Article - RSS and E-mail: How They Can Work Together?

RSS and E-mail: 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 ranging from e-zine
publishing, direct sales messages, loyalty campaigns to
internal communications between team members.

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

With 100% content delivery ratios, is RSS a replacement for
e-mail?

At least right now, certainly not. However, it has become
the key supplement to e-mail delivery. While many internet
users are starting to ignore e-mail subscriptions and
subscribe only to RSS content, the majority is just
starting to explore the world of RSS.

As such, the time to get started with RSS is now . if you
want to get an upper hand over your competition before RSS
reaches mainstream and at the same time test the RSS
marketing approaches that work for you.

Using RSS as a supplementary content delivery channel, next
to e-mail, is one of the places to get started. But to use
RSS in conjunction with e-mail, you first need to
understand some of the basic relationships between these
two tools and e-zines and blogs.

A) UNDERSTANDING RELATIONS BETWEEN RSS, E-MAIL, E-ZINES AND
BLOGS

How do these four really relate and what does this mean for
your internet marketing strategy?

The most common miss-conception is comparing blogs and
e-mail, with many bloggers actually touting blogs as a
replacement for e-mail. The truth is, there's no comparison
at all, just like comparing apples and oranges.

The second miss-conception is believing that RSS and blogs
are somehow strongly related or even that RSS is good only
for delivering blog content. The result of this on one side
are marketers who do not see RSS as a full-powered
communicational channel, and bloggers on the other side who
refuse to see e-mail as a viable content delivery vehicle.

Let's set the record straight in the simplest possible
terms.

Blogs and e-zines or newsletters are "the what" --- what
you publish online ... the content side.

RSS and e-mail are "the how" --- how you get that content
or information to the reader ... the delivery side.

RSS/e-mail and blogs/e-zines cannot be directly compared.
Blog content and e-zine content can both be delivered via
RSS and e-mail, and there is no direct business/logical
relation between, for example, blogs and RSS.

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

E-zines on the other hand are more similar to magazines or
newspapers, carrying content presented in a complex
non-linear content structure, and having the ability to
carry many different content types that do not mix well
together if provided through a linear content structure.
For example, a typical e-zine might include an editorial; a
leading article, representing the prevailing topic of a
specific e-zine issue; supporting articles, clearly
structured to show they are secondary to the leading
article; links to the most relevant forum topics and posts;
a news section; different advertisements (banner ads,
textual ads, advertorials etc.); a Q&A section; a featured
whitepaper; etc.

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

B) INTEGRATING RSS IN TO YOUR E-MAIL MARKETING STRATEGY

If you can understand these basic relations you can in fact
understand how much you can integrate RSS in to your e-mail
marketing strategy as a supplement to e-mail as a delivery
tool.

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

1. Use RSS to announce each new issue of your e-mail
e-zine, which you make available in full on your website.

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

3. If you publish much content in different topic
categories in your e-zine, provide a separate RSS feed for
each of those topics. Take another look at the elements we
listed above that a typical e-zine might include. Each of
those elements could in fact become a stand alone RSS feed.

4. If you're doing e-mail autoresponder marketing, provide
those very same autoresponders as RSS feeds, allowing your
visitors to subscribe either to the e-mail or RSS delivery
channels to receive the very same content.

5. If you have your own affiliate program, make sure that
your affiliates can also subscribe to your affiliate
notices via an RSS feed, not just e-mail. Basically, all
you will be doing is duplicating the same content you're
sending out via e-mail in an RSS feed.

6. If you're sending out special notices or updates to your
existing customers via e-mail, create a special
limited-access RSS feed to deliver those same updates via
RSS as well.

These should be enough to get you started thinking in the
right direction.

Find out all you need to know about RSS and how to use it
to get your content delivered, win back your customers,
make more sales and increase search engine rankings.
»Unleash the Marketing & Publishing Power of RSS«,
acclaimed as the best and most comprehensive guide on
marketing with RSS by top RSS industry leaders, experts,
developers and top marketers.
http://rss.marketingstudies.net/index.html?src=sa18