2006 Top Email Trend: RSS!

January 9, 2006

ExactTarget recently released it's 2006 Email marketing projections. Surprise, surprise. RSS is integral to the future success of Email, at least according to ExactTarget.

RSS will start to make an impact on email marketing. There is a lot of talk about RSS (Really Simple Syndication) and how it will affect email marketing. While 2006 will not be the year of widespread RSS adoption at the expense of email, there will be an opportunity for RSS to become a significant component of email marketing. The Indianapolis Colts are a great example of how to aggregate content in an email template and then distribute that content as an email to their fans. The content is available on the web at sites like NFL.com. The RSS feeds the information to a site that places it into the Colts’ email template. Alternatively, marketers can make content for their emails available through an RSS feed that subscribers can choose to access through their RSS reader versus email.

I agree. RSS adoption will not rise *completely* at the expense of email, just as email adoption did not rise at the expense of the telephone or postal mail. As savvy marketers, we need to to what we've been needing to do in the last decade of web growth - meet people in their medium. If the medium is RSS, as it is for a growing contingent of consumers, then Email marketers need to be there too with an integrated message.

The same goes for advertisers, and ExactTarget is on the money here too with and idea that savvy publishers using RSS to deliver content can teach those using email to deliver content.

Email as a carrier for third party advertising. Email is attractive to advertisers because it is targeted and trackable. Email marketers generally know quite a bit about who receives their messages. The key to success is that the ad has to fit with the expectations of the subscriber. You never want to abuse permission, violate privacy or be irrelevant.

The final prediction for Email marketers focuses on metrics, as all good marketing should. RSS marketers and email marketers can easily rally around this idea.

The new metric: return on subscriber. Marketing with email will fail if marketers only are focused on the results of one email campaign versus another. The goal for 2006 must be to focus on return on subscriber, creating high customer lifetime value. This is accomplished by simply monitoring the value of your subscribers as individuals. Measure their value quarter-to-quarter, not campaign to campaign.

As we've been saying all along - would you rather have a visitor to your website, or a subscriber to your content and your brand. We have to move towards better valuation of the subscriber and treating our subscribers like the customer partners that they are, whether from RSS or Email.

Posted on January 9, 2006 9:55 AM
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