Best practices for RSS? You better believe it! And here is a good place to get started on your quest for understanding, too.

Contrary to general opinion, RSS meets the needs of even the most demanding direct marketer, actually providing most of what e-mail marketing does, except for the strong push factor.

Most direct marketing reasons against RSS are in fact the result of inadequate understanding of RSS by most marketers.

a] Scheduled and autoresponder messages
There are already a few services and software packages on the market that allow for scheduled and autoresponder messages via RSS feeds. Once your visitor subscribes to your special RSS feed, he can receive a pre-determined set of messages in a specific time frame, determined by you. Use these messages to welcome your new reader to your RSS feed; thank your new customer after the purchase, send him additional information about the ordered product and give him the opportunity to buy an additional product at a lower price tag a couple of days later, and so on.

b] RSS metrics
RSS can in fact be tracked: track anything from the number of your subscribers, their reading habits, their reading frequency to your click-through rates and activities after clicking-through from your feed. This includes tracking which of your RSS feeds are performing better, are more interesting to your readers and drive more sales … and the same for individual content items. [Read the rest]