Sure, most marketers would love for consumers to sign up for their e-mail newsletters. And while many consumers want the content, they don’t want to surrender their personal information to yet another source.
That, says Scott Voigt, director of product marketing for Silverpop, is where an RSS feed can be beneficial.
Speaking at ACCM in Boston earlier this week, Voigt noted that RSS feeds are empowering to consumers, because they allow users to easily subscribe – and unsubscribe – to content they want, without registering.
RSS feeds bring content into a single location for consumers, and they’re easier to control than an e-mail subscription, which might take several steps to sign-up for – or opt out from, he says.
And, such feeds are beneficial to marketers. Research has shown that 55% of consumers say they would subscribe to more content online, if they didn’t have to share more information, notes Voigt.
Another benefit of RSS is that the feeds are guaranteed delivery to a user’s RSS reader – they’re never caught in spam filters. This, he says, increases response rates by 5% to 20%, which makes up for the potential losses in personalization and tracking.
A new trend is individualized RSS, where a new URL is created every time someone subscribes, giving the user their own customized feed and individual messages.
He noted that sears has an RSS feed, where users can tell the retailer exactly what they categories of product they want to receive information about.
If you don’t have the resources to create original content to syndicate via RSS, repurpose content created for e-mail newsletters, says Rok Hrastnik, international internet director for Studio Moderna.
Hrastnik told the audience at ACCM that marketers should also consider creating their own page of RSS feeds on their site, which can serve as an information resource for customers.
A site like Amazon, for example, could use RSS to offer relevant information about a product such as a tablet PC, linking to video demos on YouTube, user reviews on Epinion and expert reviews on ZDNet.
And despite the fact that this is still a fairly new technology, don’t forget the basics. Provide a strong call to order and measure your cost per order, visitor, etc. “It’s just a channel and needs to be evaluated just like any other direct marketing channel.”
Above all, keep in mind that you must remember your customer’s needs.
“RSS needs to be more relevant than e-mail,” says Hrastnik. “You can unsubscribe in a blink of an eye.”
When asked about the legality of posting links to other sites’ content, he recommended caution. Always credit the original source, and never post the complete version of another site’s content.
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