Email newsletter vs RSS Feeds (Full Version)

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spinningjennie -> Email newsletter vs RSS Feeds (9/27/2007 5:28:17)

A client has a motel in a smallish mining town and has read an article which praises the virtues of RSS feeds for marketing hotels to guests. (We designed their website.)

My offsider thinks a better option for them would be to create an email newsletter to advertise special deals, events etc.

Are the following good reasons for choosing an email newsletter over RSS feeds?

1. Customers are more likely to know what a newsletter is and be comfortable with the concept.

2. Cheaper – Publishing RSS feeds means you’ll need a content management system that generates the feeds. [I think free software is available]

3. Easier – They already have a database of user emails they can send to. RSS needs people to choose to subscribe. They may not get many subscribing.

4. Why publish article headlines when they can publish the entire article? Newsletter sends text and pictures to recipients, RSS sends summaries/headlines [I think RSS also has image enclosure capability]

Regards
spinningjennie




Thomas Brunt -> RE: Email newsletter vs RSS Feeds (9/27/2007 10:32:41)

quote:

1. Customers are more likely to know what a newsletter is and be comfortable with the concept.


As of today, an email newsletter will usually be more popular than rss (depending upon the audience you're targeting.)

I use http://www.feedburner.com for my news feed because it gives people the option to subscribe via rss or email.

Things are changing, however. The capabilities of rss are built into all kinds of new sofware and hardware, and people absolutely will be using rss for their news in the future. It's just so much more efficient and user-friendly. I don't believe there's any doubt about this.

quote:

2. Cheaper – Publishing RSS feeds means you’ll need a content management system that generates the feeds. [I think free software is available]


RSS is way easier than an email newsletter to publish. Email newsletters can get you into tons of trouble if you're not very careful. Email newsletter publishing is MUCH more expensive because you really need to employ a distribution service unless you have the time to run down and appeal all of the false spam reports.

quote:


3. Easier – They already have a database of user emails they can send to. RSS needs people to choose to subscribe. They may not get many subscribing.


It is a pain to transition from an old mailing list to rss. You will loose some folks. I believe you will have to do it sooner or later, however. Email just doesn't work very well for news anymore. I still use my old email mailing list, but I use it far less often. I will probably trash it later this year.

quote:

4. Why publish article headlines when they can publish the entire article? Newsletter sends text and pictures to recipients, RSS sends summaries/headlines [I think RSS also has image enclosure capability]


That's not true. Lots of news feeds publish the entire article. Some prefer to bring you back to the site (same goes for email newsletters,) but that's entirely up to the publisher.


t



spinningjennie -> RE: Email newsletter vs RSS Feeds (9/27/2007 20:48:11)

Many thanks Thomas for the good advice on this. RSS Feeds are new to me, but what I had read on it made me question the robustness of those points made by my offsider.

Regards,
spinningjennie



halinagold -> RE: Email newsletter vs RSS Feeds (9/28/2007 2:46:30)

Why not offer both, so that people have a choice and you get the best from both worlds until RSS becomes as "normal" as email newletters are today? (which may be this year for webmasters and such but may take much longer for many others)

:-)




Tailslide -> RE: Email newsletter vs RSS Feeds (9/28/2007 4:44:50)

It's a toughie - email newsletters are much more familiar to most people than RSS - but they are an ENORMOUS pain in the a*se and you end up worrying about being blacklisted as a spammer all the time!

The problem with newsletters is that once you establish that you're going to send them every month or whatever... you actually have to produce something! I know a couple of clients who used to do this and it became a terrible strain to them. They virtually burst into tears when I just told them to stop sending the damn things!

Then you've got the whole spam email thing which means that you're probably better off using a service but of course they're not cheap. If you try to do it yourself you've got the whole html/text email worry thing (many clients are set up by default just to receive text emails) which means that you're probably safer just using text emails (which are a bit boring). Then you discover that you basically can't use CSS for HTML emails if you do want to send them - you have to use old fashioned tables and font tags [:o]

Hassle, hassle, hassle, hassle!!

I try to talk people out of newsletters (I'm a great businesswoman eh?). If they're determined and if they're sure they have the content then I'd recommend a service.

The only times I've actually set one up myself (not including WordPress plugins which pretty much do the lot for you) was for more of a group email thing where the list of emails was drawn from a database and the user could send an email and an attachment at a single button press. That used Swiftmailer which is PHP. Neat enough for small scale stuff.

Depending on the audience this is aimed at RSS feeds could either solve a lot of hassles for the user and make their life a lot easier for virtually no input OR they could fail to get through to a lot of their clientele.

