subject: Using RSS Feeds as a Marketing Strategy [print this page] Using RSS Feeds as a Marketing Strategy Using RSS Feeds as a Marketing Strategy
How can RSS marketing put you ahead of your competition? If you feel ready to use RSS advertising to boost your online business, you have to devise an RSS marketing strategy.
RSS or Rich Site Summary is a marketing tool that has a lot of unexplored potential. Although many internet users use RSS, many more are still unaware of the RSS marketing potential. If you are one among those who are still unaware of the marketing potential of RSS, it is high time that you switch over from being a non-RSS internet user to a RSS internet user. Here are the different ways RSS marketing strategies can help you to promote your products and score a sell with your products.
First, RSS is not email. Email, as a marketing tool, has grown quite clich over the years. So much so, the usual practice of sending business proposals through email is often unsuccessful as the emails stand the chance of being marked as spam. RSS frees your email from the ghost of spam. With your own RSS feeds, you can now (automatically) periodically communicate with your consumer base without fearing that your communication will be marked as spam and deleted even before they are read. However, you must be able to use your RSS feeds as an intelligent PR tool in order to get full benefit of the RSS marketing strategies. One thing that should be mentioned here is that if you are fond of old fashioned emails, then there is a solution for that too. Several RSS to email conversion services like Feedburner, Feedblitz, Zookoda and Aweber lets you send your RSS feeds as emails. What more, you can even include your company/brand logo in the emails. These services even allow you to import subscriptions from your inbox to the mailing list. The best idea is to use RSS subscriptions for those who are reluctant to give their email ids to you and for the rest use plain old-fashioned email.
Since, we are discussing email, we should also discuss the newsletters issue. RSS is considered better placed than newsletters because the RSS feeds are automatically sent to the recipients whenever they are ready. This is not the case for newsletters. You have to manually prepare a newsletter (that takes time) and send it to the different email addresses in your mailing list. Now, if you are fond of gathering as many email ids as you can as your marketing strategy, what you should do is send the newsletters through RSS and make the newsletters interactive. This will ensure that the people who are receiving your newsletters are encouraged to talk back to you. The more people will talk back to you, the more number of email ids you will gather.
Since getting across to a continuously increasing number of people is the key point of any marketing strategy, you should also use the social media sites plus RSS combination. Social media sites like twitter and facebook are a great way to stay in touch with your subscribers. Services like twitterfeed lets you post your RSS feeds directly to your social media accounts. Another such service is the facebook based RSS graffiti that transfers your RSS feeds on your other sites to your facebook wall postings. Not only that, your RSS feeds start appearing on the newsfeeds of your friends and fans.
