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 :-)