Reaching Non-Techies and News-Junkies RSS Users

Posted by Hendry Lee on 02/21/06 in RSS Promotion

Marketing Sherpa has an interesting article on how to reach RSS users who are not aware about the technology. Back in October 2005, Yahoo! published a whitepaper titled RSS — Crossing into the Mainstream of which they reported among others that the awareness of RSS is still quite low among Internet users.

How marketers should react to the study to promote their RSS feed?

To get your feed picked up by non-RSS-button users — those who are not familiar with the orange RSS button — you may want to follow the path of Travelocity.

Instead of issuing a press release or running a big ad campaign the team merely sent a single email offer to the members of its house list who were either Yahoo or MSN email users, asking them to sign up for the feed via MyYahoo or MyMSN respectively.

“Of the people that opened the email, over 2/3 actually subscribed to the feed,” says Patty Hagar, Travelocity’s Principal Account Manager, Strategic Marketing. “That’s an enormous clickthrough rate — enormous! They were really hungry for this information.”

You also need to publish your feed frequently.

There are other suggestions related to RSS advertising and branding too. RSS feed publishers should consider running various RSS ads instead of single creative repeatedly. Try to include your brand automatically as part of every headline to increase visibility.

Reference: Analysis of Yahoo!’s RSS Whitepaper.
Source: Marketing Sherpa.

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3 Comment(s)

  1. Shannon Whitley | Reply

    You can easily prompt people through an email to subscribe to your feed via Feedlinx (http://www.feedlinx.com). Feedlinx is a service that allows users to subscribe via email or feed readers and keeps track of their read posts no matter which options they choose. It’s a true “multi-channel” solution.

    Here’s a stripped-down example link for this blog:

    http://www.feedlinx.com/feedlinx/default.aspx?href=http%3A//feeds.feedburner.com/rss_marketing&type=3

  2. techbee | Reply

    Sir
    After this elating article on Add to my yahoo, I tried to subscribe to your blog via +myyahoo (on this page) and it failed! Yahoo advises me to contact you to warn you. Have you not listened to your own advise and changed your URL….funny!

  3. Hendry Lee | Reply

    techbee,

    Thanks for letting me know about the issue.

    Further investigation shows that it is an error on Yahoo. They have fixed that and now it is working.

    I suspect it is related to the feed redirection problem. Other RSS aggregators are able to handle them well, including Yahoo! but for some reasons they have problems with it yesterday.

    Hope it helps.

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