What exactly is Cutique?
Cutique is an advertising co-operative. That means it is a site that enables
its members to pool their promotional dollars to purchase advertising they
could not afford on their own. Every month, our members contribute membership
dues to participate in cutique.com.
What do these membership dues pay for?
First and foremost, these dues pay for advertising the site. Each month, the
membership dues collected are mostly spent on the purchase of
online banner advertisements for the website.
These banner advertisements link to Cutique, which links to
our members' websites. Shoppers find out about our members' fabulous
products by clicking ads for Cutique and then shoppers are forwarded to our
members' sites to make their purchases. In addition to funding our ad campaigns, a small portion
of the
member dues also pay for administrative expenses such as web
hosting, banner design and mailing list management/distribution.
Where does Cutique advertise?
Cutique mainly advertises with indie design blogs such as Modish and Design Sponge
and some generally cute-oriented websites
like Kawaii Not and Cute Overload.
So, how much are these membership dues?
Membership is $100/month. You can sign up for as
little as one month just to see if this will be successful for you. Three and six month
memberships come with a 10 and 15
percent discount respectively.
If you catch us when we do not have any immediate openings and you want to advertise
right away or $100 is out of your budget, we also offer mailing list only advertising.
Our opt-in "discounts and deals" newsletter is sent to over 1,000 each month. To advertise
on the mailing list we'll need a discount code or a deal to
share for your
site. You can share a discount code or deal on our mailing list for $10.00. All
submissions for mailing list ads must be approved. To advertise this way
please contact us. Please note that Cutique members are able
to share deals and sales on our newsletter free of charge, this is a perk of Cutique
membership.
Wow! $100 seems like a lot of money!
Although $100 might seem like a lot of money, you have to consider what you are
getting for $100. To begin with, major blogs and websites, such as those with
thousands of visitors each day (meaning the sites
we advertise on) are not cheap to advertise on. At the very least, you are
looking at spending around $400 for an ad on a site with any considerable
amount of traffic and a lot of these sites charge much more. We do not just
promote our sites within the handmade community because we aim to bring in a
larger and more diverse
customer base. When you spend $100 to participate in our co-op, you are
essentially getting an advertising and promotional campaign with $1,200 behind
it. Also, advertising for Cutique is ongoing, so we can purchase several
advertisements from an ad venue at once and get reduced rates on our ad
purchases.
It is also worth considering that your average craft show will end up costing
you over $100 to participate in (probably even more if you pay yourself for the
man hours you will spend sitting there) and probably won't bring nearly as many people
to view your products as advertising with Cutique.
(Cutique averages
about 15,000 visitors per month and about 45,000 page views.)
This is not to say that craft shows aren't great; the difference is that
Cutique allows
designers to advertise to a larger, more targeted audience over a longer period of time,
with less effort involved
on the designer's part. In terms of
views per dollars spent, $100 is not a whole lot to spend compared to other
more time-consuming and inconvenient means of promoting your brand.
Hmm, I found another website that has 1000 visitors/day and an ad there is only $75 per month. I am not so sure
Cutique is a good deal.
Participating in Cutique is a little different than running a banner advertisement on
a blog or website. When you run a banner ad on a website, your ad is secondary
to the site's
content and usually off to the side of the page.
People visiting the
site you're advertising on have come to view the content on the site and your ad
is not the center of attention. The average click-through rate on most banner
advertisements is less than 1%, so
the site offering you a $75 ad that promises you 1000 readers per day is likely to
deliver an average of 300 click-throughs per month or less. With Cutique, site
visitors have come specifically to view our members' products and our members'
products comprise all of our site's content. Our members always have a product right on the
home page of the site and additional products listed on Cutique's
category pages. On average, each of our members receives about 1000 click-throughs per
month as a result of their Cutique membership.
Why should I trust you guys with my advertising dollars? How do you know what
you're doing?
We started our first advertising co-op (IShopIndie.com) in February of 2006 because
we were frustrated with the astronomical expense of promoting our own handmade
goods and wanted to share the expense with other designers facing the same issue. Since
then we've dealt with a variety of advertising media and venues and learned a lot about
what it takes to bring shoppers to a website and where the best places are to do it. Since
we received such an overwhelming demand from designers hoping to participate in
I Shop Indie, we launched some new sites to accomodate more designers. Thus Cutique was launched in August 2007.
What makes Cutique different than all the other sites out there?
We understand that the indie designer has many options when promoting his or
her brand online. There are lots of great marketplaces, like Etsy and blogs
geared to indie designers with affordable rates. We certainly do not aim to
replace these outlets for promotion. Cutique was designed to work in tandem
with your other promotional efforts by increasing your brand's visibility to an
audience you might not be able to afford to market to on your own. Our goal is to
make consumers aware that buying from our independent designers is an
alternative to buying from large chains like Hot Topic or Urban Outfitters.