I think they need to weigh up what the newsletter will do for them. Is it likely to actually produce income? If so then how much roughly? Maybe it will pay for itself if you use a service and that will be a lot of the hassle gone. If it's not likely to actually produce a lot of income then maybe RSS would be the more cost effective / time effective solution.

Oh I know - how about a blog instead!! Set up a blog on their site about life in a small mining town - lots of photos and local "colour" Get an RSS feed attached to that and set up a subscriber system so that subscribers get updates when new posts are made (blog plugins will do this for you).

That's all no help really is it?



halinagold -> RE: Email newsletter vs RSS Feeds (9/28/2007 7:19:57)

I forgot to say:

If you want to offer both email newsletter and RSS you might be interested in using iContact.com, where you can publish both (and a blog/archives of your newsletter) in one click.
I use them and like it.

And by the way, it's perfectly possible to offer a newsletter that comes when you have something interesting to say - you do not need to decide for a specific frequency. I do that with my subscribers and both I and them enjoy that - rather that newsletters created under pressure... [;)]

:-)

Halina



spinningjennie -> RE: Email newsletter vs RSS Feeds (9/30/2007 4:30:42)

Many thanks Halinagold and Tailslide for the very thoughtful ideas.

Halina, the iContact.com site looks like a cheaper option than my own company has used for email newsletters, with the advantage of RSS feeds as well. Will have to investigate this further. I also take your point that you could just produce a newsletter when it suits. Though in the real world that could well mean it never happens! I agree with Tail that many a newsletter has become a burden. Also suspect in this case that RSS feeds might result in no subscribers, but the client is still very keen on this option due to the spam charge risk. But I suppose if you use a (not cheap) mailing service with an 'opt in' requirement you avoid the spam charge, and are at least targeting your past guests, rather than just relying on people who land on your website who might subscribe to your RSS feeds.

Tail, the blog plug-in thing is not something I'm familiar with (as is the case with RSS feeds). Can you or anyone else suggest a good blog plug-in, and I'll start investigating this too?

regards
spinningjennie






womble -> RE: Email newsletter vs RSS Feeds (9/30/2007 5:36:48)

Interesting topic (partly as I'm working on a couple of sites that are going to need either an email newsletter or RSS feed).

As a user though I'm fast moving over to RSS because it's simply faster for me. One of my jobs at work (my other job) is writing the department's weekly newsletter (that goes out by email and on the intranet), but as far as collecting info for the newsletter I've switched over almost entirely to RSS feeds. I used to subscribe to various email newsletters related to the industry I work in, but inavriably they'd arrive in my inbox looking depressingly dull (most arrived in plain text), and if I hadn't time to read them at the time (common) and due to mailbox size limits imposed by the IT dept. (ridicuously small), most of the time I'd just delete them. I discovered that most of them also offered RSS feeds, and instead now I use the feeds with Google Reader - all my feeds in one place (handily I can also check out what's going on here and other work un-related places without anyone knowing [;)]), no size limitations, and they're all sitting there ready for me when I need to check them out to actually write our newsletter.



Tailslide -> RE: Email newsletter vs RSS Feeds (9/30/2007 6:17:06)


quote:

ORIGINAL: spinningjennie
Tail, the blog plug-in thing is not something I'm familiar with (as is the case with RSS feeds). Can you or anyone else suggest a good blog plug-in, and I'll start investigating this too?


Well it was just a thought that if your client went down the route of a blog instead of a newsletter per se then you could install a WordPress blog attached to their site then go hunting for a subscription plugin (I've used one called Subscribe 2 I think) and activate that within WordPress (a case of clicking an "activate" link in the admin panel). Then every time your client updated their blog - everyone who'd subscribed to the blog would get an email with a link to the new entry. Course it would mean having to customise a wordpress theme to look like your client's site which is always fun at first!

May well be a case of using a bloody great hammer to crack a nut!



spinningjennie -> RE: Email newsletter vs RSS Feeds (9/30/2007 9:25:56)

Womble, I like your example of the usefulness to the user of Google Reader, for gathering together changed information from a number of sites very quickly, if those sites offer feeds.

Tailslide, Thanks for the tips on creating a blog. I found the info on writing a blog using WordPress and the Subscribe2 plug-in link for WordPress.com to allow subscription.

I wonder which is easiest to do:

1. have the client create a blog with a subscription option via plug-in or
2. have the client create a feed

On this question, in another post with subject 'RSS Confusion', Thomas Brunt said:

quote:

You can create a feed with software like http://www.feedforall.com, or you can use a blog. The latter is much more a much more common approach.


Perhaps the blog option is easier.

