In the late 1990s and early 2000s, AZeats.com was doing something that was fundamental to the success of the entire business: building an audience and finding ways to stay connected with it.
The restaurant websites were only part of the equation. AZeats needed people to:
Two important pieces of that effort were Dine-mail and NewsBytes.
They served different purposes, but together they helped AZeats create something that was difficult for many restaurants to build on their own: an ongoing relationship with customers.
Dine-mail
Dine-mail was AZeats.com's email collection and distribution system for its restaurant clients.
Because Dine-mail was built directly into every AZeats website, it gave client restaurants an affordable form of targeted advertising.
When a visitor subscribed, Dine-mail collected that person's email address. The subscriber was added to the restaurant's email database and also became part of the broader AZeats database. This created an important new asset for both the restaurant and AZeats:
That was very different from traditional advertising.
A newspaper advertisement reached whoever happened to read the newspaper that day. A radio commercial reached whoever happened to be listening. A magazine coupon disappeared when the magazine was discarded. Dine-mail allowed restaurants to communicate directly with people who had already demonstrated an interest in them.
Restaurants Could Do It Themselves
One of the important features of Dine-mail was that AZeats did not have to send every newsletter for every restaurant.
Restaurant clients had their own Dine-mail backend login.
They could access their account, manage their subscriber communication, and send emails and newsletters to their own database.
Dine-mail handled the distribution.
That meant a restaurant could develop an ongoing relationship with its customers without having to understand the technology behind the system and without having to call Bill every time it wanted to send a newsletter.
The technology was doing the work.
Dine-mail was a custom application built specifically for AZeats, at a time when modern cloud-based email marketing platforms, drag-and-drop editors, and sophisticated analytics did not exist.
What Restaurants Could Send
The messages could contain the kinds of information restaurant customers actually wanted:
The purpose wasn't simply to send advertising.
It was to give subscribers a reason to come back.
A customer might receive a holiday promotion, discover a new restaurant, print a coupon, or learn about a discounted gift certificate.
An email could lead directly back to the restaurant's AZeats website, where the customer could find a menu, directions, coupons, or gift certificates.
NewsBytes was different
NewsBytes was the bi-weekly AZeats.com newsletter.
While Dine-mail provided the technology that allowed individual restaurant clients to communicate with their own subscribers, NewsBytes was AZeats.com's own communication with the AZeats audience.
NewsBytes informed subscribers about:
NewsBytes gave people a reason to come back to AZeats.com regularly.
It also helped turn AZeats from a collection of restaurant websites into a destination of its own.
A person didn't have to be looking for a particular restaurant to visit AZeats. They could receive NewsBytes and discover something new.
Dine-mail and NewsBytes were capable of sending HTML-formatted email, but the practical use of images was very limited by the technology and email clients of the time. Images made messages larger, took longer to download over slow connections, and weren't reliably displayed the way they are today. As a result, the effectiveness of an email depended much more on the message, offer, and clickable information than on elaborate graphics.
Building the AZeats Audience
This distinction between Dine-mail and NewsBytes is important to understanding the AZeats business model.
Dine-mail helped restaurants build and communicate with their own customer audiences.
NewsBytes helped AZeats build and communicate with the larger AZeats audience.
The two systems also reinforced each other.
A person could visit a restaurant's website, sign up for its guestbook, become part of that restaurant's mailing list, and also become part of the AZeats audience.
It was another example of the Win-Win-Win philosophy that ran through so much of AZeats.
Email Before Email Marketing
Today, email marketing is a normal part of running a business. Businesses routinely collect email addresses, segment audiences, send promotional campaigns, and link customers directly to websites and online stores.
In the late 1990s, those practices were far less common among independent restaurants.
AZeats was building them into its restaurant websites.
The Dine-mail system was custom-built for AZeats rather than purchased as an off-the-shelf service. Messages had to work with the email programs of the time, many of which had limited support for graphics and formatting. Reliability was more important than appearance.
The goal was simple:
Get useful information to people who wanted it and give them a reason to dine.
More Than a Newsletter
Looking back, Dine-mail and NewsBytes can easily be mistaken for ordinary email newsletters.
They were much more important to AZeats than that.
They helped solve one of the fundamental problems of the early Web:
How do you get people to come back?
Building a website was only the beginning. AZeats needed an audience, and once people became part of that audience, AZeats needed ways to remain connected with them.
Dine-mail gave restaurant clients a way to build relationships with their own customers.
NewsBytes gave AZeats a way to build its own relationship with the public.
Together, they helped turn AZeats.com from a collection of webpages into an ongoing dining community.
Long before social media, mobile apps, online ordering platforms, and today's automated marketing systems, AZeats was already using the Internet to connect restaurants with customers and customers with restaurants.
The technology may look simple today.
The idea was not.
AZeats wasn't just putting restaurants on the Internet. It was figuring out how to bring people back.
