupons or store locations. In 2009, only 11% of consumers surveyed said they used their phones to do this kind of research. Shoppers who were highly satisfied with a retailer’s mobile experience were 30% more likely to buy from that retailer both online and offline.

Wow, would you have guessed it? Consumers actually like to use Social and Mobile for updates, deals, coupons, searches and brand information on future sales!

Just think what the numbers will be for social and m-commerce by next Holiday season? By the way, what steps are you taking to get your business ready for Social Commerce?

They burn Heretics at the stakes…

So who is going to be the Heretic for Social on your marketing team? The one who STANDS UP as the advocate for Social? Is it you? Shouldn’t it be you? If not YOU then WHO?

Who on your marketing team…

v Is going to slam their fist and ask why our social icons are buried at the bottom of our website?

v Will determine how our social consumers will even know how to engage with us?

v Will add something new to your marketing mix that will capture social commerce?

v Is devising a strategy to defend against the competitive threat of a social flanking strategy

The thermometer and the thermostat

A thermostat functions to establish and maintain a desired temperature. In business the thermostat maintains the status quo. Maintaining the status quo is always more comfortable. Bucking it always has risk. Doing little with Social marketing today is staying with the status quo.

A thermometer automatically signals a change in temperature (for our purposes business temperature). A business thermometer can reveal that something is wrong with the business. That something is wrong with the status quo. A business thermometer tells us when our order costs are too high, or that we are not servicing our consumers appropriately or our gross to net media dollars are either too high or too low. In traditional marketing the yellow, red, and green lights (your marketing dashboard) are your marketing thermometers. But now, I hope your business is moving away from traditional thermometers and into new ones. New thermometers called Social GPS.

Red Light, Yellow Light, Green Light…or Social GPS

So what is you’re Social GPS telling you? Do you even have a Social GPS? Is it pointing your business in the right Social direction?

What is that annoying Australian GPS voice telling you about your Social business?

Are you: going straight ahead and on course, in need of a turn or do you need to reroute your Social business? To be successful in Social you must be prepared to enter your coordinates, steer correctly, be patient and stay the course. But you also must be nimble and flexible enough and to make the important and critical “on the fly” Social corrections as you listen and engage with your consumers. If you don’t your business could be heading for a Social ditch and so could your job.

As the leader in Social/Mobile SaaS solutions, The ShoppeSimple Network can help you develop your Social GPS, manage and optimize it. With The ShoppeSimple Network, there’s nothing to install, nothing to maintain, nothing to worry about…. its just plug and play.

To learn more check out shoppesimplenetwork.com

In just a brief conversation, we can assess the opportunity for your business to tap into social and mobile marketing and learn what our other clients have already experienced; making serious bucks. And you can get started with the program at an affordable rate, just $250 per month depending on your compete.com numbers with absolutely no commission “toll” or maintenance fees of any kind.

To learn how you can join the ShoppeSimple Network simply respond to this email or give me a call 612-349-2740.

Best Regards,

Jeffery

Jeffery Giesener

CEO

ShoppeSimple Network