Unified digital marketing: email, website, SMS plus RSS

by Andrew Mobbs, Myzan Ltd

In October 2005, Chris Sherman – Executive Editor for SearchEngineWatch wrote that “only 12% of all users [involved in research conducted by Yahoo and Ipsos] were aware of RSS and just 4% had knowingly used the technology to read feeds from blogs, news sources and other regularly updated content sources on the web.”

How things have changed. Fuelled by big spends from big companies, RSS is suddenly everywhere.

Following early RSS adoption by Yahoo and Google in the summer of 2006, Microsoft finally released its RSS offering in the autumn in its break-though IE7 release. This brought RSS to the masses with built-in support for the standard right inside the browser “favourites folder”. Considering their approximated 60% share of the web browser market, it is quite evident that RSS adoption (whether a conscious decision by consumers or not) is already widespread. Firefox (Microsoft’s biggest browser competitor) and Safari (for Mac) have also driven RSS adoption through their tight integration with this standard for data interchange and syndication. To further fuel the market for RSS, Microsoft’s newlyreleased Windows Vista has desktop gadgets built-in that are designed to consume RSS feeds and put the power of this standard in the hands and minds of every Windows user.

So this is an exciting time to be cutting one’s teeth on the latest opportunity for simpler, more efficient, effective and measurable electronic marketing / advertising. Giving RSS a try is not about finding a substitute for email marketing or jumping on a bandwagon but rather about making a simple and logical business decision.

Life before RSS

Before discussing the merits of RSS it is important that I highlight some key differences between numerous digital marketing / advertising mediums as they pertain to the delivery of messages to customers.

In the world before RSS (well it’s mainstream adoption anyway) there were principally three ways in which we could digitally get messages to our customers:

1. Email

2. SMS / Text Messages

3. Website Content

The first two of these are essentially push rather than pull technologies. Simply put, our customers get information sent to them rather than them requesting the information from us. This has resulted in a number of problems for consumers – not least of which is the abundance of irrelevant spam in their inbox.

The third technology is a pull technology but has the significant drawback of not being able to make our customers aware that we have something new to tell them; and it has been demonstrated time and again that solely expecting customers to regularly visit your website to read your latest messages is a sure-fire way to go out of business. It can be argued that web-based advertising (which could also be classified under website content) has enabled companies with advertising resources to somewhat overcome this limitation by putting brands in the faces of consumers all over the web (thereby reminding them to “check in” every now and again), but this too has come to frustrate consumers with its inherent intrusive nature.

The power of RSS

So it should be clear that we need to offer our customers another option…and into the frame steps RSS. RSS is a pull technology, so it is safe to initially assume that it faces the same problem that websites have always faced – how do we drive customers to our messages. This is where it all becomes interesting with RSS because your customers choose where they are most likely to “check in”. For me, it is my Google homepage that I visit most often, and if you think my Google homepage looks like anyone else’s you would be mistaken. The information I see on that one page is everything that I currently find interesting; for example: the latest content from websites that I have visited, or emails that I have received which have RSS feeds and headlines that I may like to read more about. Within 5 minutes of opening up my browser every morning I have read the BBC headlines, got the latest weather report, checked the time in Victoria, Canada at our North American offices, read the latest Vecosys blog headlines, spotted the latest travel deals on Expedia and much more! I don’t receive emails from any of these companies with this information so my inbox clutter is kept to a minimum, and yet I am always up-todate on what is happening and I’m regularly clicking through to their sites to read more. This is the power of RSS – it enables me to consume what I want when I want it.

It is easy to get excited about messages that are relevant to us as consumers. It is more difficult (and typically more costly) for us as businesses and as marketing and advertising professionals to achieve this. There are some great RSS products out there that simplify this for us, and if used correctly will provide a great return on investment for any company that uses them.

Getting started

When choosing your RSS management tool, ensure that the product allows you (technologically-inclined or otherwise) to simply create RSS feeds. RSS feeds (for those who don’t understand this term) are documents structured in XML (not important) that contain a number of headlines and corresponding summations. An example of one of these items might be a headline which reads, “Interest rates to increase by 0.25%”, or “iPod Nano - £110 Special”. They can therefore be anything – essentially they are messages. There are a number of products on the market that will help you create, your own feeds, but only a few provide you with a unified, centrally stored repository of your messages, and tools with the ability to manage and distribute those messages in a number of different forms – including embedding them within emails or serving them as dynamic animations on website pages. Very few go one step further and provide full tracking and reporting of impressions or click through analysis - a must if this technology is to be used as part of the marketing mix.

Electronic marketing / advertising messages seldom exist in a vacuum – one form separate from another. It is therefore puzzling why we structure the information we feed those various mediums in silos – completely separate data sources that say the same thing.

With certain RSS products your customers can add your feed to their Google homepage, to Windows Vista’s RSS gadget or any other feed reader they may use (and there are loads of these out there). They can also receive your feed in your own email signature or in an email marketing campaign (using an ad-type animated GIF), or for that matter directly on your website using an RSS reader / presentation tool. There are also mobile applications that can be downloaded to view your messages, and these are the same messages you create once within your RSS application - no replication, and therefore a system that is simpler to manage and cheaper to run.

If you are not yet embracing RSS as a supplemental but vital tool in your bag of marketing / advertising tricks then I suggest you give it try!