subject: Will RSS Kill Email Marketing? [print this page] Firstly, for anyone unsure of what RSS stands for it is Real Simple Syndication and while it may seem daunting at first, once you start doing it, you wonder why you thought it was so frightening to begin with.
Email marketing as most internet marketers know, is a very common and effective marketing practice today. Most internet marketers have lists of people's email addresses stored in an auto-responder. And if these internet marketers are consistent workers, they will email the people on their list at set intervals pre-programmed into their auto-responders. So how can RSS possibly kill email marketing?
Today more and more people use WordPress blogs to make their websites with, simply because it is an easy platform on which to make a website and because it is an interactive medium. Each WordPress blog can have an RSS email subscribe list that people who want to follow a blog's conversation can subscribe to and receive each and every update.
By interactive medium, I mean that you can 'talk' to, and with, your visitors on your blog site and each 'conversation' becomes a new entry so it builds up content on your website for you. Anyone who has subscribed to your blog via RSS will receive each new update into their email account or RSS reader account.
If you have a topic of interest to a few people, then a good conversation can be generated with everyone offering opinions on a subject. These blogs make very interesting reading,simply because you can either be a voyeur or a participant. Either way, you can learn a great deal from others who are willing to share their knowledge on a topic of conversation.
It is these RSS subscribe lists that have the potential to kill off email marketing. If you are in someone's auto-responder to receive their email messages then they will offer you more and more products to buy. In a short time, people get tired of being sold to, so they unsubscribe. Rarely does anyone stay on someone's list for any length of time.
Having said that there are some brilliant, informative and consistent email lists that people do belong to for years. Paul Myers is one that comes to mind instantly because people like me appreciate his commentary and he doesn't kill us with buy offerings. There are some others but they are few and far between; but I know I have been on Paul Myers list now consistently for the past 5 years. Many of his subscribers have been on there much longer than I have so that should indicate the difference between a good list and a bad list auto-responder owner
If there is a list owner reading this and who seems to have people subscribe and then unsubscribe quickly, then I suggest that RSS could kill off your list building pretty soon.
RSS gives people the updated information that they originally wanted from you or your product, but removes them from the inconvenience of being hounded by email to buy stuff all the time.
Recently I have noticed the more savvy internet marketers using both. They email their lists with titillating snippets and then send interested readers over to their blogs to receive the freebies or for more information. Perhaps they also su
