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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.
About the author:
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
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