When I first started taking on the email marketing for Broadway Media it took nearly a full work day. The time suck came because I had to make sure every website was up-to-date with content, sift through all the content to see what I felt was worthy of being included in the email, typing all the content, uploading all the images, sending test emails, and waiting for approvals.
As our client list grew, I had less time to spend doing emails and needed a solution. I noticed over the years that biggest reason for these emails were for clients. They wanted to send out the top promotions (paid for by clients) and an occasional client ad. The rest of the content didn’t seem to matter.
This web app checks each station’s RSS feed three times a day, checks for duplicates, separates articles into categories, and saves the article information into a database.
Now each week all I have to do is select which articles I want in each email. This web app turned nearly 8 hours of work into 1 hour of work.
Things I learned with this web app:
- Email provider’s very specific HTML structure for an email so all browsers and devices can read it
- Creating CRON jobs with bash scripts
- Pulling in RSS content and saving to the database
- Create custom CMS