In our November, 2003 issue, we first introduced you to IMN’s RSS feature which allows you to instantly start publishing RSS feeds that link directly to your newsletter or weblog. Today, we’ll give you more information on our RSS features including insights on how it can fit into your marketing program and an overview of our new trackable RSS feed feature.

RSS Goes Mainstream

As we discussed previously, RSS is an XML standard that has, over the last several years, emerged as one of the most popular ways to post headlines and short abstracts for use by other Web sites and "tickers" or "viewers" on personal desktops. Because email boxes continue to be inundated with spam, RSS can be an additional communication channel for e-marketers that sidesteps many of the issues related to email delivery. This is especially appropriate for newsletters and blog publishers who can offer their subscribers the option to actively “pull” newsletter or blog content on a regularly scheduled basis.

Essentially, RSS is like on online newswire service that provides content for other Web sites and RSS content aggregators. The aggregators are Web-based services or client-based tools that allow users to easily “subscribe” and “unsubscribe” to the RSS feeds that they are interested in receiving. RSS is primarily used for publishing headlines and short synopsis, along with URLs linking back to the content publisher. The published RSS content then resides passively on a Web server and is then actively pulled down to client computers on a regular basis.

IMN RSS

As a newsletter or blog publisher, you can easily expand your distribution by using the IMN RSS publishing feature, which allows you to instantly start publishing RSS feeds that link directly to your newsletter or blog. Once your subscribers choose to include your RSS feed in their aggregation service, headlines and abstracts of your newsletter or blog’s content will be immediately available to them.

The new Trackable RSS feature lets you gain even more knowledge about your readers’ behavior. Now, every time one of your subscribers interacts with content that you publish via RSS feeds, there is an opportunity to learn what they want and care about most and meld this information together with all of the other statistics collected from your email campaigns and companion micro-sites. This gives you the opportunity to respond with fine-tuned information and messaging that will help you build a stronger relationship. With trackable RSS feed links, you have a new channel for exposing your company’s news and information while you build a loyal subscriber base through the mutual exchange of information.

If you want to add RSS feed links to your marketing program, there are three different levels of service that you can choose from:

1. The first level (available to all users) enables you to publish an RSS feed so it can be picked up by the RSS feed aggregators.
2. The second level is our “trackable” RSS offering which allows you to track and learn from groups of subscribers interacting with content.
3. The third and most comprehensive level is what we call the fully "customizable" feed, that presents different content to different subscribers depending who they are.

Besides targeting external customers and prospects, RSS feeds are ideal for internal corporate applications. For example, if you work for a large company of 10,000 employees, you could provide an RSS feed from an e-newsletter about employee benefits. The link can be embedded in your intranet and headlines and content abstracts from the e-newsletter can be automatically displayed for all employees to see along with the link to the entire publication. You can then use IMN’s content tracking and behavior analysis to learn about employee retirement and investment interests, preferences and priorities according to which articles in the e-newsletter they read the most and how much time they spend – and then respond with relevant offerings and information.

We currently have two RSS feeds that our customers are putting in their aggregators.* To see them in action, you can add these links to your RSS aggregator:

1. For our newsletter, Informed Marketer News, use this link: http://newsletter.imninc.com/e_rss.cfm
2. For IMN release notes, use: http://www.imninc.com/releasenotes/e_rss.cfm

*If you currently don’t have an aggregator, you can get one from companies like www.feeddemon.com.