Why you want to utilize RSS to E-Mail Technology

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.

The power of RSS to e-mail technology really comes into play when you want to issue multiple e-newsletters in a limited time window.  For instance, you might be used to only sending out a weekly newsletter when now you have the option to distribute multiple newsletters out in the same week period, perhaps focusing on specific niche topics, or in the event you have a niche publication, focus on ‘super niche’ topics.  You may wish to consider creating multiple RSS feeds from categorized articles and it might be a good idea to start doing this if you don’t already do so to leverage the automation capabilities available to you (through your CMS or at least updating individal feeds manually at the initial stage).

The process may be tedious at first but in theory, this should not require any additional resources after you become acquainted with how your mail distribution program sets up the e-mail blasts.  I would recommend that whoever you choose as a vendor that they include X amount of time to properly train you in the contract you sign to help alleviate upfront costs.  If you select a popular software package such as Lyris, you may also find useful information on the web to help you get started and there is always the possibility someone in a trade organization you may belong to can help you along as well (a non competitor of course).

From a revenue standpoint, the more playing fields you create (new advertising space in newly developed e-newsletters), an increasing amount of ads will trickle in converting to increased cash flow — perhaps faster than you think.  This will be particularly true if you create very niche-focused newsletter content as it elevates targeting opportunities for your advertiser base and still allows you to position/reuse ads from your more generalized weekly newsletter if desired.

With respect to giving due credit, this concept was introduced to me by a colleague, Matt Goodwin.  You may wish to check out his blog over at www.ttamniwdoog.com for some great tutorials and information on various Information Technology topics.

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Posted by Curtis on Feb 17 2009. Filed under E-Mail Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.