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.

As far important as our subscribers’ list or our newsletters’ design and content is knowing the efficiency of our email communications. Because of this, it is essential comprehend what our email marketing´s stats mean. Analyzing them, we will find out our mistakes and our success points, and so gaining more from our online marketing strategies.

-          Reading stats

They tell us how many times our mailing has been read. Nevertheless these stats may be not 100% accurate, given that your readers may open your email from their mobile phones, Blackberries, using Outlook preview panel, blocking images, etc. and unfortunately these readings will be not counted in the stats.

For these reason, MAILCast offers you additional stats, unique reading stats which reflects only one reading for IP address, although one subscriber had read your email ten times, MAILCast will count it as only one time. In addition, MAILCast also gives a detailed report of bounce-back emails, identifying the particular email addresses affected, and the reasons for bouncing (whether the email inbox is full, the server is unavailable, email address is not correct, your message has been considered as Spam by email filters, etc).

-          Links stats

They show us the persons who have click on the links included in your mailing. These stats are 100% accurate. As before, MAILCast not only details who has click on which link, but also how many times has been done. This figure can be extremely useful for sales forecasts, as it will inform us about what products have been more interesting and for what audience.

-          RSS reading stats.

If you are publishing content via RSS, having integrated the MAILCast’s News channel in your website, then MAILCast will give you a report about how many times your content have been accessed, and in what days. So it will enable you to track the result of your publications, what news was more popular for what IP addresses. Given that the RSS readings are anonymous, MAILCast cannot give you personal data from this report.

-          Subscribers’ management stats

If you have online registration forms available in your web and managed by MAILCast, you will receive a detailed report (downloadable in Excel) of the new registrations and cancellations of your newsletter’s subscribers.  Having these online forms in your portal, it will easily increase the number of your subscribers and people who are interested in your business, products and services. Furthermore MAILCast offers you the option of double opt-in and opt-out, helping to comply with the current Data Protection legislation. Furthermore, MAILCast will delete from your database those addresses that have been bouncing, so you will keep your list clean, and it will not affect your business reputation. Taking care of your list of subscribers is important; otherwise most of the email service providers (ESP’s) may flag your mailings as unsolicited commercial emails (Spam).

The communication process becomes fundamental to comprehend our customers’ needs, so we must take this thought into account. In order to achieve an efficient relationship with them, we must consider our communication as a reciprocal information exchange, so we´ll find out the opinion and ideas of our interlocutors.

We communicate a message in very single contact with our clients. Our communication skills will help to our recipient to decide whether our message is positive or negative. Because of that, here are some advices helping you to empathize with your clients and gain the customers’ trust:

·         Show the client that you are listening

·         Try to obtain useful information from any message you get from them

·         Allude to some comment that you have received from the client, demonstrating that you have been listening and acting as a result.

In addition of bearing these aspects in mind, we must not forget the clarity of our message, and so avoid to misinterpretations, because them can make the effectiveness or our messages fail.

According to the current legislation and recent anti-Spam consciousness, MAILCast promotes the use of double opt-in to fill up your subscribers lists.

What double opt-in means is that after your subscriber enters their email addresses to receive your newsletters, then they go a step further: they’ll need to confirm their correct email address by replying to an email sent to that particular address. So that you confirm the permission of your subscriber, you avoid misspelled addresses, etc. Tip: when your customers confirm the subscription (clicking on the link), they can go to a “Thank you” webpage where you can advice them to add your sender email address to their address book, so that your newsletter will not finish into the Junk folder.  

Now, double opt-in is fine. What about double opt-out?  A nightmare…! Don’t twist it. If they like to unsubscribe, make it easy. It is nothing more frustrating that going from page to page without finding the bloody option to delete your email address from the database. The longest it takes, the worst feeling you got of that company. Think that the foundation of effective email marketing is building trust and relationships with your subscribers.

The ignorance is bliss, but you can get it right now.

Of course, MAILcast will let you choose the method and messages of your choice for subscribing and unsubscribing to your e-mail newsletters.

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?

Writing up content for digital channels is completely different than writing it up for traditional medium. Because of this, it is essential to know the online environment and its main characteristics before you even start writing.

We should focus on preparing attractive and accessible contents for our users, turning our newsletter into another corporative tool for marketing. There are some patterns that can help us to elaborating interesting content:

·         Don’t  take a detour, go straight to the point.  Reading a document on the screen is far more difficult and tired task than reading on paper. Therefore you should include the relevant information at the top of the newsletter to attract attention to the recipients so they will continue reading, mentioning other news that they will find further down in the document.

·         Choose an appropriate language. It is recommendable to write in short paragraphs and simple sentences. If you are explaining a complex subject, you could use the formula “read more” to satisfy the needs of your interested readers, so they will have access to the complete information. We must use a familiar and ‘easy-to-understand’ language to make our message clear.

·         Insert images and appropriate hyperlinks. The images should support the content, adding meaning  and  impact to the information offered.  Therefore we should insert generic images which do not interfere with the content. Pleas note that the image size should not affect the opening time of your newsletter.

If it is written efficiently, the newsletter will add an important value to our company or organization. It will help us to build up a good reputation for our company. We will gain subscribers and engage to our audience.

The design of our newsletter’s template is part of our external and corporative branding. To reinforce it, and to achieve the familiarization of subscribers with your communications, you should design your template as simple as possible and according to the corporative image shown in your website, commercial dossier, and the rest of your marketing documents. This does not mean the impossibility of changing your colors’ palette or your images’ evolve, if you wish. However the structure of your email should stay consistent overtime.

In relation to the graphic design of your template, we can refer to the usability’s general tips used also for web design. Usability means efficiency, effectiveness and satisfaction with which a product achieves specific goals to particular users in a singular context.

• Do not include too many images and pictures. These mean overloading the email and thus, making its deliverability more difficult.
• Do not design all your email in HTML, as the more popular email filters may label it as Spam.
• Be careful with the background color chosen, it may cause problems to read your message.
• Simple and relevant content, as average people only dedicate 1.4 seconds to read through a commercial email. Make the scanning easy to your public.
• Don´t forget to include the ‘unsubscribe’ link at the bottom. It is also recommendable to include the RAF bottom (Refer to A Friend), so your list can be increased ;-)

In Email marketing, the subject line is vital, mainly because it means to get into the mail inbox and the reading stats. I, myself, every morning delete at least 10 emails without doubt, only by checking the subject line (or the unknown sender). Most of the times they offer me medical or miracle potions that, fortunately, I don´t need.

Having said this, the email marketing professionals, who are sending newsletters or punctual campaigns by email so often, seriously consider the subject of our mailings. In the case of newsletters, it is usually easier because the subject line normally is the title of the periodical publication. In this sense, it is recommendable that you send the last issue to your new subscribers, so they will recognize your newsletter since day 1.

However the case of punctual marketing campaigns is different, and in many cases tricky, too. We have to carefully find an efficient line to introduce the product or service to the audience: it must be short, direct, personalized, informative, original, informative, interesting, shocking, eye-catching, flashy…because a recent study shows that 35% of the recipients open the email based on the subject line.

Therefore it would be ideal that your subject line had the following characteristics:  remark the benefit from reading our email, personalized, according to our recipients’ needs, create expectation, create an own style, not using capital letters or symbols, avoiding words such as ´free´, ´promotion´, ´offer´, ´gift’, ‘buy now’, ‘click here’, ‘opportunity´, ´important´….adn all this in 50 characters max, including spaces…only.

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.