Thursday, April 21, 2005

RSS Causing the Decline of Mailing Lists and Email Marketing ?

Theses metrics come from one of the majors of the email marketing industry, in the DoubleClick report of december 2004:
The Q3 2004 average open rate (average of 34.3 percent) declined 7.5 percent from Q3 2003 (37.1%), while the average click-through rate (8.2%) decreased 10.9 percent during the same period (9.2%).
I'm not sure RSS have so much influence on thoses metrics, -I personnaly think it's more spam gates who are more and more used by access providers-, but RSS will be for sure, the next big channel of communication. I'm a bit surprise to not find RSS/XML links in a lot of place where they should be use.

RSS is not only for Blogs and News

Where do you find now RSS links :
  • Blog sites
  • News sites


Where you should find RSS links to bring a better communication between you and your clients :
  • Corporate Press releases page
  • Human Resources Jobs posting sections
  • Whitepapers section
  • New products section
  • Bestsellers list page
  • Inventory sale section
  • Calendar of events section
  • Discount Coupons page
  • Contests & Sweepstakes pages
  • Downloads of softwares and patches pages
  • Portfolio section
  • Classified ads sections (a must)


In a limited-access (log-in) zone you can also use RSS to :
  • Make awareness messaging with yours; affiliates, employees, team members or investors
  • Podcasting (links to a audio content like a radio shows)
  • VideoCasting (links to Video comments, interviews or statements)
  • AppCasting (Alpha & Beta software releasing)
  • Consulting & billing awareness tool
  • Agenda feeds
  • A emergency warning channel
  • ...
A another good example of the tendancy of RSS supplanting mailing list.

Update 13h22 EDT : Funny coincidence, an hour after this post I learn that DoubleClick is close to sale!

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