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: Chris is the President of San Francisco-based Feedster, a rapidly growing Internet search engine and advertising network that provides timely and meaningful information to consumers and large Internet sites in need of targeted media. Mr. Redlitz cut his teeth in retail and in consumer products, but landed in Silicon Valley in the mid 90's just in time for the birth of online media. He lives in Marin County with a great wife and a fluffy feline. You can find him in the gym before the sunrise, in the city during the day (if he's not on a plane), and hitting a golf ball on the weekends barring rain and an upcoming board meeting.

Email Morphs Into A Feed: The Progression from Email to RSS Content Distribution & Marketing

Written on: January 31st 2006
Author: by Chris Redlitz |
Feed: XML Feed

What’s the attraction for the marketer? Again compelling, it’s a dedicated audience of subscribers qualified by topic, a publisher’s dynamic content, and post (article) frequency. Marketers can present a contextual message embedded in the body of the feed, and track the performance of a campaign. Think about the growing inventory of feeds from blogs. Yes, this is user-generated content, which requires additional qualification, but the sheer growth numbers makes this a very interesting channel to consider.

Example:

Feeds from blogs (user generated content) provide a large foundation of subscribers, and a potentially, a very appealing micro audience for marketers.

Sun Microsystems ran a campaign promoting their quarterly webcast targeted to developers. The campaign was run in a variety of technology feeds and relevant feeds from blogs. The RSS channel generated over 30% of the sign ups for the webcast. There was virtually no negative feedback from subscribers to the feeds receiving the Sun text based ads.

Finally, what’s the attraction for the user? How about customization of content resources. In the near future RSS feeds will enable product updates, newsletters, MLS listings, and auctions; just use your imagination. Think about keeping tabs on your competitors with keyword-based feeds from your favorite RSS search engine.

So, if all of this sounds very compelling, you can reduce your reliance on email for customer retention and acquisition, and begin to utilize RSS as an alternative communication and commercial platform. Consumer adoption will reach a point of critical mass within the next 12 months and the opportunity for marketers to present targeted advertising within RSS feeds will improve in the very near future.

It will soon to be time to pass the baton. Will email marketing die? No, but this new platform will morph some of that spam into ham.

*Feedster’s RSS index grew 500% to 20 million feeds in 2005