Email marketing is one of the most effective ways to attract potential customers to a company and keep them interested in what you have to offer. But as much as email marketing is a useful tool, there are different kinds of emails that perform better than others.
One of the most popular email platforms today is RSS (Really Simple Syndication). Although the name may not be too helpful, RSS feeds are simply the way content is distributed to people via email. Instead of sending out long blog posts in one email, content creators can choose to distribute their posts via RSS so that people can subscribe to them via email and read the content when it comes out.
But is RSS the right choice for content creators? Should you even care about RSS at all when you’re an email marketer?
Here, we’ll discuss what RSS is, why it’s growing in popularity and how you can utilize it to achieve better email marketing results.
What Is RSS?
RSS is short for Really Simple Syndication, an open standard used for content delivery across the internet. As its name suggests, RSS makes content easy to find, access and consume, regardless of device or internet connection.
Unlike an RSS feed, a traditional email marketing campaign requires someone to visit a web page in order to subscribe to it. Depending on how the business sets it up, you may need to fill in a form, confirm your email address or click a link to confirm your subscription. If someone doesn’t visit the site (or the link doesn’t work), they may never see the content unless you send them a link in the mail again. For this reason, RSS is often thought of as a “subscribe at your own risk” kind of channel.
With RSS, you can distribute content via email in a way that works automatically. When a blog post or article is published, an RSS notification will be generated. This notification will contain a convenient link to the content, allowing users to subscribe and keep up with all the latest content as it’s published. Not only that, but if you’re using a tool like Feedly or Google Reader to follow the content, you’ll get an email alert when new content is added.
Why Is RSS Popular And How Can It Benefit Email Marketers?
As we mentioned above, RSS makes content easy to find, access and consume, regardless of device or internet connection. This content can then be distributed via email, making it simple and convenient for customers to keep up with your offerings.
Additionally, RSS is used widely across social platforms like Twitter and Facebook. If you’re running an online store, you may want to consider using affiliate marketing through these platforms to grow your business. When someone clicks a link or likes a company page on Facebook, they’re redirected to a store where they can make a purchase. With this kind of integrated marketing, you can target potential customers where they are rather than having to rely on them coming to your website first.
How Does RSS Work For Bloggers And Small Businesses?
If you’re a blogger, distributing your content via RSS is the easiest and most convenient way to do so. When you publish a new article, all you need to do is click a button to create an RSS notification. From there, you can add the feed to your reader and begin receiving content in your inbox, just like that!
For those running a small business or blog, RSS makes it much easier to keep customers up to date on the latest news and developments. If someone visits your site on a regular basis, you can use the information they find to grow your business. Additionally, if you’re using Google Reader, you can create collections to organize content by subject matter or create folders to keep related articles together.
An RSS Advantage For Email Marketers
As an email marketer, you may be thinking that RSS doesn’t offer much advantage over traditional methods of content distribution. After all, you can use a tool like Feedly to easily find and subscribe to content, regardless of whether you have a blog or not.
But think again. Not only does RSS make content easy to find, it also makes distributing content through email much simpler. When you create an RSS feed and send out an email with the content in it, people who subscribe to the email will automatically begin receiving content from your site, just as soon as it’s published.
Additionally, RSS allows content creators to keep their audience interested and engaged with the latest articles, news and developments via email. If someone finds your content valuable, they may subscribe to it simply to stay informed on what’s going on.
More Than Just Feeds
While RSS makes it easier to distribute content via email, that’s not all it can do. RSS allows content creators to keep track of how many views their content gets and when it was most popular. This feature alone makes RSS a valuable tool for blog owners and business owners who want to understand the effectiveness of their content.
By keeping track of these trends and analyzing the results of their efforts, content creators can choose to plan future content around these popular topics or subjects in order to engage their audience once more.
So, as you can see, RSS is much more than just a way to distribute content via email. It can also be a valuable tool for analyzing industry trends, tracking the effectiveness of your content and engaging with your audience via email.
In The End, Is RSS The Right Type of Email Marketing?
So, is RSS the right type of email marketing? For the most part, if you want to reach the right audience, use the right tool, want to engage with your audience and want to keep up with the latest trends, then RSS is a great choice. If you don’t mind doing a little bit of legwork to get the content you want, then traditional methods of email distribution still work just fine.
But if you’d like to see your content reach the largest audience possible, consider using a tool like Feedly or Google Reader to find and subscribe to the feed of your choice. With these tools, finding and subscribing to content is a simple task. Additionally, you can use tools like Hootsuite and Buzzsumo to discover content creators, bloggers and small businesses you can partner with to spread the word about your products and services.