Curtis Carmichael

Web marketers must constantly keep themself updated with technology and marketing know-how in today’s ever-changing (and very competitive) Internet publishing landscape.  You can no longer ‘follow the lead’ and simply consider yourself a pure ‘marketing wizard’, IT professional or graphics pro.  On the contrary, one must wear many hats and ‘choose the path untaken’ to be 110% successful in this competitive arena.

I thought I’d take a few minutes to share a lesser-known web marketing tactic revolving around using RSS to automatically dump content into e-mails.  This is particularly useful if your business operation has limited time and resources.

A respected and very popular (but expensive) e-mail broadcast program called Lyris ListManager has this capability built-in, as does an alternative service at MailChimp.  Lyris ListManager can run as a hosted software solution on your own server or you can subscribe to have access to the software on a SaaS (software as a service) model with Lyris.  MailChimp functions as a powerful web-based software solution running off of mailchimp.com.

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I tend to use the analogy of e-newsletters, when used properly being comparable to modern day stealth fighters with relationship to web marketing campaigns.

E-newsletters tend to be either heavily bogged down with marketing/advertisements, swamped with articles and other non-marketing content or somewhere in the middle.  You’ll need to find the happy medium through A/V and multivariate testing and definitely want to make sure you don’t deter potential prospects by littering your content with too many ads and marketing ‘junk’ — emphasis on the later because no matter how well designed your campaign might be from a marketing content perspective, if it looks like spam/junk mail, no one will read it and/or no one will enable images to be viewed if applicable, disallowing accurate open rates from being tracked, etc.

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