BtoB: How RSS can complement e-mail marketing

"A few years ago RSS (really simple syndication) was being touted as a replacement for e-mail. The technology, the theory went, would let marketers create frequent Web content updates that would then be “pulled” from a subscribed user's RSS reader. Marketers could have people subscribe to RSS news feeds like they did e-mail lists but not have to worry about bounces or deliverability issues. Clearly, though, that didn't happen—and never will.

Instead, RSS has emerged as a strong complementary tool for e-mail marketers, especially as more and more Web content is repurposed in e-mail newsletters. Want to offer an RSS feed to your own subscriber list? Here are four tips courtesy of Derek Harding, CEO of Omnicom Group's Innovyx, an e-mail marketing solutions provider, to help you get started
"...read on

Karen J. Bannan
Story posted: September 3, 2009 - 11:26 am EDT

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Captain Inbox says:
I think RSS is great, most people don't really get it as they only see it as a defunct syndication tool that has been replaced by email and twitter. That's Madness!
So much of the content we see is derived from an RSS feed but we just don't know about it. There are so many places we need to get the same bit of content - facebook, twitter, blog, delicious, the list is endless. It all uses RSS. Twitterfeed is the prime example, it will take the feed from your blog and tweet it for you, it can throw it to Ping.FM which will then updated dozens of other sites all using RSS.

The best thing of all is the ability to use the RSS feed to automate your email marketing!
Nowadays most of our content is a bit bloggy which means that there will be and RSS feed. YOu can just make a parser to rip out the top 3 or 4 posts from your RSS feed and drop it in your email template. You can even do this automatically. Pure360 has a cool tool that allows me to point a message at a url and whenever a delivery is scheduled using that message, Pure360 goes and gets the content from the end of that url. And, if it is the same as the last time it will pause the delivery and tell me - now that is cool!