Welcome TrueValue – ShopLocal's Newest SmartCircular Client

Mon Mar 22, 2010 0 Comments

Last Friday (3/19/2010) at the 2010 TrueValue Spring Market Members Convention here in Chicago at McCormick’s Place, a new partnership was unveiled between ShopLocal and TrueValue for ShopLocal to become the sole provider of online circulars for all corporate and member sites.

TrueValue is using the SmartCircular 4.1 platform to bring their traditional print weekly ad digital and to add extensive

The team here at ShopLocal is really thrilled about working together with the TrueValue team. Carol Wentworth, the VP of Advertising, shared a strong vision of the role that digitally powered marketing will play in attracting and retaining the 25-34 year old customer segment to TrueValue stores. This single segment equates to 19.2 million households or 9.1 million homes. These younger customers are the ones that spend the most per year on home improvement ($1,695) currently.

She also shared that TrueValue will increasing be focused on the national sales events that are tied to peak sales periods (aka such as Memorial Day) and short duration ads (aka Drive The Door Events), due to the great unit sales success and improved product margins that the promoted items that are part of these events produce.

To start with, all national sales events and bargain of the month print ads will be published online within the new TrueValue SmartCircular 4.1 site. However the goal is to get each member (aka locally owned and operated TrueValue store location) to opt-in to participating. This means that each member can choose to:

Pay to only be included in the print version of the weekly ad
Pay to only be included in the online version of the weekly ad
Pay to be included in both the print and online version of the weekly ad

So obviously, we want to showcase to the local members the incredibly strong value proposition of #3 where print + online is the winning combination for both frequency and reach of their local shoppers.

However this sort of member level marketing flexible doesn’t stop there. Both TrueValue corporate and ShopLocal are working together to allow each local member store to:

Run an online weekly ad that has different sale start and sale end dates than the print version
Run an online weekly ad that has different circular pages than what was included in the print version
Run an online only weekly ad that was custom made for digital only distribution (and is never printed and inserted into newspapers)

Also within this new digital marketing plan, targeted, localized email and an improved local web sites are also part of the mix along with the online circular. Its a great three-way punch: local destination resource centers (TrueSites) + rich interactive store promotions content (online circulars)+ targeted consumer communications (email)