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I hate to admit it, but in some business scenarios e-mail is flooding people, who cannot pay attention to (or even almost read) everything that goes into their inbox. And although e-mail is by large the most effective way to reach your focused audience, there are alternatives that will lead to better use of your information. And you can get added value too.
The alternative I'm talking about is, of course, RSS. Despite all the hip surrounding this TLA* these days when almost everybody seems to know it very well, 4 or 5 years ago (when we introduced RSS support in MAILCast) it wasn't that way. So, now that the knowledge barrier is very low, it's a very good time to start taking advantage of RSS possibilities.
RRS is very suited for situations where you produce a large volume of information that is difficult to deliver to the right people. You can slice this info in several specialized RSS feeds, and keep your e-mail newsletter active for anyone to subscribe.
This way, people really interested in all the content you produce on a specialized issue will keep receiving it by e-mail. But people who prefer to be more proactive or who is not interested in everything you published on every channel, will have the option to subscribe to your RSS feed and will be kept informed at their own pace. You'll gain some extra readers for your info, because these people probably wouldn't get subscripted to your newsletter anyway.
And you get some free extra features too.
For example: you can use MAILCast's RSS footer content in order to enter any information you want your feed subscribers to read. This can be a simple slogan or copyright notice, or even advertisement banners (check the news displayed in the frontpage of Krasis.com or campusMVP.com). This content will not be shown in the e-mail newsletter when you send it (with automatically layout) to your e-mail subscribers. You gain an extra path to keep in touch with your customers.
Another interesting thing is the fact that you can get anonymous reading stats for your RSS feeds. You get a clear view on how many times your feed is read and by which IP addresses (you can easily restrict which IPs have the rights to read it), and even more interesting, what are the most popular news or articles within the contents your publish in your different RSS. You can even know how people get to your content (through a search engine query, direct subscription, an on-line RSS aggregator...).
Click to zoom
Just give it a chance and integrate it with your Website. You will not regret.
* TLA: Three Letter Acronym :-)
Recently we posted about RSS vs e-Mail. Maybe we should have started by the root of the thing... What the RSS acronym stands for? What is RSS and how does it work?
Technically speaking RSS is short for Really Simple Syndication, and is a standard form of representing contents by using a special XML schema.
Oh my!!!! This maybe doesn't mean anything to you, so lets explain it in simple and day-life terms.
I bet that you like a lot of web pages. Many of them are about your job and professional interests. Others are about your hobbies, news, and this kind of things. You usually want to visit this pages in order to read the new contents they are publishing. If you dare to visit nothing more than a few of them you, literally, are spending hours a week getting this information.
What if you could get the new contents right at your desktop, without needing to visit them anymore?
This is what RSS gives you. Let's see it graphically:
First af all, the page you're interested in must export it's contents to RSS. You know that it is doing this, because usually it somewhere will have an icon (orange one) with the RSS or XML word in it. Clicking on it shows the contents (in an strange way usually, because is XML). In most modern browsers like Internet Explorer 7+, Firefox or Safari, you can also have an orange toolbar icon like the one in the above picture that shows that a page has an RSS source for its contents (or RSS feed).
You can check an example of all this in our main webpage (http://www.krasis.com/) or even in this blog! :-)
This is represented in the figure above by the webpages on the right and the arrows.
Well. That's OK. You have the source but, how do you use it?
Here is where the element in the middle of the image fits. You need an RSS Aggregator or Feed Reader to consume the feeds. As of today, there are lots of feed readers in the market. We recommend an on-line service like Bloglines (in the picture) or Google Reader because you can access them from any computer even on the road or through your mobile phone. They are free and work in any web browser in the market. Naturally you have a lot of other options in the desktop, like Omea Reader, Newsgator, or even the new Microsoft's Outlook 2007 or Windows Vista Sidebar. Just make your choice!
In this feed readers you have all the contents from your favourite pages served, without needing to visit them. This saves you time and effort, and you keep informed in a timely manner.
So, hurry up, get a feed reader and start to aggregate the contents you like right now!
The marketeers point of view
Obviously the proliferation of RSS and people not visting your page it's a big challenge for you as a marketeer. But you can't afford not having an RSS feed of your contents in these days. So... how does this affect you? How can you take advantage of it?
Stay tuned! We are going to tell you in future posts.
Update (13/11/2007): Look at this terrific video from CommonCraft that explains RSS in "plain english". Great!
According to Jakob Nielsen, the usability guru, the RSS will never substitute the email marketing. Fistly because receiving a personalized newsletter seems warmer and more powerful medium to reach your audience. Secondly, it seems that only few people- mostly techies- like to customize their information through RSS feed.
Moreover, most of the people showed confussion regarding the term RSS. Few of them knew the meaning "Really Simple Syndication", so Nielsen suggests to call them "News feed" instead. This way it will be easier to guess what they actually are for.
