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By Robert Davis
RSS: A brief look at Really Simple Syndication
RSS has been adopted by just 2 percent of all Web users, and by 5 percent of Web users aged 12—21, according to Forrester Consumer Technographics. With such small numbers, why all the excitement?
First, RSS users are a great market segment. They’re young, spend twice as much time online as Web users who don’t use RSS, and are about a third more likely to have broadband. And they spend about 33 percent more on online commerce than Web users who aren’t using RSS, Forrester says. In addition, RSS adoption is growing rapidly, and will likely take off when the next-generation Microsoft OS launches with built-in RSS support.
RSS also has potential to offer marketers an option for overcoming some of the obstacles facing e-mail. As noted earlier in the article, e-mail is increasingly challenged as a delivery channel. Businesses and individuals alike have aggressive spam filters, and operating systems and anti-spam applications increasingly shunt marketer’s e-mail into “junk” folders.
While strategies exist to mitigate these threats, as discussed earlier, smart marketers will also explore promising alternatives such as RSS.
Now is the time to experiment with RSS. Here’s a short list of ways you can put a “toe in the water” with RSS marketing:
• Offer newsletter content via RSS feeds, taking advantage of their 100 percent deliverability. Develop a newsletter to which highly-engaged segments will want to subscribe, such as a newsletter promoting new product and digital content offerings.
• Embed links in product search results allowing searchers to register for RSS updates when new products that meet their preferences are introduced.
• Deliver your company news releases via RSS, taking advantage of the ability to include rich media content, and bypassing reporters’ overloaded e-mail inboxes.
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