RSS and Email; Working together

RSS and email: how they can work together?

Copyright 2005 Rok Hrastnik

For most marketers online e-mail is still the key marketing and communicational tool, with its use since the publication e-zine, direct sales messages, loyalty campaigns to internal communications between team members.

But pass email due to spam filters and spam itself is getting increasingly difficult, while anti-spam legislation is putting e-mail marketers even legitimate to risk.

With content delivery rates 100%, is RSS a substitute for e-mail?

At least now, certainly not. However, it became the key supplement for e-mail delivery. While many internet users are starting to ignore email subscriptions and subscribe only to the RSS content, most are just beginning to explore the world of RSS.

As such, the time to familiarize yourself with the RSS now is if you want to get an upper hand over your competition before RSS hits mainstream and the same time test the RSS marketing approaches that work for you. Using RSS as a channel for delivering supplementary content, next to e-mail, is one of the places to start. But to use the RSS in conjunction with the e-mail, you first need to understand some basic relations between these two tools and e-zines and blogs.

A) UNDERSTAND THE RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN RSS, EMAIL, E-ZINES AND BLOGS

As these four really relate and what this means for your internet marketing strategy?

Miss-most common design is to compare blogs and email, with many bloggers really touting blogs as a replacement for email. The truth is that there's no comparison, just like comparing apples and oranges.

The second miss-design is to believe that RSS and blogs somehow are strongly related or even that RSS is good only to deliver the content of the blog. The result of a side are traders who don't see RSS as a communication channel full-powered and bloggers on the other side who refuse to see the email as a delivery vehicle of viable content.

Let s the record straight in the simplest terms possible. Blogs and e-zines or newsletters are "what"---what you publish online ... the content side.

RSS and email are "how"---how to get this content or information to the reader ... the delivery side. RSS/email and blogs/e-zines cannot be compared directly.

The content of the blog and e-zine content can both be delivered via RSS and email, and there is no direct relationship/business logic between, for example, blogs and RSS.

For example, which makes sense, is to compare e-zines and blogs. Blogs are conversations "personal" opinions and news, delivered in a linear structure, typically written in a more personal style and confined to a limited number of types of content.

E-zines on the other hand are more similar to magazines or newspapers, loading the content presented on a complex structure of non-linear content and have the ability to carry many different types of content that do not mix well if supplied via a linear structure of content. For example, a typical e-zine can include an editorial; an article from leaders, representing the dominant theme of a problem specific to e-zine; support articles, clearly structured to show they are secondary to the article of leaders; links to the topics of the Forum and messages; more relevant a news section; different ads (banners, textual ads, advertorials, etc.); a section of Q&A; a featured white paper; etc.

Provide all this content requires a structure of complex content and a strong and experienced editor. The blog format, simply does not provide the level of structure needed to effectively present a complex content mix.

B) RSS INTEGRATION IN YOUR EMAIL MARKETING STRATEGY

If you can understand these basic relations you can actually understand how you can integrate RSS in your email marketing strategy as a supplement of email as a delivery tool.

For now, here are some of the most basic generic opportunities using RSS coupled with e-mail:

1. Use RSS to announce each new edition of his email e-zine, that you make available in full on your website.

2. Provides a separate RSS FEED for the articles that you publish in your email e-zine and get them to their subscribers, as well as articles become available, without having to wait to receive them in your e-mail newsletter. The same goes for the news section, if you have one.

3. If you publish a lot of content in different topic categories in your e-zine, provides a separate RSS FEED for each of these themes. Take another look at the elements that we listed above which may include a typical e-zine. Each of these elements actually could become a stand alone RSS feed.

4. If you re doing email autoresponder marketing, provide these same autoresponders as RSS feeds, allowing visitors to subscribe or for email or RSS distribution channels to receive the same content.

5. If you have your own affiliate program, make sure that your affiliates can also sign up for their affiliate notifications through an RSS feed, not just email. Basically, you're going to do is duplicate the you re content even send by email to an RSS feed.

6. If you re sending special notices or updates to your existing customers via email, create an RSS feed special limited access to offer the same updates via RSS as well.

These should be sufficient for you to start thinking in the right direction.

About the author:
Learn how to take full advantage of marketing RSS feed and get all the skills, knowledge and information about procedures for implementation of RSS in your marketing mix, direct marketing, PR, e-commerce, internal communications and online publishing, SEO, traffic generation and customer relationship management. Including complete interviews with more than 40 RSS marketing experts. Click here now: http://rss.marketingstudies.net/book/

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