Coupons Provider Starts RSS Feed
Consumer-printed coupons provider Coupons Inc. is using an RSS feed. Coupons are added daily, and they are pulled out of the RSS feed when offers expire.The all-coupons feed (www.coupons.com/rss.asp) is available on My MSN and My Yahoo as well as other content aggregator sites and standalone RSS newsreaders.
"Coupons are very untargeted, distributed to all and allow consumers to select [the coupons they would like] themselves, just like news, weather, sports or entertainment, so they are a perfect fit for RSS," said Steven Boal, CEO of Coupons Inc., Mountain View, CA.
Data are updated on Coupons Inc.'s CouponBar, a toolbar that installs directly into major Web browsers and provides a regularly updated list of offers from selected manufacturers that signed on to appear on the bar.
The CouponBar puts a star next to the new coupons added daily. At any given time there are roughly 35 offers highlighted. The service is free to advertisers and aims to drive consumers to the sites of the manufacturers offering the coupons.
"For advertisers, this toolbar allows the desktop to become another high-visibility channel for coupon distribution," Boal said.
Consumers can download CouponBar from http://couponbar.coupons.com.
Boal said the RSS feed is an outgrowth of the CouponBar.
"Just serving the information to the toolbar limits your capability to reach people who may not use a particular browser, etc.," he said. "RSS, however, allows us to deliver the raw data and have consumers take it in any form they'd like."
Offers delivered by the Coupons Inc. platform appear simultaneously in the RSS feed, on the CouponBar, on manufacturer Web sites, in e-mail campaigns and on coupon sites using Coupons Inc.'s hosting solutions. All offers are protected via Coupons Inc.'s security, which controls distribution and sets print limits.
Melissa Campanelli covers postal news, CRM and database marketing for DM News and DMNews.com. To keep up with the latest developments in these areas, subscribe to our daily and weekly e-mail newsletters by visiting www.dmnews.com/newsletters