Regards,
spinningjennie



womble -> RE: Email newsletter vs RSS Feeds (9/30/2007 11:24:15)


quote:

ORIGINAL: spinningjennie

Womble, I like your example of the usefulness to the user of Google Reader, for gathering together changed information from a number of sites very quickly, if those sites offer feeds.


Saves a load of trees too - before I converted the rest of my section to RSS we used to have to collect all the newspapers and cut articles out. Then when they discovered the web they used to print out articles from sites...now we just use the feeds to go straught to the articles and then print them to pdf. Saves time and the planet! [:D]



Tailslide -> RE: Email newsletter vs RSS Feeds (9/30/2007 12:14:22)


quote:

ORIGINAL: spinningjennie

I wonder which is easiest to do:

1. have the client create a blog with a subscription option via plug-in or
2. have the client create a feed



Oh definitely number 2 because to achieve number 1 you need to set up the whole blog. This would be a useful alternative if they thought that the RSS feed wouldn't go down well.



spinningjennie -> RE: Email newsletter vs RSS Feeds (10/1/2007 5:04:08)

Thanks again Womble and Tailslide. I've got some exploring to do on RSS fee creation, blog creation and the RSS/email newsletter optional approach with iContact.com. It will all be useful learning for me, though whatever is easiest and cheapest for this particular client to generate himself once I've assisted with setup will be the go for the current situation.

regards
spinningjennie



Paul Orlowski -> RE: Email newsletter vs RSS Feeds (10/1/2007 12:15:56)

I've been happy with Constant Contact. They claim to have a good industry reputation so they have fewer spam claims and blockages. That may be because they go to great pains to ensure we are using permission based emailing. Does iContact.com have a good reputation?

Paul



halinagold -> RE: Email newsletter vs RSS Feeds (10/1/2007 13:38:44)

I don't know about iContact reputation.
Their service works fine, I know at least a couple of trustworthy businesses (besides my own...) that uses them, but otherwise you just need to check them out and see how it feels.

And by the way: If you use them you can automatically publish your newsletter as both RSS and blog and newsletter archives.




GetCalhoun -> RE: Email newsletter vs RSS Feeds (10/1/2007 16:54:29)

I had to reply to this one since it's one of the topics here I know a little about....I learn a whole lot more here than I teach.
For an earlier web biz I used newsletters a lot. It was a travel biz with components here and in Brazil. I took great pride in composing the monthly ditties and then the other half down there sent the newsletters out, because even back then in 2000 I was concerned with getting blacklisted. Now if they got their mail blacklisted...so what? It got to be such a burden on my partner that it was one reason our very profitable biz went belly up. We were sending like 800 a month...later, as their ISP became more saavy, only at 50 a time. That was a whole lot of sets of emails to keep up with.
Now, I have a client with like 30 email addresses and after a couple or three years I just said to heck with it. Why? The ol blacklist worry. It's just not worth the worry of getting yourself whacked.
Personally, I think newsletters are a wonderful idea...if all are opt in. Some may even get read and be appreciated by fans. But mainly, it's a scary road, worrying for a good email address...and I don't think it's a good idea to use a throwaway address on Yahoo or Google either. It lessens the impact and power of using your own good email address.
And finally, one other consideration, if you do go the email newsletter route. Sometimes monthly is too much. It might work better every other month. Things to consider.
Norm



DebSpecs -> RE: Email newsletter vs RSS Feeds (11/27/2007 16:57:18)

I've just put an RSS feed on our website which gives product updated that I post everyday on blogger. To tell you the truth, in a week or so, I hardly have any subscribers, but i'm sure in time that will change.

Our email newsletters are an invaluable form of marketing, especially when permission based.

Our main site mostly uses an Able-Commerce plug-in, but we get opt-in emails from other sources, and for this, we use Constant Contact. They have decent reach, and since they're very strict, you'll be encouraged to only add names of those who really want to be on the list. This is the best kind of list.

I also plan to put an RSS subscribe link on our next e-mail newsletter to see how that goes.

good luck!



spinningjennie -> RE: Email newsletter vs RSS Feeds (11/28/2007 6:39:24)

quote:

I also plan to put an RSS subscribe link on our next e-mail newsletter to see how that goes.
Sounds a good idea.

Thanks for the tips DebSpecs!
Regards
spinningjennie



DebSpecs -> RE: Email newsletter vs RSS Feeds (11/28/2007 13:21:34)

While we're on the subject, does anyone know if a lot of people subscribe to my RSS feed, and the feed is rife with "indound links" to my site, this could help the page rank and/or natural SE placement?
:)Falala



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