While I am coming more and more to the conclusion that, for the time being, RSS and email must be cohabitant marketing communications tools, there is still a debate brewing. Alex Barnett, Online Customer Experience Manager for Microsoft UK (how's that for a title!), discusses it in two posts: RSS Future - Distributed marketing and the solution to spam? and Email v RSS, let us move on. The later post contains a rather extensive listing of email and RSS positives and negatives.

For me, the debate was settled after having read an article by marketing executive Tom Barnes, CEO of MediaThink. In a first of two-part series entitled RSS: Marketing's Next Big Thing, Tom outlines advantages to both strategies and shows how they can work in simpatico. *The article is premium content, so I'm being careful not to raise the ire of Marketing Profs attorneys by giving away too much information. :-) But, you ought to become a subscriber to Marketing Profs anyway.*

According to a recent article in eMarketer.com, the best way to reach moms with your marketing message is to email them. The article goes on to say...

Exactly 67% of mothers in the US say they check their e-mail three to four times per day or more.

The key to addressing moms in an e-mail campaign is speaking to their needs. Lucid and BSM found that 66% of mothers spend more money with companies that send them useful and relevant e-mail messages. Nearly 90% of mothers say they either "sometimes" make purchases based on e-mail messages or "often" make purchases from e-mail. In fact, 71% think e-mail messages influence their buying decisions.

Just how many mothers use e-mail? Nearly all of them (96%), according to an AOL survey of over 1,600 mothers. AOL also found that 67% of mothers go online to do product research and 55% look for coupons or discounts online.

Despite what I've said in the past, email ain't dead yet!

(BTW, if you want to know more about marketing to women, I recommend paying a visit to the Wonderbranding, LipSticking and DivaMarketing blogs.) 

Spoof emails - also known as phishing - present yet another problem related to email marketing. These hoax e-mails appear to be from a well-known company but can put you at risk.

They can be difficult to spot and generally ask you to click a link back to a spoof web site and provide, update or confirm sensitive personal information. To bait you, they may allude to an urgent or threatening condition concerning your account. The spoof PayPal emails that many of us have received are a classic example.

This is yet another reason any company that uses email as a marketing tool ought to consider adding RSS feeds as a syndication medium. At least to this point, RSS can be trusted. End users only receive information from the sites to which they subscribe, and can easily unsubscribe at any time.

In this regard RSS not only means Really Simply Syndication, but Really Stop Spam as well!

Want to read what some Microsoft researchers have to say about email vs. blogs? Me neither, but in case you do, here's the thread.

According to an article on eMarketer.com, a report from DoubleClick reveals that e-mail continues to grow in popularity among consumers, and acknowledges e-mail as a "legitimate and relied-upon marketing channel."

The report also acknowledges that spam continues to be an unsolvable problem that comprises the majority of emails received by consumers, a fact that may actually work in favor of permission-based email marketers. Think about it, if a consumer gets a bevy of email they don't want or did not request, it stands to reason an email message that comes from a trusted sender would be a welcome sight.

I had a dream the other night that some programming genius came up with a publishing application that created content for a weblog AND an email newsletter all-in-one! In other words, inside one app, content could be easily repurposed so that there was no need for re-entering it. You post to your blog and, within the bowels of the app, that content could easily be morphed into a format suitable for email.

If anyone knows of such a tool, please let me know. I've said that, for the time being, the ideal marketing communications mix is a combination of blogs and email, with RSS thrown in for good measure. Those are the areas I'm emphasizing now, and I'd like to know if such an application exists. If it doesn't, why is someone is not working on creating it? If someone did, I know it would be a hit!

If you're a small business thinking about starting an opt-in email marketing program, I can think of no better software tool to use than Constant Contact! The system is easy to configure, very intuitive in terms of processing an email marketing campaign, and provides a number of high-quality pre-formatted templates that don't require the knowledge of HTML to use. IOWs, it is "made in the shade" for the small businessperson.

According to a survey done by the godfather of internet marketing, Ralph Wilson, Constant Contact is the most popular email marketing software program in use by small businesses.

Take a look at some of their success stories, and I'm sure you'll conclude Constant Contact is a program well worth investigating.

My friend Michael Katz is an email marketing maven if ever there was one. If your small business uses an email newsletter as part of your marketing communications strategy, then you need to read his practical manual E-Newsletters That Work. It's a step-by-step guide to creating an effective email newsletter.

In the latest version of his own newsletter, Michael shares some tips on how to turn readers into clients (or customers as the case may be). After all, what good is a business newsletter if it doesn't help your bottom line? What he has to say applies equally as well to small business blogs too.

Here are the bullet points. . .

1. Use client experiences as examples - Say things like "In working with XYZ client last week." This helps your readers associate your company with a solution to a problem that they may also have



2. Stop referencing "the experts" - You become the expert, not just an observer of experts. (Of course, where email newsletters are concerned, Michael IS the expert!



3. Congratulate your clients - Your client gets some free publicity and you get to remind your readers of the work you do.



4. Include an "About Us" section - Provide an easy way for your readers to get to know you.

In addition to purchasing Michael's book, you will also want to subscribe to his monthly newsletter. I promise you it contains refreshing, entertaining, and very helpful content. You will welcome it into your inbox, to be sure.

In reference to his photo above, don't you just love a guy who enjoys his work! :-)

According to an article in eMarketer.com, a report from MessageLabs shows spam rates are down considerably from this time a year ago. The report credits a "growning enforcement of corporate governance requirements" along with government enforcement efforts like Operation Web Snare. Part of the drop in rates could be seasonable. Summer months tend to show a drop in the amount of spam.

The bad news is that only about 25% of email service providers are CAN SPAM compliant, and that 61% remove hard bounces from their email deliverability rates, which serves to inflate those rates.

A few days ago, I wrote a short riff on why email marketing should not be dropped in favor of RSS for content syndication and marketing purposes. . .for the time being anyway. I proposed a "best of both worlds" scenario that the two be married and used in tandem.

My friend Rick Bruner of Business Blog Consulting had, only a week before, written about much the same subject. While he does get something off his chest in the early part of the post regarding RSS, his commentary is well-reasoned, insightful, and well worth your time.

In essence, Rick holds out hope and sees a brighter future for email than I do. He's more the optimist and I'm just a curmudgeon I guess. His trump card is that he has some statistical data to back up his comments. I just have a gut feeling. Ha!