Have you reshaped your Email newsletters and are you already enhancing them by RSS and Twitter feeds?
Please assist me in gaining an understanding if RSS and Twitter have already crossed the marketing chasm. I might collect your feedback and publish on http://www.felgner.ch after asking for permission individually. Thanks for contributing ...
Clarification added May 7, 2008:
Your feedback will be published on http://www.felgner.ch/2008/05/email_newsletters_social_bookmarking.html. Please give me a short note in case you do not concur.
Answers (7)
David L.
Caddy Master at TheDigitalGolfer.com
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Harald
I took the leap late last year and ditched the email newsletter all together. I now publish my content by RSS feed to all my online communities. I also have an RSS ticker in my email signature which means that my customers get to see the latest stuff instantly.
In reverse, I have also unsubscribed from all the newsletters that I used to receive via email. But only where I could subscribe to RSS. I now have my homepage set as iGoogle and display all my RSS feeds there, or on Bloglines.
What I find interesting is that my twitter following grows on a weekly basis without my doing anything to promote it. Other than posting tweets.
Biana B.
Consultant
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Hi,
I find that my regular newsletter ( http://www.avocadoconsulting.com/free_newsletter.html ) is still very well read and acted upon. Therefore, I am still publishing a traditional newsletter and am getting great results from it.
In addition to the newsletter I publish a blog, and there I do provide an RSS feed for those who want to subscribe. You can see the blog at http://www.avocadoconsulting.com/marketing/
Biana Babinsky
Online Business Expert
http://www.avocadoconsulting.com
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I prefer RSS and have unsubscribed to all my newsletters as the content is generally never consistent in quality. In regards to Twitter i dont understand why i would want a feed so continuous and vague as that. Just doesn’t seem to make sense for business.
Desiree S.
CEO, Bella Web Design, Inc., Dynamic Webby Award Honoree, Entrepreneur, Funny Girl, Speaker, Musician
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My clients prefer both. The ones who are tech savvy understand RSS feeds and the ones who aren't enjoy our monthly newsletter (which always gives them a subscribe option and links to our site and blog!) I think you need to look at your customer base to decide which way works for you and your customers.
Lowell D.
eBusiness Manager | Internet Marketing | Digital Strategy
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Here’s my take on this. Clearly, Email marketing’s part of the mainstream - you know that you have reasonable loyalty from your customers when you email them, based on engagement statistics i.e. the open rate, click through rates and conversion numbers. So far so good. With email, you have a semi-casual relationship with your customers/potential customers and you provide them with relevant information to influence their actions with regard to your products.
RSS demands a higher level of loyalty from subscribers. Which means that anyone subscribing to your RSS feed wants to hear more about what you have to say or offer and allows a subscriber to "syndicate" news/blog/information summaries from web sites. These RSS feeds display the latest news/posts from sites that you subscribe to on your own web site, your desktop or read them on other sites collecting these feeds. The problem with RSS is that it’s primarily the digerati who use this mechanism to specifically obtain the content they desire.
Twitter’s a new phenomenon and most folks are scratching their heads wondering what it’s all about. You can open a twitter account and have subscribers to your account just like an RSS feed. In fact, some business are using their twitter accounts as RSS feeds and it doesn’t really add much value to the community. A twitter account needs to be nurtured and built up to the point where it’s more than just an account. Branding’s important here as is credibility. You need to build a twitter personality and then build a fan base that want to hear what you’re twitting about. And you have to maintain your account regularly and ensure a consistent stream of content, interact with the community and build loyalty around your twitters. And yeah, unlike emails where you can propagate your products openly, you cannot do that on twitter just yet as any overt commercial plug will drive a potential subscriber away. I’m bearish on this trend. Twitter’s a lot of fun once you get used to it, but that’s my inner-geek speaking. Realistically, I think it will gain prominence among micro-communities and remain a strong niche player but will take ages before the mainstream warms up to it.
In conclusion, if I were to look at the various segments that we’ve serviced over time including baby boomers, B2C, B2B, youth markets etc by email, I’d use RSS or Twitter to complement my email marketing efforts to these segments rather than just replace email with them.
Our LAO has traditionally sent bi-monthly email newsletters to a massive (opt in) database. However because it is a bi-monthly email, some of the information is no longer completely up-to-date. likewise not all of the information contained is relevant or of interest to all respondents. It's for these reasons that we have very recently started publishing a blog and subsequent RSS feeds that run parallel to the traditional email newsletter.
It is our intention to survey our readership towards the end of the year and ascertain which format they prefer and why.
The e-newsletters I do for my clients are still done in more "traditional" ways -- that is, email push to employees usually with the newsletter embedded in the email. Linking them to the e-newsletter is less effective, of course, because it requires another step after opening the email and we've all learned how that stops people from making the effort.
Most, if not all, of my clients are still not ready for RSS, Twitter, etc. In fact, most aren't sure what to do about the direction online communication is going... we're striving to help some of them (the ones we think can handle it) understand the value and direction of social networking, podcasts, quick-hit online videos (the YouTube phenomenon) and the like.
