Winner of the $10,000 MerchantCircle Sweepstakes!

Today we announced that Idaho-based Bonnie Wilks is the winner of the $10,000 Spring Fling Sweepstakes, hosted by MerchantCircle, the largest online network of local business owners in the nation. MerchantCircle kicked-off the sweepstakes in February to celebrate its relaunch as a consumer destination that helps busy people solve everyday problems.

Winner Bonnie Wilks discovered that MerchantCircle was running a sweepstakes while searching online for local deals, and promptly entered. At that time, she also joined MerchantCircle’s “Neighbor” program, which enables consumers to "follow" local businesses for the latest promotions, coupons and announcements. Wilks soon found that she loved writing and reading reviews on MerchantCircle, which today has over 6 million pieces of user generated content, from ratings and reviews to photos and blogs, to help consumers find the best local businesses.

“From all of us at MerchantCircle, congratulations to Bonnie Wilks on winning the Spring Fling Sweepstakes, we are very proud to have you as part of our neighborhood,” said Paul O’Leary, GM, MerchantCircle. “We are also so grateful to all our contest entrants, and we want to thank all of them for joining the MerchantCircle community.”

MerchantCircle allows consumers to immediately connect with qualified providers in their local area, get access to deals, find expert advice and receive free competitive quotes for real-life tasks. Consumers can find providers across all business categories, including home repair and improvement; health and beauty; financial and professional services; construction and real estate services; restaurants; and many others.

The sweepstakes was sponsored by Reply! Inc., and was open to legal residents of the 50 United States and the District of Columbia who were, as of entry date, 18 years of age or older. The sweepstakes period was from February 28 to April 10 of this year only. No purchase was necessary.

Sincerely,

The MerchantCircle Team

Take Control of Your Local Listings

Our goal at MerchantCircle is to connect local shoppers with the best local merchants. We’ve worked tirelessly to make it easy for people to find great businesses that provide quality services. Our desire to connect shoppers and businesses continues even when these shoppers may be searching elsewhere on the Web. That’s why we’ve partnered with Yext to ensure that MerchantCircle members can get found regardless of where shoppers are searching.

Guaranteed Presence

Yext PowerListings allows businesses to control their local search listings across 35 search engines and directories including MerchantCircle, Yahoo! And Yelp. Not only does Yext PowerListings ensure that the name, address and phone number are correct across their network, but it also allows businesses to highlight their listings with special offers, detailed business descriptions, photos and other enhanced content.

Save Time

Business owners no longer have to individually contact and verify their listings on each search engine or directory. PowerListings users can quickly and easily make changes to all of the listings within the PowerListings dashboard.

Track Results

PowerListings gives business owners the ability to see how many times their listing showed in the search results as well as how many times their business profile was viewed. With Yext’s granular tracking and reporting businesses have complete insight and control over their local search results.

How does your business look online?

As a business owner, you might not even be aware of how your business information appears across the Internet. Yext makes it extremely easy to find out with their free business listing report. Simply enter your business information as you would like it to appear, and Yext will create a report detailing everywhere your business information is missing or inaccurate.

Yext PowerListings has already helped thousands of local businesses gain control of their local listings, and we hope it can help you!

Sincerely,

The MerchantCircle Team

MerchantCircle: Making a Difference!

It's often difficult to keep our perspective with the day-to-day demands of working in a fast-paced environment, but, sometimes we need to take a step back and remember that the work we're doing does make a difference in our members' lives.

Check out this great "behind the scenes" video starring several of our members from the Los Angeles area:

So, to our 1.2 million merchant members: we are humbled and honored to have some part in helping your businesses succeed.  Best of luck to you and your families and thank you for your support!

Sincerely,
The MerchantCircle Team

You Spoke, We Listened...and It’s Working!

As you know, we recently updated the MerchantCircle.com website experience.  It’s only been a few weeks, but we’re happy to report that consumer engagement with the site (especially merchant listing pages) is at its all-time highest level!  

This means that more consumers are finding more businesses on MerchantCircle than ever before.  Customers are spending more time on Merchant business listing pages, and they are reading and writing reviews about Merchants they love.  This has been our goal from the very beginning - connecting local Merchants directly with Neighbors who need their products and services.

The recent improvements are the direct result of Merchant feedback.  We asked what you thought, and you told us what you liked and what you wanted to see done differently.  We took what you said to heart and focused on the features and capabilities you valued the most.  

• You asked for improved search across the site - you got it!  
• Merchants didn’t really care for the anonymous reviews, so they’re gone...replaced with reviews from registered MerchantCircle Neighbors.  
• The pages are cleaner, less cluttered and it’s much easier to find what you’re looking for.  

We will continue to make improvements that make the overall MerchantCircle experience better, faster and more relevant.

In fact, on the development side, our MerchantCircle Product Development Team, the magicians behind it all, have been working their magic indeed. The team has been using a version of Agile Product Management (it's a tech thing) that allows us to push updates to the site much more often. This means that we can resolve issues faster, add features quicker and easier, and continue to improve the Merchant and Neighbor experiences as fast as we can.

Over the next several months, you can expect to see more features and new capabilities for both Merchants and Neighbors.  Here’s a short list of the stuff we’re focused on delivering in the next month or so.

