An important aspect of advertising products for an online retailer is featuring product promotions. Promos can be deal-breakers for online shoppers and it’s important that they know about them BEFORE reaching your merchant page. CPC Strategy interviews dealnews’ Head of Sales, Clover Simpler, to find out more about the huge PPC marketing channel.
Describe your company in 140 characters or less.
Dealnews reduces the “noise” for online shoppers by offering them a highly curated selection of the best new deals from online and local stores.
Anything else you’d like to add to that description?
Dealnews is a top 1,000 website with 20 million visits per month during the holiday season. The vast majority of dealnews’ traffic comes from repeat daily visitors, not SEO or SEM. Dealnews is also a widely cited e-commerce authority. In the past week, dealnews was featured on CBS News, USA Today, MSNBC, Business Insider, Kiplinger, MSN Money, and more. (Yes, that was just one week.)
About $400M of merchandise was sold via dealnews’ sales leads in 2011. If you counted that as our revenue, dealnews would be #60 on the Internet Retailer 500.
Just so we don’t string any retailers along, what’s your target market? Who’s your ideal customer? & What are your costs?
Dealnews is primarily read by men, ages 18-45. However, women are our fastest growing demographic. Both men and women visit dealnews for clothing and other soft goods, which are about half of the deals we list, and tech products, which compose the other half. Dealnews readers have very high disposable income and are well-educated.
80% of dealnews visitors made an online purchase within the last week.
Our readers are tech enthusiasts and are very interested in lifestyle items like clothes and shoes. We lead with deals on individual products and generate above average conversion rates. Some of our largest retail clients are Apple, HP, FinishLine, and Aeropostale. We work with these clients on a CPC, CPM and CPA basis. Our CPC rates are competitive and vary by price point, but are in line with rates charged by the largest comparison shopping engines.
Ideal retailers are aggressive on price for brand name products or are the brand. For example, a North Face $50 jacket would perform better on our site than a $10 no name brand. The product mix and categories they work in would appeal to younger men interested in gadgets and technology. Again, woman are our fastest growing category for clothes and shoes.
How does your company provide a solution to the needs, wants and desires of online retailers?
Retailers can think of dealnews as a great big fire hose that they can turn on to a single offer. The right offer can sell thousands of units per hour on dealnews. In contrast, retailers should not expect dealnews to perform like a comparison shopping engine (CSE), where they get small amounts of clicks across a large product catalog.
What’s typical in terms of your results, or what a merchant can do with your service to get more sales & profit?
Because of its careful curation, dealnews has click-to-buy conversions that are as good as (or better than) CSEs and search marketing campaigns, and yet we almost always charge less because we don’t force our clients to bid against each other.
Our offer listings typically generate from a few hundred to a few thousand clicks per listing, depending on the quality of the deal. We list more than 200 offers a day and can be flexible in how much coverage an advertiser gets until they are comfortable with the volume and conversion we deliver for them. Our listings other than CPM placements do have to adhere to our editorial guarantee which limits our coverage in some cases as all offers from the retailers will not meet that criteria.
To generate more revenue for its clients, dealnews has a terrific sales team that works closely with them to identify their unique needs.
What does implementation look like? Costs? Time? Resources? What’s involved?
Starting with dealnews is as easy as signing a short contract. Our sales team will then work with you to get your offers in front of our audience. Because our editors handpick each deal, there is no technical integration or setup fee. You can usually have an offer up the same day you sign.
Additionally, dealnews can geolocate an offer to a specific city if you desire.
How can a merchant get started with working with your company?
Contact us immediately!
About Clover Simpler: Clover Simpler is dealnews’ Head of Sales. Clover leads the company’s national sales operations and work closely with the management team on the creation and execution of its business strategy, operating plan, and corporate development activities.
Clover is highly experienced with the e-commerce and has been the Managing Director and Vice President of National Sales at kgbdeals USA. Prior to that, she was Vice President of Global Customer Services at INTTRA and worked 23 years in a series of senior executive roles at Dun & Bradstreet.
