Emerson: An RSS Overkill?

Here's a company that's totally serious about RSS marketing.

Emerson not only created an excellent RSS Starter Kit for new subscribers, which all marketers can learn from, but actually also put their RSS notification right on top of their homepage.
[via Steve Rubel]

Now all they need to do is setup RSS subscribe links (not ignoring the easy AddToMyYahoo! and AddToMyMSN buttons!) within their website content categories and next to their e-mail subscriptions.

While I aplaud their move to strongly facilitate their RSS subscriptions I at the same time wonder why aren't they doing more to promote their e-mail subscription options.

Don't forget --- e-mail is still the strongest content delivery channel. Don't start ignoring it just because of e-mail. Rather, learn how to use both of them together.

But going back to their RSS subscriptions ...

The Moonwatcher blog [Charlie Wood] took a deeper look and found the personalization process for the feeds too complicated, since Emerson allows you to personalize your feed content.

I agree, Emerson should offer easy subscribe options to their most important topical RSS feeds, without the user having to register.

And I dissagree, personalization is actually what gives the consumer more choice, and at the same time helps the marketer better communicate with his audiences.

The simple answer is --- do both!

The Moonwatcher comments:

"Second, it creates needless complexity for the site administrator. Why have a form, and a form-handling web application, and a dynamic feed generation application? Why make it more difficult to analyze what feed content people are actually suscribed to? Why create and maintain a server-side database of user preferences?"

Well, because additional user data gives you better targeting capabilities.

Because additional user data can help you better market to your audiences and better serve them.

Because additional user data helps your sales department better manage the time they spend on individual leads, helping them identify the hottest leads at this given time.

But of course, users should always be strongly enticed to give you all of this data, for example by providing them with a downloadable high-value whitepaper after the personalization process. And they should also have the choice of simply subscribing to your default feeds as well.