The Silverpop CEO explains why RSS (Really Simple Syndication) will soon become the internet content delivery channel of choice, and why that's good for marketing.
In this new era of digital communications, consumers are increasingly taking charge of their online experience and, in some respects, taking control out of the hands of marketers. For proof, you don't have to look any further than the phenomenal growth rate of blogs.
In 2002, about 100,000 American bloggers toiled away at their craft, reporting on everything from what they had for dinner to their pursuits, politics and the meaning of life. It was, by and large, a tech-community kind of pursuit. But corporate interest in the marketing potential of blogs -- and RSS, the technology that drives them -- soared after bloggers successfully ignited a wildfire of political discourse and debate that raged across the Internet during the 2004 U.S. elections.
In fact, the Pew Internet & American Life Project estimates that by the end of 2004, about eight million of the 120 million adult American internet users had created blogs, and 32 million -- a whopping 58 percent increase over the previous year -- were reading them.
With an estimated six million U.S. users and with more signing up daily, the rate at which individuals are adopting RSS is surpassed historically only by the pace at which they embraced the World Wide Web. Within a few years, I believe RSS will be the internet content delivery channel of choice for the majority of consumers-- and it will deliver much more than blogs and news.
Spurred by the growing ubiquity of RSS and the opportunity to unlock its potential as a marketing tool, pioneering companies are avidly exploring this promising new channel. Savvy organizations around the world are adopting RSS and putting it to a wide range of uses. Whether it is a media site distributing news or a retailer publishing promotions and specials, RSS is quickly becoming a common way for businesses to communicate with consumers.
One-to-One RSS
Forrester Research, in its "RSS 101 for Marketers" report, said, "RSS is a powerful tool -- albeit for the technologically advanced today -- that marketers should test and deploy to proactively maintain relationships with their customers."
But for marketers who have spent the last decade moving away from traditional broadcast media toward the more closely targeted methods made possible by the new digital media, truly innovative applications for RSS have remained elusive-- until now.
Although it is most often associated with blogs, RSS is morphing into an individually targeted marketing channel capable of offsetting many of the downsides of other channels. New techniques are being unveiled that allow marketers to leverage the appeal and growing adoption of RSS without sacrificing their hard work of the last decade to achieve measurability, targetability and flexibility.
The newest generation of RSS technology -- individualized RSS feeds -- allows companies to target, segment and personalize communications much the way they do email messages today. Individualized RSS recipients receive text, images and promotional offers uniquely matched to their expressed interests and desires. The individualized feeds enable marketers to communicate with subscribers based on demographics, past behavior, or any other segmenting attributes.
With these next-generation solutions, each recipient gets his or her own unique feed, enabling marketers to understand exactly how many and which recipients are picking up their messages. And because each feed is unique to the individual recipient, marketers can track and measure subscriber actions all the way down to an individual, facilitating the same behavioral targeting and testing possible in other personalized media. Moreover, marketers can actually create a unique message for each user based upon demographic or behavioral data.
But best of all, these individualized RSS solutions do not require any changes on the part of recipients-- they can use the same reader they use today to get their blogs or news feeds to access a company's promotional messages.
Why RSS?
RSS user demographics are certainly worthy of marketers' attention. According to Forrester, users frequent the internet and, at about 39, are younger than non-RSS users by about six years. Forty-six percent are college educated and -- in the three months before Forrester's survey in February 2005 -- spent, on average, $465 online compared with $333 for non-RSS users.
The advantages RSS offers make it easy to see why 57 percent of marketers told Forrester they are interested in adding RSS to their marketing mix. For example, although email has been a prime driver of online sales and is expected to continue to hold a significant presence in marketing programs, spam makes consumers leery of signing up for email messages. Those who do opt-in for emails are often frustrated when spam filters keep desirable content from reaching them.
RSS, on the other hand, delivers every message to recipients' desktops, assuring 100-percent deliverability. Consumers like RSS feeds because they are self-organizing, with each feed arriving in its own folder. Most important, however, RSS offers consumers control. RSS feeds do not require consumers to provide an email address. Instead, the consumer's RSS reader checks for new messages from the sender's website until the consumer says stop. And once opted-out, the consumer can no longer be contacted or bothered. With no email address involved, RSS makes unwanted messages all but impossible.
Expect the ubiquity of RSS to grow
Consumers can pick up RSS messages in a variety of ways-- on their computers, from popular web portals like Yahoo and even from cell phones. RSS is also at the heart of the exciting new phenomenon called "pod casting," which lets consumers automatically download audio files and play them on portable devices like Apple's iPod.
The widespread appeal and adoption of RSS are impossible to ignore. Now, with individualized RSS, new-era marketers can leave old-school mass marketing in the past where it belongs, and look to a future where RSS communications are limited only by the imagination.
Bill Nussey is the president and CEO of Silverpop, a provider of permission-based email marketing solutions, strategy and services. Ranked as having the highest business value and richest feature set by JupiterResearch in 2004, Silverpop was also acknowledged by research company Forrester as a "strong performer" that "stands out with an interface that is quite easy to use while providing strong functionality." Before joining Silverpop, Nussey was president and CEO of iXL, Inc., a publicly traded e-business consulting firm. During his three-year tenure, iXL executed its initial public offering, increased revenues from $10 million to $120 million per quarter and grew from 400 to over 2,000 employees. Nussey has also served as an investment professional with the venture capital firm Greylock Management Corporation. He co-founded and was CEO of DaVinci Systems, an award-winning email software company.