We already established that RSS and e-mail in fact need to be used together, as opposed to either one replacing the other.

While RSS might not be used by as many people as e-mail, you can be sure that those that do use it and subscribe to your feeds will get your content without fail. In addition, many already prefer to receive information via RSS instead of e-mail, making RSS an absolute must as a supplement to e-mail delivery.

Let’s now take a detailed look at exactly how RSS and e-mail can work together.

1. Announcing Your E-zine via RSS

What’s the use of an excellent e-mail e-zine if it’s blocked by spam filters or lost in the recipient’s mailbox? No matter how high quality content you prepare, if it’s not received it can’t be read and then acted upon to drive sales your way.

Namely, you need to stop thinking of your e-zine in terms of e-mail delivery, but rather consider it as a vehicle to present relevant and related content in a specific context of an individual e-zine issue, which can then be delivered to your recipients in multiple ways.

Just consider newspapers, which are delivered in print format, on the Web, via e-mail and RSS as well, all this to assure optimum delivery according to end-user preferences.

While most e-zine publishers will never consider presenting their e-zine in print format and delivering it via traditional delivery services, you need to explore all available means of online delivery. After e-mail, RSS is the first that comes to mind.

Using RSS to announce your e-zine via RSS is the simplest and least expensive way to get started with RSS and it will help you make sure that your valuable content in fact does get delivered, at least to the audience using RSS.

A) The Process: E-mail E-zines

What is the process behind traditional e-zine publishing?

–> The publisher provides an e-mail e-zine subscription box, in which visitors enter their e-mail addresses, thus giving consent to the publisher to receive his communications and at the same time building his subscriber database.

–> The e-mail address is saved in the publisher’s subscriber database.

–> The publisher prepares an e-zine issue, usually creating an HTML document with either full-text e-zine issue articles and news or summaries of articles with links to full-text articles on his website.

–> The HTML document is packaged as an e-mail message by the publishers’ e-mail publishing solution and then sent to his subscriber database using e-mail as the delivery channel.

–> E-mail messages “travel through the internet” and are either stopped on the way by various spam filters and other “barricades” and are then either deleted automatically or delivered to the subscribers’ e-mail accounts.

–> Subscribers download these e-mail messages when they log-on to their e-mail account and can then manipulate them, either deleting them, moving them to another folder or reading them.

How can we now transfer this process to publishing your e-zine via RSS as well?

Continue reading at the RSS Marketing Diary