RSS: A Marketer's New Best Friend?
By Jeanne S. Jennings,
Published in The Marketing Advents Newsletter, Direct Marketing Association of Washington, December 2004

I wrote my first article about RSS in August of 2003, but even then the technology wasn’t new. It was introduced about ten years ago by Netscape. So why are so many marketers just looking at RSS now? Here are three benefits of RSS, and some potential downsides, as well as some additional resources if you want to learn more. 

Three Benefits of RSS:  

1. Avoid spam filters. Assurance Systems recently reported that 15% of legitimate email does not make it to the intended inbox; one ISP was found to be blocking over 25% of the opt-in messages entering its system. As the fight against spam intensifies, these ‘false positives’ are expected to increase.

        RSS, although electronic, does not flow through the email channel, so it's not impeded by
        spam filters -- no more ‘false positives’ when a requested email is incorrectly tagged as
        spam. This is one of the primary reasons publishers have embraced RSS, and why marketers
        are so intrigued.

2. Avoid in-box traffic jams. Another related benefit of RSS is that the recipient designates where the content will be delivered – so you can avoid the over-crowded in-box, where requested emails are often overlooked or mistakenly deleted because they’re mixed in with unwanted communications.
    

3. No more opt-in/opt-out issues. In its current form, there’s no opt-in/opt-out debate surrounding RSS, because the only way a recipient can receive an RSS content feed is to request it proactively (which is opt-in in its purest form). Unlike email, there’s no question of whether the feed is unsolicited and marketers can be sure that all their RSS recipients are people who truly want to receive their information. This makes RSS a great way to build relationships with people who have expressed interest in your product or service; it’s not a substitute for marketing to third-party lists who don’t know you from Adam.

 Now the Potential Downside:

Many industry experts are predicting the technology won’t be widely accepted by end-users for a year or more. In order to receive an RSS feed a person needs to download software, called an RSS reader, and install it on their machine. Some companies offer the software for free, others charge a nominal fee ($25). Then they need to request your RSS feed (you can put a button your website to allow them to do this). While it’s not labor intensive, it does take some work on the end-users part.

 Also, I’m still not sure whether RSS is the Beta or the VHS (or for that matter, the DVD) of electronic content delivery. My family had a Beta VCR which I inherited for my first apartment -- just as the Beta format was being phased out by Blockbuster and the other movie rental chains. RSS technology may see the same fate.

The biggest obstacles to broad RSS acceptance are other technologies; things like SenderID/SPF and other anti-spam initiatives which, if successful, will greatly diminish the ‘get around the spam filter’ benefit of RSS.

Intrigued?

I know I am. If you are too, I recommend you download an RSS Reader. I use NewsGator, available at NewsGator.com, but there are others, just plug “RSS software” or “RSS reader” into any search engine. Then you can  play around with it yourself.

You’ll be surprised at the variety of feeds available, even today. Apple publishes an iTunes RSS feed to market music, Toys R Us offers one on best selling toys and there’s even an organization called Newlook Marketing that publishes an RSS-based hosiery catalog. That’s on top of feeds from publishers like ABC News, Business 2.0, MarketingSherpa and Variety. And that’s not all – there are feeds on Star Trek, quilting, football and just about every topic under the sun.

Want to Learn More?

Here’s a link to an issue of my newsletter, The Jennings Report, dedicated to RSS. It includes links to first-party sources for RSS software, how to create an RSS feed, different industry perspectives on RSS, an example of a great announcement to get people to sign-up for your RSS feed and more: http://www.jenningsreport.com/dmaw.htm.