Delivering Email Thru RSS Feeds - R U Doing it?

[joanpasay]

I have noticed more and more email marketing messages being delivered with messages in the footer that indicate the message 'could have' been received by RSS FEED right into a personalized webpage (MyYahoo, MyMSN, etc)

*Is anyone doing this?

*If so, what third party service/software are you using?

*Do you think this will catch on?

Apparently this may be the end of Spam.

What do you think?

I think there is a new industry about to emerge called RSS Marketing....



JOAN

[bubbleshack]

Joan,

Most commercial programs for managing e-mail marketing lists have released this feature quietely over the past year. We built the capability in-house, but there are some legitimate advantages and disadvantages from a marketing perspective.

Advantages:
Users have to subscribe and pull the content down. As you pointed out, this means its difficult to really send unsolicited ads through the medium.

Different display formats. Apple Mac OS X Tiger really demonstrated this with a new screensaver that has a visually attractive way of listing new feeds.

Disadvantages:
Difficult to display graphics consistently. It "can" be done across the RSS feed, but how it actually appears to the reader is another thing.

Difficult to measure the actual readership and response metrics when compared to traditional e-mail marketing messages.

Adoption curve. Microsoft will be integrating RSS support with IE7 and Windows Vista, although how the public uses it will be alot different.

Delivery platforms. Outside of the OS, more consumers are reading e-mail on the go through mobile devices (PDAs, Blackberries, Cell Phones) and even pure web-based interfaces when they are traveling or away from their primary PC. RSS does not yet have a reliable channel for delivering feeds to these devices. I have seen developer versions of one's that do, but again it becomes an issue of adoption by end-users.

Building an audience is also tricky because it requires actual work on behalf of the user. If someone signs up for a conference, you can't then automatically subscribe them to your RSS feed without their own intervention.

So, to answer your questions: RSS has potential to become a minor marketing medium, although it will take at least 3-5 years to see how it evolves to meet the needs of consumers and the demands of companies. Personally, I believe that RSS will stay a simple compliment to e-mail marketing. Its relatively simple to build, cost-effective to deploy, so why not have it in anyways - regardless of the actual impact.