In order to make that happen, a well-funded, highly visible advertising and
promotional campaign for our co-op is essential.
The perks of participation in Cutique and the other sites in our network are
- Our ads are targeted to a specific demographic.
We bring together designers with products that complement each other. The designer
selling handmade vegan purses is an ideal advertising partner for the artist
making pendants out of recycled bottle caps. We bring designers like this together
on Cutique and then advertise to consumers who are most likely to be interested
in products such as these.
- Our website membership is limited.
Your products won't get lost in a sea of thousands of products on our site
because we only allow 12 designers to participate in our site at once.
This limited membership increases the value of your membership to our site.
Our members always get 1 product right on the home page to
maximize visibility.
- Our advertising and promotional efforts reach out to a large audience.
Because we pool together advertising dollars from our membership, we are
able to put together a well-funded promotion and advertising campaign. We also
have experience with both, since we've been at this a while and know what
produces results.
- We enforce quality control on our sites.
Cutique exists to help indie
business people succeed. We do not accept members with unprofessional product
photos or products that are a poor match for our websites.
- Self-service, real time management of your own content.
You post your own product images and descriptions and make changes at
your convenience. There's no waiting for help from a web developer to get the
job done. Our account management tool is user friendly, so you can manage your
site membership day or night with ease.
- We offer performance data.
You will always know how many click-throughs your products and website
have received, and you will even be able to keep track of the number of sales
you've received as a result of your membership with each site.
- We correspond with our fans via newsletter.
Each month Cutique sends a newsletter out to our website's newsletter subscribers.
As a member of Cutique you will be able to submit news about your products to this
newsletter. This feature is just another way we help you promote your business.
OK, maybe I'll give this a shot. How do I sign up?
Visit our parent website's sign-up page
and fill out all the requested information. Once you've created your account, log in and
click the link on the top right that allows you to add websites to your account. Choose
Alternative Culture from the first menu and Cutique from the second one. Then click the
"add me" button. If Cutique is full when you attempt to join, you may wish to join the
site's waiting list. This will get your products onto our site as soon as we have an opening.
What if this doesn't work out for me?
We can't promise advertising with us will bring you traffic or sales. We've
had great success in the past with co-op advertising and many of our current
members have been very happy with the results they've seen. We do hope your
participation in Cutique will be a success for you, but if things do not work
out you can cancel your membership by logging into your account, clicking on the
Cutique link under Websites, checking the checkbox to make your Cutique membership inactive,
and clicking the save button. Should you decide to try again at a later date you can
always log back in and reactivate your membership with Cutique.
What if I have an Etsy store or I don't know how to check my website's traffic counter?
How do I know if customers are visiting my site?
You can check the number of click-throughs your products and website have received by
logging into your account on our parent website and clicking on "Cutique" under the websites
header. You will have a section on that screen that links to your traffic information.
Generally, the more products you upload the more traffic you will probably get.
What if people are clicking though but not buying!?
Sometimes people click through to read more about a product and find some detail
that turns them off, sometimes people click through and check out items
they wish to purchase at a later date. All kinds of things can affect
a customer's purchasing habits, from how difficult it is to use your site to
how much detail you provide about your products. Having great quality photos,
detailed product descriptions, good customer service policies and an easy to use
website with an easy to use payment system will maximize your sales.
How do I know if people are buying?
Although it is possible for us to tell you how many sales you've received from your membership,
this depends on a few things. First of all, sales tracking requires the use of cookies.
If your customers prevent us from setting a tracking cookie, we will not be
able to track their purchase activity. We also will not be able to track any purchase
activity if you do not implement sales tracking on your own website (view the User Guide
located on your account manager page for details about this). Lastly, cookies do
expire, so if your customer makes a purchase based on seeing your products
on our site but the purchase takes place a month later, we will not be able to record that
as a sale associated with your account. So in short, sales tracking will give
you a pretty good idea of how many sales your membership is producing but
it's not an exact science.
If I don't see a huge spike in sales does that mean this is just a waste of money for me?
Not necessarily. Although many things can have an effect on your sales, advertising
here (or anyplace else) and not seeing a dramatic increase in sales overnight
does not mean the advertisement was ineffective. Advertising is not only about
selling things, it is also about building brand recognition. Snapple does not
expect that when they advertise on a highway billboard passing
motorists will pull their cars into
the nearest convenience store to get a Snapple iced tea. The idea
is to make consumers aware of their brand so that when the consumer is thirsty Snapple will
come to mind. Advertising for you will probably work similarly. A person who visits
Cutique today may not need a new bag or notecards or much of anything right now, but the idea
is that when that person does need something, they'll think of Cutique (because it is
widely advertised) and come buy something from our members.
|