While RSS feed are a fantastic tool to keep updated with the latest news of your interest, it can also be seen as other obligation for the Internet users who will need to check another space regularly.
If you like to read all this article, you will find it at http://www.useit.com/alertbox/newsletters.html.
Customer loyalty is a company’s ability to retain satisfied customers. Gaining the loyalty of your online clients means that your web visitors come back regularly to your website. In order to achieve so, you need to offer them high quality and fresh content. Fortunately Internet gives you a wide range of opportunities, helping you to establish a personalized and lasting relationship with your customers. The most efficient tools to engage your audience are:
- E-Newsletters
It allow you to send a weekly or monthly personalized email to your clients with the latest company’s news, articles and interesting information, offering them advices about your products, … This electronic tool’s main advantages are: it offers you an easy, economic and direct way to keep in touch with your customers, it helps you promoting and diverting traffic to your web, making your company reachable and closer to your clients, building the sensation of belonging to a community,…
You don’t need to be an expert to publish a newsletter. Most of the Email marketing software or web-based applications available in the market nowadays (i.e MAILCast Server) have very attractive templates where you only need to add your own content to achieve a really professional result. But remember NOT to forget the unsubscribe option in your communications. May you not have a big subscribers’ list, don’t worry; including a registration form in your web pages will make it easily grow.
- RSS feed
This is other great tool to build online customer loyalty by publishing content by RSS. It can be easily integrated in your web; your visitors will receive your website’s updates instantaneously and anonymously through any RSS reader. The main advantage of this Internet tool is the direct control by the users, they will subscribe and cancel the subscription to your web, avoiding the disadvantages of giving their email out and keeping their privacy at all times.
Virtual communities come to play with the popularization of the Internet. They were born as online spaces to satisfy their members’ needs: information sharing, offer support, debate and socialize in an informal manner.
 Nowadays, they are also a valuable tool from the business point of view (i.e. corporative blogs) because they enable and improve the internal communication within the organization, and establish a closer relationship with their clients and providers. But not only…many companies have discovered other advantage: being able to anonymously analyze how these communities (and their members) evolve and develop overtime, their likes and dislikes, their habits and uses. So handling this information, they can after introducing new devices and products adapted to this particular market.
Virtual worlds like Second life or communities like Del.icio.us, MySpace or YouTube are open spaces not only to promote products, and so get ahead to their respective competence, but also a perfect environment to interact and know, just as any other member, the marketing patterns of this targeted audience, say young people 18-40 years old and engaged with new technologies.
This online experience can be also transferred to RSS marketing. Publishing your news by RSS, people who is interested in our products and services will subscribe to our feeds. We will not know their names or email addresses but we will be able to discover their likes.
Say that I subscribe myself to a recipe’s blog. Then I could also check in my RSS reader how many people are subscribed to this particular blog. And even to what more blogs about recipes (or not) have are they subscribed to, and so on. So I will discover on what else is interested people who is interested in cooking.
With the new social networks, it becomes a game to know what is interesting to other people like me, or any other group. So many new worlds to be explored by marketers... Exciting, isn't it?
When we talk about RSS feed, we usually think in the edition and distribution of web content for advertising, publication of news, updates in websites, etc However the RSS also got a fundamental and highly valuable application in professional training and education.
 This tool has an enormous and wide range use in the academic sector in general. As example, it could be very useful for a University to publish their new courses, grants, research studies, placements, conferences, events,…and loads more. Students and teachers would benefit from such tool, as it would help them to stay updated about what’s going on within the campus which is quite hard when you are studying in a big University plenty of departments, divisions, research groups and so on.
Furthermore these RSS will allow everyone to share comments, news, links to recent papers, images, etc. This information would be accessible no only from web providers, but also for users of PDA´s, iPods, mobile phones, etc.
The implication of these RSS for the educational community is extremely important, particularly because of the range of the publications which are made online for everyone. Thus the RSS technology contributes creating a bridge between available contents in the Internet and the users. Reaching the global public, the RSS transforms the “lonely voice” of the websites into an international dialog with other people who are interested on the same academic subject.
As an alternative channel for you marketing strategies to build your customers and providers’ loyalty, RSS can play an important role.
It is an easy tool, and a direct mean by which our messages avoid the anti-spam filters and where our readers keep their privacy: no email addresses involved whatsoever. These below are some examples of what you can do through RSS feeds:
- Marketing and Internet information feeding. Surprise your customer publishing content as they come.
- Advertise your products, new books, publications, your software updates, etc
- Offer special discount, give vouchers for your most loyal customers.
- Publish audio and video files, mp3, podcasts, interviews, content from your mobile.
- Publish pictures, photos from your shows and events.
- Publish academic studies, tutorial, white papers, etc
- Publish your company’s news in the corporative intranet.
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