How Geeks Can Increase E-Mail Delivery...Use RSS

February 26, 2005

Kirill Popov and Loren McDonald from ClickZ wrote an in depth article on ensuring permission-based e-mail delivery, "How Geeks Can Increase E-Mail Delivery". I've highlighted the ten items below.

1. Create a reverse DNS
2. Set up an SPF
3. Make only one connection
4. Limit sending rate
5. Accept bounces
6. Validate HTML content
7. Avoid scripting
8. Understand content filtering basics
9. Monitor delivery and bounces rates by ISP/domain
10. Monitor spam complaints

I'm exhausted just writing all these down. They did a wonderful job explaining each point. This is the reality of content delivery via email. SPAM has devastated email content delivery and has forced legitimate publishers to fight through hoops just to talk to their customers. Content delivery via email as some proclaim may not be dead, however it is dieing. How can you keep this up and have it be cost effective. The expense and time need for a successful delivery of your permission based email is eroding the value of your customers. Is just too time consuming and expensive. And, once you get over these technical hurdles you have to consider the limitations the SPAM filters are putting on what you say - read the 50 common words/phrases you cannot include in email.

Sending content to consumers should not be like this. The solution to this headache is far more cost effective. It's call Real Simple Syndication (RSS). Their is a reason why the word "Simple" is in the name because the steps are:

1. Create your content

(Big sigh of relief.) That's it. Your readers who have opted-in to your feed get the updates automatically. Just like 10 years ago before SPAM devastated email. Publishers no longer have to be an expert in email delivery. No more ISP filters to worry about or CAN-SPAM threats. Stick with what you know, creating high-quality content your readers enjoy.

Sure, you will need to create the newsletter you do today as RSS adoption increases but implement an RSS strategy. Take the same content you are creating now and re-purpose it as an RSS feed. Penn Media publishers over 50 newsletters delivered to over 7 million subscribers per month. Soon all 50 newsletters will have an RSS feed. They are using an open-source tool that easily integrates with their current content management system to create the RSS feeds. It is not hard to do.

If you are still not convinced, here are a few more ideas why it makes sense to move from email to RSS.

Posted by Bill Flitter on February 26, 2005 2:30 PM
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