• More social media features and functionality
• A new mobile app - an extension to the 4.5-star rated Merchant app
• Prominent focus on Reviews & Compliments
• Optimized search functionality making it smarter and easier to use
• Better "request a quote" functionality to reduce the time from search to transaction

If you have suggestions, questions or any other input - please join us on the MerchantCircle Forums. 

Sincerely, 
The MerchantCircle Team

The New MerchantCircle: We've Remodeled!

With the new year upon us, lots of folks start thinking about embarking on remodeling projects. Here at MerchantCircle, we spent much of last year remodeling the site, and you could say we learned a few things.  We thought we’d share our experiences with all of you out there thinking of taking on a remodeling project, no matter how big or small.  

Here’s what we learned...

It’s good to have a plan...but plans change.  Looking back, our original plan didn’t take into account the complexity of the task ahead.  As we went along, we learned a ton about the site and each other.  The biggest lesson: the only way to make real progress is to get out of the “planning” phase and into the “doing” phase.

Everything takes longer than you think.  That’s probably true with many things in life, but definitely true with remodel projects.  You don’t know what you don’t know, at least until you start tearing things down.

You’re never really “done”.  Just when you think you can’t go on a day longer...you will find yourself checking things off your “punch list”.  The initial project will get done, but the tweaking, tuning and improving never ends.  

If you’ve recently remodeled (your kitchen, a bathroom, or maybe even your business website) share your experience in the new MerchantCircle forum. 

Now for the good stuff…

The launch of the new and improved MerchantCircle is a key milestone in the integration of MerchantCircle with Reply!.  As you can probably tell from our new homepage, we’re refocusing MerchantCircle a bit to help busy people get things done – big and small – by connecting them with a network of local business owners who are eager to help.

Here’s what’s new on the site…

For consumers (we like to call them MerchantCircle Neighbors):

·      Better search experience – three search bars focused on finding merchants, answers, or deals

·      New localized category pages that includes top merchants, deals, and advice (see examples here and here for examples)

·      More prominent display of top-rated merchants

·      Integrated “request a quote” functionality on listing pages, category pages, city pages

·      Easier access to expert articles and advice

For our fantastic merchant members:

·      A completely new support section and fresh user forums 

·      Reorganized layout for claimed listing pages to drive more user engagement

·      More prominence for photos and a new Photo Viewer

·      No more anonymous reviews

·      Better promotion of content and better search through new categorizations for businesses

And we’re not even close to done…in the coming weeks, we’ll announce other exciting improvements!

Stay tuned...

Sincerely,

The MerchantCircle Team

P.S. To learn more about the new, improved MerchantCircle, we've created this handy-dandy FAQ

P.P.S. We’ve also create a whole host of “how-to” videos to keep you up to speed on the new features available to you

Q4 2011 Merchant Confidence Survey -- Full Results

Several folks have asked for the full analysis from the Q4 Merchant Confidence Index survey, so here ya go!  This presentation is chock-full of stats pertaining to small business owners' thoughts about our economy, the future of small business hiring and trends in the adoption of new marketing channels like daily deals, pay-per-lead and mobile advertising.



Enjoy!



Sincerely,

The MerchantCircle Team

MerchantCircle Q4 2011 Merchant Confidence Index

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Customer Acquisition is (Still) King for Local Merchants

For many small businesses, the biggest challenge is acquiring new customers at an acceptable cost. And in 2011, we saw several new approaches to customer acquisition gain momentum: Facebook Ads and group deals.





According to our most recent Merchant Confidence Index survey of 2,500 local business owners across the U.S., while newspaper ads and direct mail – tried-and-true offline customer acquisition techniques – are still popular, with 25% and 24% of merchants using them, some 12% of merchants have offered a daily deal – up 33% compared to three months ago – and 24% bought targeted Facebook Ads.

Daily deals appear to be effective in driving customer acquisition tool for some small businesses.  According to the Merchant Confidence Index, 75% of merchants who have used daily deals in the past would do so again.  Of those who would use daily deals again, 61% of said they’d use them again because daily deals are “effective for customer acquisition.” While only 37% of merchants said the deals were “profitable”, it seems getting a new customer through the door makes daily deals worth trying again.

Local merchants are also acquiring new customers via Facebook Ads, the targeted paid ads offered by the world’s largest social network.  Some 38% of merchants said they’d use Facebook Ads again due to their effectiveness as a customer acquisition tool.  But for those who wouldn’t use Facebook Ads again, 66% said it’s because the ads did not work to acquire new customers – showing that customer acquisition is a top priority for small businesses.

Customer acquisition is so important to local merchants, the majority of respondents said they’d be willing to purchase qualified prospect information on a pay-per-lead basis. Over 60% of merchants in the financial services industry would pay for leads, while one-third of merchants in the automotive, construction, and home improvement industries would.  Look for this strategy to gain steam in 2012.

Marketing strategies that aren’t proven to bring in new customers are, unsurprisingly, not very popular with local merchants looking to grow their businesses. Mobile marketing, for example, has been slow to catch on with local merchants. Only 22% of merchants have tried mobile marketing, with 72% saying they’ve hesitated because they don’t have a good understanding of how to use it to reach potential customers.

With nearly a third of local merchants concerned about the high cost of marketing in the next year, it’s no wonder they prefer to use channels that deliver what they most need: new customers.

Sincerely,

The MerchantCircle Team