The RSS Marketing Revolution from SilverPop

Last week, straight from the DMA in Atlanta, I announced that something close to an RSS marketing revolution is coming today.

Why a revolution?

If marketers are to accept RSS as a reliable and relevant outgoing communications and marketing channel, they need an out-of-the-box enterprise grade RSS marketing solution that offers them everything they are already getting from e-mail marketing.

This includes:

a] Content personalization capabilities

b] Easy-to-use advanced subscriber list segmentation

c] Content targeting capabilities to ensure greater content relevancy and message impact

d] Enterprise-grade content security

e] Integration with existing user databases and metrics systems, peferably without giving the vendor access to user data

f] Automated follow-up capabilities

g] Complete tracking capabilities and e-mail comparable metrics

h] Ability to generate leads and subscriber data

Mostly all of these services were already available in some RSS solutions (such as the advanced metrics part by Syndicate IQ; follow-up capabilities by RSS Autopublisher and RSS ByPass; on-demand targeting by SimpleFeed and Nooked; enterprise-grade security by MyST Technology Partners; and so on ...), they have never before been fully integrated in an out-of-the-box solution.

Today, the e-mail marketing solutions vendor SiliverPop changed all this by launching the first RSS marketing tool, RSSDirect, that really delivers all of the key outbound RSS marketing tools in a simple-to-use environment.

Personally, I was most impressed with their segmentation & targeting capabilities, which builds on their existing e-mail platform and brings the world of e-mail segmentation to RSS.

More on their RSS solution coming soon, and I'd especially like to share their screenshots, which I'm just waiting to receive.

Why is this launch so important?

Based on my preview, I believe this is the RSS solution that will start an avalanche of similar advanced RSS marketing solutions from both the e-mail space and the existing RSS space, all contending to achieve market leadership and all ultimately providing us with better marketing tools.

Is RSSDirect perfect?

Of course not, and there is still much room for improvement, ranging from improved metrics back-end integration to a range of RSS marketing features, such as specific RSS promotional tools; RSS SEO features; inbound RSS communications; webmaster RSS tools; improved syndication tools; podcasting; videocasting etc. etc.

All in all, the RSSDirect tool is right now focused only on outbound communications with end-users, which is a start. And as the market develops further I'm sure we'll be seeing other advanced solutions that will start addressing more and more elements of the Business Case for RSS model.

The possibilities are quite endless and it's up to the vendors to explore them and bring the full capabilities of RSS marketing to marketers.