Judy's Blog

What's On Sale Near You Giveaway

Last week we launched a media campaign to support our What's On Sale Near You Giveaway in Seattle & Atlanta. We picked two markets to ensure that we'd have enough data points at the end of the promotion to clearly evaluate its success. Seattle was an obvious choice since we're based here and know this market and Atlanta was selected for a few reasons: it's a second tier market that we felt we could penetrate and influence in a relatively short period of time (vs. a NY or LA) and it's totally different from Seattle which is important so that if we have success or even failure in two markets we can clearly rule culture or geography as contributing factors.

Marketers and especially Non-marketers are always skeptical of promotions because while they do a great job at goosing results, the quality of leads generated is often very low. To deal with this issue, we structured the promotion as a chance to win vs. do x get y and then offer entrants the opportunity to increase their chances to win by posting a qualifying local deal. For anyone that's conducted a promotion with UGC elements, you know that a large portion of content generated is low quality so we put a qualilty measure (using our new approval queue) in place which lets posters know that only deals meeting qualifying standards will be published and will guarantee an additional entry into the promotion

Early results look promising and we've been pleasantly surprised by the engagement metrics (CTR, repeats and pageviews) which have all increased steadily since we launched.

Here's a look at some of the campaign creative we're running:

Local editors at Judy's Book

Over the past month we've hired a team of local editors in Seattle, Atlanta, New York, Chicago and LA to help us source and share the best local deals in those markets. What we've figured out is that this content is scarce and requires a lot of work to generate a relatively low volume of content. But the effort feels worthwhile when you start to look at the type of sales and discounts that are available from the top local boutiques and retailers. Check out our Seattle deals page for example and you'll see deals from well known local retailers that don't often have large advertising budgets to tell you when they have great sales or discounts in their stores.

In addition to hiring local editors, we've also developed a few features to support this effort:

1.User-posted local deals: up until now, we've only allowed online deals to be posted on this site but with the latest release any Judy's Book member can post local deals (so long as the business has a website). 

2. Deal approval queue: this was a highly debated feature but ultimately we all agreed that to maintain high quality content we would need the deal approval queue in place to monitor user submitted content and ensure that what does get published to the site are great deals and sales. While this option is undoubtedly more labor intensive, we hope that the work upfront to screen deals will pay off long term and result in a better experience for users.

We'll keep you posted on how these features are working in the next few weeks.

CJU & Shop.org

by Erin Friedman

Last week I attended the CJU conference in Santa Barbara. Like the Linkshare conference in June, the event was well structured to faciliate conversations between publishers and advertisers which in my opinion is the only good reason to attend any of these events (unless your company has oodles of money and doesn't mind its employees signing up for the occassional boondoggle). At the end of the conference I walked away with stronger partnerships with some key national advertisers that we've been focusing on as well as a laundry list of suggestions from our CJ account rep which will undoubtedly keep us busy (and with any luck increase revenue) for the next few months. Anyone in the affiliate marketing space should put the annual linkshare and CJU events on their calendar.

Andy has been in Vegas all week at the Shop.org conference. Early reports indicate that the content has been good and that there are a bazillion people in attendance so networking is hard. We'll get his full report when he returns next week.

Affiliate Marketing 101

Last Fall we entered into the affiliate marketing world and signed on with the big networks: Performics, Commission Junction and Linkshare. Our strategy was broad brush--sign up with as many merchants as we can to determine which ones drive the best search traffic, clicks and of course sales.

Now that we've been at it for a while, we've been able to focus in on what works for our business and how to get the most out of our affiliate partners. Here are a few of the things we've learned:

• Learn to edit. There are many many merchants that likely don't apply to your site or customer that will clutter up your content. Focus on the few that you care about and make sure to merchandise their content well.
• Make a personal connection. We were resistent to reach out to our affiliate partners because we were new to the space and weren't driving huge sales. We took a risk and attended the linkshare conference and built relationships with all of their top merchants who now have Judy's Book on their radar and are willing to work with us to help jump start sales
• Don't be afraid to ask. We figured that exclusive deals and higher commissions were reserved for affiliate sites that were reporting the biggest sales.  In just a few conversations at the Linkshare conference it became clear that affiliate partners were very willing to extend special offers or help with custom data feeds and in general enter into a conversation to make the relationship successful
• Find a way to stand out. Affiliate partners partners have positively reacted to the Judy's Book value prop, especially the local focus but they also liked our deal editor program which assigns an editor to each of the brands we care about giving the merchant trust that their content will be merchandised and manually reviewed ultimately resulting in what we believe is a higher quality deal site.

