MarketingSherpa usually come through with excellent practical tips and data, gathered from leading corporate marketers, and their latest piece on RSS is no exception.

Here's an abbrevated version:

a] Despite the fact that marketers still aren't agressively promoting their RSS feeds, they are seeing their RSS readership take off like crazy. USAToday.com told MarketingSherpa that their RSS traffic is "rising month after month by orders of magnitude", even though they are barely promoting their RSS feeds.

The simple moral here is that even if you don't want to go "full RSS" just yet, you need to setup your RSS feeds. Results will follow.

b] W. Atlee Burpee & Co (the garden seed people) saw their RSS strategy help them increase November sales by four times ... just from a trial RSS feed featuring a "seed of the day".

In addition to this being yet another proof of RSS working for sales, it also gives some insight into what actually works. In this case it was providing an e-commerce feed with a featured offering on a daily basis.

c] RSS is now finally attracting the traditional online consumer, as noted by USAToday. But this isn't the crowd you'll get with the "orange RSS button", but rather the people that don't have a clue of RSS, but will subscribe using the "Add to MyYahoo" and "Add to MyMSN" buttons.

It's now finally clear that you have to go a step forward in your RSS promotion strategy and start using "user friendly subscribe buttons" ... or face limiting your RSS accessibility only to the cutting-edge crowd.

d] Travelocity shares their data on their RSS feed promotional campaign to their existing e-mail subscribers. They simply broke-down their e-mail list into Yahoo! e-mail users and MSN e-mail users, and then sent them an offer to subscriber to their RSS feed using one of these online services.

The cool part is that 2/3 of the people that opened the e-mail actually subscribed. These are amazing stats that show that people are in fact in need of the content consumption solution offered by RSS ... you just need to present it appropriately.