A surprisingly simple solution.
If you operate a blog-based Web site — or even a Web site that includes a separate blog — there’s a good chance that you can use the built-in category and RSS feed features to distribute special offers to site visitors by e-mail.
I set this up on my WordPress-based Flying M Air Web site the other day and it works like a charm. Let me explain how.
The Goal
Before I explain how to set this up, let me take a few moments to explain why you might want to do it. The best way to do that is to explain what my goal was.
Flying M Air offers helicopter tours, charters, and excursions throughout Arizona. Some of our flights begin and end in Phoenix, which is about 1/2 hour from our base in Wickenburg. The folks who buy Phoenix-based tours and charters cover the cost of our flight to the starting point, but with a penalty to our profit margin.
My idea was to “piggyback” other tours out of Phoenix on existing tours. So, for example, if I knew I had a flight at 1 PM, I could offer similar flights out of Phoenix in 12 noon and 2 pm time slots. These piggybacked tours would be offered at a discount to encourage customers to sign up. This would enable me to serve multiple Phoenix-based customers with one round-trip to the Phoenix area, thus maximizing my revenue for the trip.
What I wanted to do to get the word out was to publish the special offers on the Web site and automatically e-mail these offers to potential customers who were interested in receiving offers. I’m not talking about spam here. I’m talking about a mailing list that people voluntarily subscribe to and could unsubscribe from at any time. Something I wouldn’t have to manually manage. (God knows I have enough work to do.)
How I Did It
I started by creating a “Be Spontaneous!” category on my Flying M Air site. The purpose of the category is to publicize “last-minute” special offers for specific dates and time slots. Because not everyone would know what “Be Spontaneous!” means, I also added a link to the category on the top navigation bar, with a more obvious label: “Special Offers.”
I then created post-dated entries with the special offers I wanted to advertise. Only one offer would appear at a time. I’d have to manually delete the offers after the date (or perhaps leave them there so visitors could see the kinds of offers they missed).
Next, I went to FeedBurner and set up a feed for the special offers. While there, I set up the E-mail Notification feature. You can learn how to do that in my Informit.com article, “Add Email Notification to Your Blog with FeedBurner.”
Finally, I added a subscription form to the sidebar of the site. I also got fancy and added an introduction to the Be Spontaneous! category that explained what it was all about and offered a subscription link.
Mission accomplished. (Really, though.)
Give It a Try
This is how I did this with WordPress, but you can just as easily do it with other blogging software. (Just don’t ask me which ones or how to do it. I’m a WordPress user.) The key ingredients are the separate special offers category and the FeedBurner e-mail subscription feature.
One word of advice: if you’re going to go through the bother of doing this, make sure your special offers really ARE special. Don’t turn this into spam. Not only will you annoy and alienate your subscribers, but you’ll give them the idea that subscribing to Web content always leads to spam.
And that’ll ruin it for the rest of us.
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