The recent announcement that AOL and Yahoo! will start charging e-mail marketers postage per thousand e-mail messages delivered, via the pay-me-to-deliver-email Goodmail program, is rocking e-mail marketers all around the world and at the same time making die-hard RSS fans proclaim the death of e-mail marketing.
It's certainly a fact that AOL and Yahoo! announced they'll start implementing the above mentioned pay-me-to-deliver Goodmail program and charge $2.5-$10 per thousand emails sent to guarantee delivery.
But what does this really mean for e-mail marketers? Is it the end of the world as we know it? And is RSS really poised to take the throne for direct content delivery and direct marketing?
A] IT'S NOT THE END OF THE WORLD AND CERTAINLY NOT THE END OF E-MAIL MARKETING
While e-mail postage will certainly increase e-mail delivery costs, it's still too early to say whether it's actually going to drive ROI down.
Depending on your own e-mail metrics, the increase in delivery might actually help you increase your ROI, even considering the increased e-mail campaign costs. This is by all means certainly a time to start carefully analyzing your e-mail metrics and calculating what these changes might mean specifically for you, before you actually start getting worried.
It's now also finally a fact that website optimization, to ensure increased visitor-to-customer conversion rates, will become paramount to reaching online profitability.
The important point right now is that you start measuring and analyzing, finding ways to adapt to the coming changes in the world of e-mail marketing. It's not the end of the world, but simply another issue to adapt your marketing to.
B] GET STARTED WITH YOUR RSS MARKETING PROGRAM
But adapting to the new rules of internet marketing is not only about optimizing your e-mail programs and your website conversion rates, but also finally getting started with RSS marketing, if you haven't done so yet.
For those new to RSS, the simple explanation is that RSS is a tool that gives you the benefit of 100% content delivery, without any problems associated with spam and other filters, such as the one that AOL and Yahoo! announced they'll start using. And the best thing about RSS is that it can even be free to implement and certainly free to deliver.
But if you haven't started with your RSS marketing program yet, now is most certainly the time.
First, consider these tactics for integrating RSS marketing with your existing e-mail marketing programs:
1. Use RSS to announce each new issue of your e-mail e-zine, which you make available in full on your website.
2. Provide a separate RSS feed for the articles you publish in your e-mail e-zine and get them to your subscribers as soon as the articles become available, without them having to wait to receive them in your e-mail newsletter. The same goes for your news section, if you have one.
3. If you publish much content in different topic categories in your e-zine, provide a separate RSS feed for each of those topics. Take another look at the elements we listed above that a typical e-zine might include. Each of those elements could in fact become a stand alone RSS feed.
4. If you're doing e-mail autoresponder marketing, provide those very same autoresponders as RSS feeds, allowing your visitors to subscribe either to the e-mail or RSS delivery channels to receive the very same content.
5. If you have your own affiliate program, make sure that your affiliates can also subscribe to your affiliate notices via an RSS feed, not just e-mail. Basically, all you will be doing is duplicating the same content you're sending out via e-mail in an RSS feed.
6. If you're sending out special notices or updates to your existing customers via e-mail, create a special limited-access RSS feed to deliver those same updates via RSS as well.
More information on integrating RSS and e-mail is available here: http://rssdiary.marketingstudies.net/content/rss_and_email_1_how_they_can_work_together.php
These are of course only some of the options for using RSS in your marketing. To get the most from this channel you will in fact need to implement the entire 7-step RSS marketing plan:
1. Start Using RSS as an End-User
2. Plan Your RSS Feeds
3. Create a List of RSS Marketing/Publishing Requirements
4. Use this List to Choose an RSS Publishing Tool and Create Your First Feed
5. Correctly Promote Your RSS Feeds through Your Own Channels
6. Promote Your RSS Feeds Through External Channels
7. Implement RSS Metrics and Your Own Content Syndication Program
You will get more free information on the 7-step RSS marketing plan with all the specifics here: http://rssdiary.marketingstudies.net/content/the_7step_rss_marketing_plan.php
C] BECOME A MULTI-CHANNEL MARKETER
And in the end, don't forget that multi-channel strategies work best. This simply means that you shouldn't use ONLY e-mail or ONLY RSS, but rather use them, and all the other channels, together.
Copyright 2006 Rok Hrastnik
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