The MerchantCircle Blog

Latest MerchantCircle release notes!

Many a new thing available for our merchants and their customers with the latest release from MerchantCircle! We've taken a note from the Postal Service over the last few days with our latest release. You know, that whole thing about through sleet and hail. It's been white squall-like conditions out here with the freakish weather, lately, but we still managed to get you the latest great serving of MerchantCircle. Here are a few of the highlights: 1) Newsletters Part 2: Email Delivery As promised just one short month ago, we now provide the ability for you to email your newsletter to all of your customers. Using the same wizard that let's you publish the newsletter to the web, you can now enter in the email addresses of your customers to send an email version of the newsletter. If you already have your email addresses in your address book in Microsoft Outlook, Yahoo, Google or Plaxo, we've included the ability to import that information easily into our newsletter wizard. Most other companies charge upwards of hundreds of dollars for this service. We're giving it to you for next to nothing: just 50 AdDollars, which you can earn by sending just a few invitations. How do you like them apples? 2) Category Chooser Thanks to everyone who wrote us last month about how much they loved the new business categories for our listings. Many of you asked if we could give you the ability to add more categories, or change categories, associated with your business. We heard you, and this month, we've now given you the ability to associate your business with up to four categories, and make any of the corrections you need to make. This will make it even easier for more customers to find you! 3) Activity Reports You've heard us talk about all the customers who are visiting your site. Well, don't just take our word for it. Look for yourself! Now, on ALL business listings, we're showing the number of potential customers who have visited your business, requested a deal or rated your business over the last 30 days. Additionally, we show the number of outstanding invitations for your business to connect, and the number of times Google and Yahoo search engine spiders have come crawling on your site. That last bit is actually very important. If you see low, or no numbers from Google or Yahoo, this may mean they're not seeing your site, and not putting it into the search engine. That's bad news when customers do a search, and don't find you there. The best way to fix that issue? Create some local content! Write a blog entry, upload a picture, create a newsletter, or create an ad. Google and Yahoo like it when you have unique new content, which will make your business stand out in their search results. 4) Customized Local News You told us you wanted more control over the news on the bottom of your listing, and we've now provided you even more options! You can customize the news on your listing, and choose different types of news. Maybe you're a realtor and want local economic or real estate news. Maybe you're a sports pub and want sports stories, or entertainment fodder. Maybe you think your customers love those oddball stories. Choose whatever mix of news you want, and help make your listing more relevant to your business. 5) Help Connect Your Neighborhood! Most of you invite a lot of your local businesses by inputting their email addresses. But sometimes you don't have that email address handy, or can't remember it. In that case, we're unable to send the invitation out until we get the address. Many of your neighbors have these addresses, and now we're tapping into your community to help get those invitations out, and you can do the same thing (and earn free AdDollars for being a good citizen!). Just login to MerchantCircle, and on the dashboard, you'll see a local business listed where we're missing their address. If you have that information, fill it in, and we'll help your neighbors get connected. 6) Pretty emails :) We've cleaned up all of our emails, and are now sending better looking ones that should make it even easier to help you get connected with customers, and for them to reach you. Lots of changes here, so keep an eye out for those invitations. 7) Cleaned-up Coupons Coupons look better than ever, so why don't you create a new one today, and help your customers get in touch with you? Handful of other small changes, but obviously a lot of improvements. And even more are coming, so check them out! By the way, have you created a Google campaign yet? Quite a few of our customers have, and are seeing a lot more local customer leads! Stay tuned for some testimonials, but in the meantime, give it a shot! It costs just a few AdDollars, and is an easy way to get more customers! Thanks for being part of the MerchantCircle community! Mark

posted by MerchantCircle Staff at 2/28/2006 05:45:00 PM ,