Although there have been countless discussions of whether RSS will replace e-mail, it has always been clear that RSS is a supplement, not an e-mail replacement.

For marketers the key issues are:

[a] understanding how RSS and e-mail can work together to increase overall results and

[b] in which situations one delivery channel is more appropriate than the other.

Here's an example of when e-mail wins hands down over RSS.

As already noted, we recently released the preview of the RSS Marketing 2007 Edition e-book, but only to our existing e-book customers.

At the same time we are switching our e-mail marketing provider, so this was also a good opportunity to move our RSS customers from the existing e-mail lists to the new provider. When the customers received a notification of the download being available, they were also asked to subscribe to the new e-mail list, to keep receiving e-book updates.

But nowhere did we give them an option of subscribing to the RSS version of the notification list, only e-mail.

Why is that? Why would an RSS author direct his customers to e-mail, rather than RSS? Or why wouldn't I give them a choice?

The answer is simple.

New e-book notification messages are added only from time to time, but usually not more than a few per year.

Delivering these notifications by RSS would in essence mean that the RSS feed would only be updated a few times per year. And here enter the problems with RSS:

[a] When an RSS feed is updated infrequently, subscribers lose sight of it and often unsubscribe. To achieve constant readership, your subscribers need to be constantly aware of the feed.

[b] Heavy RSS users subscribe to dozens and often more feeds. This means that their capacity to pay attention to individual content items and feeds decreases. Making your one important message stand out becomes increasingly difficult, especially if you don't have loyal readership. Which you don't, if you publish an update feed a few times per year.

[c] RSS is a non-intrusive channel, where you cannot make one message stand out from all the rest. But, in the case of important notifications, you want your message to stand out.

The Other Side of the Coin

However, on the other side, there are several problems with this kind of notifications on the e-mail side as well:

[a] E-mail addresses get stale and eventually die out. When sending out the e-book download notification, 11% of the e-mail addresses were invalid.

[b] Your e-mail is stopped by spam filters.

[c] Even when it does get through, it needs to compete with dozens of other e-mail messages in the inbox.

Consequently, both channels have problems, and some are similar.

What's the Solution?

If you want to make sure your customers receive crucial updates, do both.

Instead of giving them direct access to the RSS feed, request that they first submit their e-mail address. And only then also give them the RSS feed subscription link.

Of course, it doesn't hurt to explain to them why this procedure.