What You Should Know About

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 ranging from e-zine publishing, direct sales messages, loyalty campaigns to internal communications between team members.

But it takes email due to spam filters and spam itself becomes more difficult, while anti-spam law puts even legitimate email marketers risk.

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

At least right now, certainly not. However, it has become the most important addition to the delivery of mail. While many internet users have begun to ignore the e-mail subscriptions and only subscribe to the RSS content, are majority has begun to explore the world of RSS.

Time to get started with RSS is as such now if you want to get an upper hand over your competition before RSS when mainstream and at the same time test RSS marketing approaches that work for you. Using RSS as an additional content delivery channel, since e-mail, one of the places to get started. But if you want to use RSS in conjunction with e-mail, you must first understand some basic relationships between these two tools and e-zines and blogs.

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

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

The most common miss-conception is to compare blogs and email, with many bloggers actually argue blogs as a replacement for email. The truth is that there's no comparison at all, like comparing apples and oranges.

The second miss-conception is to think that RSS and blogs somehow strongly connected, or even that RSS is good only to provide blog content. The result of this, on the one hand, marketers who don't see RSS as a full-powered communicational channel and bloggers on the other side that refuses to see email as a viable content delivery vehicle.

Easily specify the entry directly in s the simplest possible terms. Blogs and e-zines or newsletters are "what"---what you publish online ... in the content page.

RSS and email is "how"---how to get the content or information to the reader ... the output page. RSS/email and blogs/e-zines can not be compared directly.

Blog content and e-zine content can both be delivered via RSS and email, and there is no direct business/logical relationship between, for example, blogs and RSS.

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

E-zines on the one hand, more similar to magazines and newspapers, transporting content presented in a complex non-linear content, structure, and have the ability to make many different content types that do not mix well together if delivered through a linear content structure. A typical e-zine can for example contain an editorial; a leading article that represents the predominant topic is a specific e-zine is issued; support articles, clearly structured to demonstrate the secondary to the main article; links to the most relevant forum topics and posts; a news section; various ads (banner ads, textual ads, advertorials, etc.); a Q&A section; a featured white paper; and so on.

Delivers all of this content requires a complex content structure and a strong and experienced editor. Format blog simply does not provide the level of structure necessary to effectively present a complex content mix.

B) EMBED RSS IN YOUR E-MAIL MARKETING STRATEGY

If you can understand these fundamental connections, you can actually understand how much you can integrate RSS in your e-mail marketing strategy as a supplement to e-mail as a tool for delivery.

For now, here are some of the most fundamental generic opportunities in using RSS with email:

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

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

3. If you publish a lot of content in a variety of topic categories in your e-zine, give a separate RSS feed for each of these topics. See another on the elements mentioned above, a typical e-zine may include. Each of these elements can actually be a standalone RSS feed.

4. If you re doing e-mail auto-reply marketing, give the same autoresponders as RSS feeds, allows visitors to subscribe to either e-mail or RSS delivery channels receive the very same content.

5. If you have your own affiliate program, you must make sure that your affiliates can also subscribe to their affiliate messages via RSS-feed, not just email. Basically all they will do to duplicate the same content you re send via e-mail in an RSS feed.

6. If you re send special messages or updates to your existing customers via email, create a special limited access RSS feed to provide the same set of updates via RSS.

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

About the author:
Learn how to take advantage of marketing RSS and get all the expertise, knowledge, and how-to information in order to implement RSS in your marketing mix of direct marketing, PR, e-commerce, internal communication and online publishing to 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/