In 2001 my wife and I were partners in a venture that opened two restaurants in Kiev, Ukraine (I lived in Ukraine for 7 years). One of the restaurants was also a night club. Among other things, I was responsible for marketing communications.
One of the first things I did was have a website created for each store. The websites were typical of most restaurant websites in terms of the information present; however I requested that the web developer build in a content management system (CMS). This allowed us to easily make changes to areas of our website that we needed to keep fresh ?Äì general menu, lunch menu and event schedule (nightclub). Another great feature of the CMS was that it would generate html newsletters and email them to our database of clients. The database was also accessible via the CMS so that we could easily add/remove/edit the records.
One of the interesting things about restaurant culture in Ukraine is that all middle to upscale joints have club discount cards that they hand out to the local society?Äôs ?Äúmovers and shakers?Äù and regular diners. In order to receive one of our restaurant club cards we required the recipient to provide his/her email address and consent to receive a weekly email newsletter.
Each week we sent out a newsletter for each restaurant. The newsletters were fully branded based on the look and feel of our website. We even had a customized vertical advertisement for Stella Artois, for which we were compensated. The newsletters included menu changes, event schedule and a personal note from me. At the bottom of each newsletter were 2-4 coupons that could be printed and cut out. The coupons were usually drink specials or for a discount on the cover charge for a specific event. Most importantly, each coupon was personalized with the name of the recipient. By personalizing the coupons we were able to make sure that only the intended recipient could redeem the coupon as well as keep track redemption frequency. It was also a visual cue for our staff to thank the patron by name for his/her continued patronage, which is always appreciated.
In general, the newsletters and coupons were a tremendous success and were contributing factors to our success. My wife and I realized early on that the restaurant business was not for us and we jumped at the opportunity to sell our stake in the business at a nice profit. Once we left, the remaining partners didn?Äôt keep up with the newsletters and then abandoned the website.
So what do email newsletters have to do with blogs and RSS distribution? Well, for a variety of reasons blogs/RSS have become the preferred delivery method for company newsletters rather than email. So if I were still in charge of marketing communications for these restaurants, I would have switched from email to RSS to deliver the newsletters with coupons.¬? I would have also swapped out the old CMS and replaced it with WordPress ?Äì WordPress is a great CMS solution for small to medium sized enterprises. If you would like to learn more about this or other Shadowbox blogging services/solutions, please feel free to send me an email.
The following is a great explanation of this phenomenon found at About.com
Reading News and Blogs via Really Simple Syndication – Spam Free
Email newsletters are great, but spam is not. The deluge of junk mail has made it increasingly painful to follow the news and what’s happening on your favorite web sites via email.Either the newsletter you’re eager to read is hidden in a massive spam attack or it does not arrive because your ISP is blocking spam and your favorite newsletter falls victim to the filters, too (now you know why a “false positive” is something negative).
RSS Feeds as an Alternative to Email Newsletters
Fortunately, there is an alternative way to subscribe to the web sites and blogs you visit regularly: RSS. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary (of course, the acronym can be explained in many other creative ways), and it allows you to “syndicate” news summaries from web sites.
You can use these syndicated RSS “feeds” to display the latest news from major newspapers, for example, on your own web site or read them on other sites collecting these feeds.
And There’s no Spam
But you can also display RSS feeds on your desktop and use them like email newsletters. There are special programs and web-based services called “RSS feed readers” or “RSS aggregators” that, given the URL of an RSS feed will fetch the latest headlines periodically and let you read them comfortably and efficiently (avoiding the info glut so common today).
The best thing about RSS is that if you subscribe to an RSS feed, you only get what you want. If you tell the feed reader to stop collecting a site’s feed, it will stop. And there’s no spam. And there’s no spam!
Using RSS Feeds
Subscribing to an RSS feed is easy.
- Look for a little orange XML icon on your favorite news site or blog, telling you to “syndicate this site”.
- Copy the feed’s URL (it will usually end in .xml, .rdf or .rss).
- Paste it in your RSS feed reader.
Now let the feed reader do its aggregating work, and enjoy the news.
Should you ever encounter “Atom” or “web” feeds instead of “RSS” feeds, do not let that confuse you. Essentially, they are all the same, just different names and slightly different protocols for the same functionality. Your RSS feed reader should be able to use either version just fine.
RSS and Your Email Program
While dedicated programs to read RSS feeds are developed, have you noticed how the most useful borrow much of the interface and functionality known from your email program? Before long, more and more email programs and web-based email services will be able to read RSS news. Mozilla Thunderbird, for example, integrates RSS feeds nicely and seamlessly, and NewsGator turns Outlook into a capable aggregator.
Email clients are the natural environment for Usenet news, email and RSS feeds. These methods of following news are strikingly similar, and aggregating them all in the same powerful program has many benefits.
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