We've still got a long way to go but we've made good progress over the past few months and will driving hard to make the affiliate channel work for JB.

Judy's Book Annual Retreat

We just returned from our annual Judy's Book retreat at Chris's family house on Lopez Island. The event was marked by many of the usual activities including stellar barbecuing from Kurt, late night poker (I heard that Chad purchased a yacht with his winnings) and tasty s'mores by the fire.  Here are a few pics:

New Features on Judy's Book

We just shipped a few new features over the past few weeks including Bookmarking and the Newsletter archives. Here's a little bit about them:

Bookmarking: Members can now bookmark deals that they like which will be stored in their member profile to check out at a later date. We are also using this feature to help us aggregate and merchandise the data as top saved deals where users can find out the top saved deals, tags, categories and merchants.

Newsletter Archive: Now users can view all of our JB newsletters in one location so if you miss out on one of the newsletters you can reference it here.

 

B2B Outreach

This past week Chris has been reaching out to a targeted list of popular Seattle merchants inviting them to check out our free online tools which allow merchants to distribute their sale/special offers on our site. Our goal is to connect local merchants with savvy shoppers who are looking for the latest, high quality deals in their neighborhood.

To validate our strategy with an expert, we spoke to Bill Brelsford, a Duct Tape marketing coach, about our B2B efforts and to find out if anyone in the Duct Tape network would benefit from our online tools. Bill gave us some positive feedback which you can read about here.

Over the next few weeks we'll be working on new features to make the merchant center online tools even easier to use and expanding the distribution of the offers across the Judy's Book site. We're excited to make these tools available to help local merchants connect with consumers and to help consumers find the best deals in their neighborhood.   

MITEF event

by Erin Friedman

Last night Dave, Rahul and I attended MITEF's event, Marketing Successfully in the Web 2.0 World. The panel included Mike Murphy from Facebook, Derek Gordon from Technorati, Ben Elowitz from Wetpaint and Norman Guadagno from Zaaz and was moderated by Jonathan Rosoff of Avenue A/Razorfish.

In general the content seemed to target brand marketers who have little experience with social media and social networks but nonetheless, here are a few of the takeaways that I thought made it worthwhile:

Be authentic:In the world of UGC, where customers activity contribute and share information online, make sure you deliver the facts and respond honestly about concerns about your product or service

Show up: There are likely many passionate users already talking about your product online. Find them and join them. Ben talked about a Starwood rewards discussion site that helped to foster loyalty among members after a Starwood employee started participating in the online discussions. The employee was able to address questions or concerns about the program and create a strong group of evangelists at the same time.

Go Deep: Tap into the passion of your users by understanding what it is they care so much about and deliver utility specific to their area of interest.

Check out Rahul's blog for some additional quotes from the panelists.

 

Deals delivered

Over the past few weeks we have added two new features which make it easy to find out what's on sale near you. Here's a little bit about them:

Alerts: Geo-targeted alerts feature that delivers the latest deals for your neighborhood via email. Visitors can sign-up from any page on the deals site.

RSS: RSS is offered on just about any page of the deals site (just look for the famous orange button). Visitors can subscribe to RSS from their local deal page (they'll need to give us a zip code to do that) to find local deals and get real time information about what's on sale in their neighborhood.   

We hope you enjoy and as always, send us a note with any feedback.   

Seattle Open Coffee Club

This morning Andy scheduled the first of many open coffee clubs at Louisa's on Eastlake. He wasn't sure what the response was going to be like but about 16 people showed up to network and chat with Andy. Based on the success of this week's meeting, Andy will continue to meet at Louisa's for the next 7 Tuesdays at 8:30am.