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Say Hi! To Our New Stores…
Adriana
Perfume - This is a fantastic store that
offers all of the most popular and famous names in perfume at a discounted
price. Proprietor: Enrique Palacios
The
Lion and Eagle Antiques - The first antique
store to join SAMarketPlace
displaying beautiful and elegant antique furniture, rugs, lamps and more.
Proprietor: Billy Gardner
Kiss
My Glass - This store offers a wide selection
of stained glass creations such as sun catchers, night lights, votive candle
holders, nativity scenes, angels, flowers, doves, clocks, key rings, holiday
gifts and desk sets.
Cats,
Cats, Cats – This feline friendly store
will soon be coming on-line with their very popular array of items for and
about cats! Items for sale will include T-shirts, mugs, cat toys, and gift
items for everyone who loves cats! Proprietor: Mark Quigley
New Sites for our Community
If you’ve visited Heart
of San Antonio lately, you’ve noticed it’s been completely
redesigned and new areas to attract visitors added. As before, SAMarketPlace
is prominently displayed and linked in several
places on the front page and on almost all other pages on the site.
Our latest major addition to
Heart of San Antonio is a new "Arts & Entertainment" section.
We are providing an entertainment portal for several local arts and entertainment
publications and are hosting their sites. Joining us in this new venture are:
Rooted.com,
an on-line entertainment magazine; SA Scene, a print magazine; and, two
major Tejano music publications, Planet Tejano y Más and Planet
Musical. This is a great place to promote restaurants, clubs, concerts and
events happening around town. Let us know if you’re interested in promoting
yourself on the site or in the publications themselves.
Be sure to check out the other
new areas including a new "Just•4•Fun"
area for the kiddos. We have a completely new Weather site, a Party
Pics area, and a News & Sports section with over 2,000 articles
each day.
Marketing Services
Since marketing your store is
the most important thing you can do to promote sales, we thought it might be
a good time to review some of the free and low cost marketing and advertising
services we offer our clients. Please take advantage of as many of these services
as possible. Just like you, we want everyone to be a success in SAMarketPlace!
Special Tourism Packages
TexasTourism
is offering 3 day/2-night packages as low as $215, which includes hotel accommodations
and entertainment vouchers. Participating are: The Crockett Hotel, Red Roof
Inns, Hilton Palacio del Rio, Six Flags Fiesta Texas, Yanaguana Boat Tours,
Via Trolley, Fiesta Noche del Rio, Pico de Gallo Restaurant, Villa d’Italia,
Que Pasa Magazine, U-R-Here Maps, and much more. If you would like to include
a special offer coupon for your business in the package, give us a call. Participation
is free for our clients. This site is a great place to advertise businesses
that cater to tourists such as convention services, hotels, rental cars, restaurants,
retail stores, etc.
Expert
Forums
If you’d like to have a forum to talk to your
customers and give them a place to meet and talk about your particular business,
let us know and we can set up a forum in our Ask the Experts area just
for you. So far, the following have signed up:
Fertile
Garden, formerly Gardenville, has an
"expert" on-line to answer gardening questions.
…And
Sew On Needlepoint has an "expert" to answer customers’ needlepoint
questions.
Free Coupons
Thanks to the San Antonio Area Tourism Council,
Heart of San Antonio now offers coupons for every major attraction in
the city. Tourists can print out their coupons while they are planning their
trip to San Antonio.
Add your own coupon to promote your store, restaurant,
or service for incoming travelers. It’s another free service from SAMarketPlace.
Counter Cards and Window Stickers
We have full color SAMarketPlace
counter cards for you at our cost of $20 per
250 and free window stickers to remind shoppers they can come back and shop
your store anytime, from anywhere.
The counter cards are printed with your store’s
name, address, phone, fax, email and SAMP address, and your site URL if you
have another website. So, these cards work not only for your on-line customers,
you can use them for regualr business cards.
Whether you have another website or not, you
should go ahead and get your own dotcom (domain) name before someone else does.
Once it’s gone, it’s gone and it’s only $35 a year. Remember, we also design,
build and host websites, so if you need any other Web services, just give us
a call.
Special Promotions: In the Spotlight
During the month of May, SAMarketPlace highlighted
a "special collection" of Mother’s Day Gifts. Since Father’s Day
is just around the corner, June 20, each store in SAMarketPlace can feature
up to three items in a special Father’s Day promotion. The fees for adding items
to this promotion have been waived for our current on-line stores. Please contact
the office by phone or email to let us know which items you would like us to
feature.
If you have an upcoming event involving your
business, send us your press release or a brief description of the project,
event, special sale, new location and we’ll feature it "In the Spotlight."
Free Listing in Business Directory
The Heart
of San Antonio’s Business Directory has
been expanded and greatly improved. For a limited time, businesses can create
a free display page, list themselves in three categories, add a logo and make
changes anytime.
We encourage you to take advantage of this opportunity
- if people can’t find you, they can’t shop you. Be sure to list your
business in the directory - it’s FREE to list.
NEW!
Guaranteed Viewer Advertising
We are now providing advertising space on our
sites at cost/thousand (cpm) rates. CPM rates allow you to pay only for the
people who actually see your ad! Let’s see other advertising medias match
that!
Our rates are priced right, and the ads are
very effective. We can place your ad in a wide variety of locations to ensure
you’re in front of your audience.
New SAMP Features
We’ve just added a feature for tracking shoppers
coming to your on-line store. You can see how many people came into your store
and what they were interested in looking at. If you see some things not being
perused, maybe it’s time to redo the descriptions or categories in your catalog.
Using your backdoor key, you can not only add or change any item from a quick
and easy list, you can view shopper statistics for your store.
Another feature we’ve added is the ability to
sell an item with several attributes such as colors, sizes, materials, etc.
One image is diplayed and pull-down menus allow shoppers to pick the color,
style, size, etc. they want.
If you can think of a feature
that you would like to have, let us know. If it can be done, we’ll add it. We’re
here to make you successful and need your feedback and suggestions to make SAMarketPlace
even better.
Till next time...
Work your store and tell everyone about it!
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