by Kelly Rusk – Communications Manager

Working in a constantly changing environment like the online world means you need to always be looking ahead to what’s new and fresh. For e-marketers, that’s RSS (aka Really Simple Syndication). For a while now we’ve been hearing “RSS will be the email killer,” but given the mass penetration of email, isn’t it smarter to understand and embrace RSS as a tool to use WITH email, not against it?  

 RSS is a means of publishing timely content that can be accessed by news aggregators, either in an online reader (such as Newsgator), in your email or even in your browser (Firefox and soon Internet Explorer 7). Content usually consists of news, personal or business blogs, and podcasts.

The main advantage of RSS, and why some predict it to be an email killer, is with RSS, spam doesn’t exist. You don’t provide any personal information to subscribe, you just add the feed to your aggregator and you’re all set.  RSS is also considered less evasive – you can publish as many posts as you like and readers won’t be annoyed the same way as if you were to send five emails a day.

While RSS has been around for a while, it’s still in its “early adoption” phase. A recent Yahoo!/Ipsos whitepaper revealed that only 12 per cent of the US online population is aware of RSS, and only four per cent have knowingly used it - which means throwing out email in favour of RSS would be alienating a lot of your current subscribers who’ve not yet taken the plunge.

However, if you’re looking to position your company as leading edge in the online world, then you should already be using RSS. If not – you still have plenty of time to get an RSS feed up and running before it explodes to mass popularity. Also, by promoting your RSS feed in your emails, as people adopt the new technology, more and more will subscribe to your feed.

As for content, your email and RSS feed shouldn’t be the same, but should be related. For example, as you may have noticed, Expresso is our monthly e-bulletin loaded with email marketing tips and trends, and e-Buzz  is our blog featuring … email marketing tips, opinions and trends… The two are obviously related, but if you look at the structure, each Expresso is planned ahead of time, has its own theme and includes an introduction written by Carolyn, and a more in-depth feature article written by various experts on our team. The blog however, features almost daily, random posts about whatever happens to pop into our heads, or whatever issue comes across our desks regarding the email marketing industry.