RSS and Email? Do I Hear Wedding Bells?

For 2 or so years now we have offered our latest coupons and bargains via RSS feeds. While the process works well from a technical point of view, I can’t say it has added much to our bottom line. It also seems that most of our subscribers prefer receiving email newsletters instead of reading our latest offers via an RSS reader. So I’ve been looking for an automated system to integrate the two and just haven’t seen anything I’m really happy with.

I’ve also found that it’s much easier to attract a new email subscriber than an RSS feed subscriber. And what about tracking? While I have a lot to learn about tracking RSS feeds, it seems that unless you buy into some premium services from FeedBurner or silverPOP, it is also very difficult to measure the effectiveness of RSS campaigns.

So this brings me to my next thought. Will someone creative be arranging a marriage for Email and RSS anytime soon? Is there an effective (and still inexpensive) solution that combines the best of Email and RSS? In short, is there a feasible way to send an RSS feed via email and enjoy the best of both worlds?

The answer, it seems to me, is not “yes” or “no.” It’s more like “kind of.” Having tested two such “RSS to Email” services — aweber communications and FeedBlitz — I’m still looking. Ideally, what would the offspring of a marriage between an RSS feed and an email newsletter look like?

Here’s some features I would expect to see in a successful RSS/Email hybrid:

1.) High Deliverability - It would have to be very high to compete with the almost perfect record of RSS feeds. Legitimate email newsletters are plagued with false positives as they are forced to navigate many spam filtering barriers at the ISP and personal levels. RSS essentially has no barriers. Perhaps with careful wording and best-practices, however, content from an RSS feed could be imbedded into an email template and delivered from a whitelisted domain using a private IP sender. (I have my doubts, though, that an automated solution would actually do this well.)

2.) Non-intrusive – Here’s another strength of RSS since it is entirely permission based and grabbed by the subscriber instead of being sent to the subscriber as with email. An RSS/Email marriage would need to employ verified opt-in and easy unsubscribe at the least to come even close — but frequent email updates generally annoy people, so how do you match that strong point for RSS feeds with email? Perhaps you could “throttle it back” a bit and aggregate several feed updates into a daily or weekly email that is sent at predictable or user-selected intervals. (Email thought, has a strength as well since its delivery serves as a periodic reminder or “call to action.” Personally, it’s so easy to forget to log into my RSS reader and when nobody reminds me . . .)

3.) Compelling Content – A marriage between RSS and Email could produce an aesthetically pleasing offspring since email allows much more artistic license — think of the options beyond basic text that can be used with an attractive template, css and html. Not bad, and it can be personalized too. Use good copy and creative hooks and you could attract a lot of attention to convert online.

4.) Inexpensive Delivery — RSS costs very little in both server resources and bandwidth. Email can get very expensive in both areas. It’s hard to find a good compromise here but perhaps a “lite version” email with scaled-back features could do the trick as long as items that impact deliverability and usability are not sacrificed. (I also think some new spam-fighting subscriber verification tools could be developed that would compare a personal RSS feed of approved content providers to the email being sent — to, in effect, triangulate legitimate email using RSS as a base to establish legitimacy, opt-in email rules as a followup test, and traditional spam detection technologies as a final barrier.)

5.) Reporting Metrics — Email tools seem far more advanced for tracking conversions than RSS tools so a marriage of these two systems might actually lead to a cost-effective way to track conversions from RSS data. While not perfect, it would be nice to receive the same data for RSS that we’ve grown accustomed to with Email.

In conclusion, while many have sung the praises of RSS, I don’t think it’s ever going to replace email. I believe RSS has a place in marketing. However, I think clever marketing teams will find ways to “double dip” their efforts and make their RSS content also available to audiences who still prefer receiving email. Perhaps such a marriage would lead to new permission-based marketing synergies and better tools for the war against spam. So I’m still waiting for the sound of wedding bells . . .

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