Is e-mail Marketing a thing of the past?  With spam on the rise and spam filters blocking a large amount of content, many would say "yes", but what, then, is the answer?  RSS or Real Simple Syndication can be.  RSS has been popularized by its use on blogs, but has recently been seen as having a more universal use - to online retailers especially.  I was forwarded an article this morning from InternetRetailer.com that expounds on this thought.

In a recent study by Jupiter Research said that "60% of marketers believed that spam filters were reducing the effectiveness of their e-mail marketing campaigns."  In comes RSS with the appeal of content delivery of channels that are 100% spam free being that RSS is a subscription-only model.  With RSS delivery is guaranteed and it is guaranteed that the receiver wants what is contained in the delivery.  Most importantly RSS arrives almost instantly to the readers.  On time delivery one of the keys to marketing on the internet.

What is so great RSS is relatively inexpensive to implement and is fast.  Also, with the upcoming release of IE 7, RSS may become a service that is ubiquitous to all users. 

I believe that RSS is here to stay and so does InternetRetailer, but what worries me is the last sentence of the article:

Blogs are not for everyone. Podcasting definitely isn’t.  But RSS is one of those no-brainer technologies that everyone should be experimenting with.

While I do agree that RSS is a technology everyone can use, I fear that the author too quickly dismisses blogs.  Certainly blogs are not for everyone, but when used in conjunction with RSS, your company would, I feel, benefit greatly from both the real-time notifications and the personal touch of a blog to go with it.

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