RSS as the answer to spam?

[dragonlady7]

RSS is the Answer to Spam (http://siliconvalley.internet.com/news/article.php/3070851)

The article suggests that instead of email newsletters, which are often bounced or filtered erroneously as spam, the way of the future may be RSS feeds. That puts the control into the hands of the user, who is much less likely to toss it out with the trash by accident if it's in with news feeds instead of in the "bulk email" folder.

The only problem I can see is those who download their email and read it offline. But, how many people do that?

[Bernard]

A few quibbles:"E-mail is dead, period," declares Chris Pirillo, ... "I don't care what kind of legislation goes through, people aren't signing up for newsletters anymore. People are assuming that every e-mail publisher is a spammer."That is not my experience. It probably depends greatly on the industry and reputation of the business or organization sponsoring the newsletter.Pirillo, who estimates that barely 5 percent of Lockergnome's subscribers are actually reading the e-mail newsletters ...That is an awful percentage and likely an indication that they are doing something wrong. I got roughly 7% click-throughs from my last newsletter.

That said, using RSS for newsletters is an interesting idea. Thanks for sharing.

[polarmate]

A lot more than you think! ;) People on dial-up connections without unlimited hours do that. Those who do not have toll-free access to their ISP do that. Um... I do that when I am in India and without a broad-band connection cos I pay a per-minute cost for the phone call and I pay an hourly charge for my Internet connection.

[polarmate]

Bernard, your stats inspired me to check our stats for a newsletter we sent out on 8/26
50% opened the newsletter
16.5% clicked through which is lower than that of the previous newsletter which was 23%.

It's not dead for us. Sales and traffic peak soon after a newsletter is sent out. I track sales referred by our newsletter. I don't agree it is dead. I also think it does depend on what your niche market is and how many similar newsletters abound. We have a fairly unqiue newsletter and there won't be one like it because of the uniqueness of our product and what draws people to our web sites.

[Bernard]

Those sounds like great numbers Manisha. Our newsletter is a simple company news type of thing. We are pleased with the results we are getting right now. :cheers:

[dragonlady7]

Most of the newsletters I'm subscribed to are far more active and lively than that-- I know there's a high percentage of readership for most of them.

But some of them, I can see-- when you register a product, for example, and say sure, sign me up for info about new releases, and then you forget about it. What's this! you say months later when you get a newsletter. Adobe's spamming me??
So people who are less active on the Internet are probably a whole lot more forgetful about their newsletters. I have heard of several newsletter publishers getting harassed by subscribers who are absolutely convinced that they never signed up for the newsletter and so are being spammed.
I think it has to do with how a lot of people use the Internet-- often people will go on an Internet binge, and do things like sign up for a million newsletters and buy things online and join a bunch of forums, and then they'll resume their normal off-line life (most people aren't so integrated into the Internet yet), and forget about most of the places they visited. When the next monthly update of the newsletter arrives, they don't remember signing up for it, and suddenly they're getting 15 emails a day from all these different newsletters, and they don't remember opting in... it's just risky.
Using an RSS feed means that there's no way a subscriber could have not subscribed to you. So you're protected.
It seems like a good idea.

Thing is, I don't use an RSS reader. I'm not involved in that sort of thing just yet. I'll probably do it at some point. But in the meantime, I do faithfully read all my newsletters on email...

And yes, there are still a lot of dial-up users in the world who read email offline. That's definitely an issue.

[Webmaster T]

I have been a big time subscriber to newsletters in the past. Lately I've joined 1 new discussion group (co-incidently blogs are the topic), but have increased my use of blogs considerably however I am not yet using an agregator though I intend to in the future as I'm rolling out my own RSS feed. When I decided to re-establish my personal site I toyed with starting the newsletter again. I decided instead to turn the site into a blog, though I may still send out notices when I publish a new article. However this is giving me second thoughts.

[k-sea]

Well this is a great topic but I'm not sure how you connect to a person directly using News Feeds.

E-mail is dynamic where you are sending them a targeted offer for one item or another. It's personalized with name, additional relevant information etc.

RSS feeds do one thing, promote your website. That's about it. Someone can link direct to your news feed and grab information from your website. Yeah you can track sales and stuff through IP but it's going to get loss in the mix when people start syndicating your news to yet another website.

E-mail is good as long as the person knows you are sending the newsletter. #1 way to combat this is to send it frequently. Not too frequently but waiting a whole month to send the next issue is going to have people wondering what they signed up for.