Category: Permission Marketing

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You have no excuse with these new ways to read RSS feeds, from Microsoft and Google

Once adopted by a critical mass of internet users, RSS feeds will change interactive marketing permanently and in a big way. I predicted that the phase shift would happen when Microsoft releases the new Vista operating system, in the spring. Published reports suggest that the sea change begins much sooner, as in today. That’s when Microsoft’s new version of Internet Explorer (IE) begins distribution through free downloaded upgrades.

Here’s how Steve Rubel of Micro Persuasion reports this news in his blog yesterday (The Day the Entire World Gets RSS):

As more people around the world start reading RSS feeds, big things will happen. [The orange RSS button on the new IE toolbar] will force everyone to begin integrating feed communication initiatives in their marketing and PR programs. News and blog posts are just the beginning. Couponing and all kinds of other communiques will go into feeds, as well as ads and more. That little orange button might look small, but boy is it big.

If you’re a marketer who (1) hasn’t started using RSS yet, and (2) doesn’t use IE regularly, you can still experience what RSS can offer. And you really must! Try the new, free Google Reader. That’s what I use and it’s terrific. Gina Trapani in the excellent blog LifeHacker.com compares this new feed reader to Bloglines, and she agrees that Google, although sometimes criticized for lackluster product introductions, really got it right with this recent product upgrade.

I have a theory that more people today will be setting up a new Google Reader account than ever before. Why? Because Microsoft has officially entered the RSS arena. As usual, Microsoft’s involvement will change everything. And that means that many who use Firefox or other IE competitors will realize that they can no longer sit on the sidelines and had better see what this RSS stuff is all about.

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The odds are stacked against this podcast advertising pioneer

I admire what Podbridge is attempting to do. They seem to have taken the lead in monetizing podcasts. I doubt they will succeed, though, unless other conditions change and change fast. Podbridge has created a podcasting advertising network, one that promises to match audio ads to podcasts that you download via iTunes (and, eventually, elsewhere).

Ads would be fed to you randomly along with podcast content. The ads, which would be dynamically stitched onto the podcasts, are served up based on your age, gender and location (such as ZIP code). Nice idea, but …

My skepticism has to do with whether people will volunteer this information (age, gender, location) to receive something that they are currently accustomed to receiving for free, and mostly free of ads.

Much more logical (but logistically challenging) is to follow the ad model that Podbridge claims to be mimicking — that of magazine advertising.

In this alternative, each major podcast producer would receive ad insertions and interweave those ads with their content. This wouldn’t provide the flexibility and customization of regional-, age- and gender-based targeting, but it would talk to people based on their enthusiasms. For instance, DVD rental ads would be placed on podcasts such as Filmspotting (as they are now, for PeerFlix).

These ads could still include Pay-Per-Call ads supported by Ingenio, as Podbridge is currently planning. It’s a brilliant use of this phone-based ad concept, which was first introduced and tested in limited Yahoo sponsored listings.

This alternate business model also allows for the strength of product placement, something that started with the early days of radio and television, and has found a new life as a way for advertisers to get their products in front of viewers who use DVRs to blaze past television progamming’s commercials.

True, this lack of scalability makes it a less-profitable business model, since podcasts are typically today such a Long Tail phenomenon.

But the dearth of consumers willing to opt-in to receive ads makes the Podbridge concept fatally flawed in my opinion. At least until there is a critical mass of premium content podcasters who will only distribute their product with Podbridge-provided advertising. That day is a long way off.

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Lessons learned about RSS feeds

What are the lessons to be learned from Facebook’s recent dilemma? This college online social network has struggled this week to quickly deal with an unprecedented backlash against their new RSS distribution of profile changes.

Lesson #1: People can’t be trusted to think through the consequences of posting things about themselves on the internet (big surprise!)

Lesson #2: RSS feeds are a powerful new information distribution channel that we – as an online society — will need to better understand, in the same way we needed time to understand email and web sites.

The power of RSS will someday soon be harnessed, and that power will further propel and advance marketing technology. Until then, prepare, as Facebook did, to be surprised by unintended consequences.

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Email newsletters still excel at customer retention and cross-sales

With all the recent noise about new online communication tools such as user-generated content and pushing content through RSS, we shouldn’t forget that some tried-and-true tactics aren’t going away any time soon. Take the the opt-in newsletter, particularly one that is customized to a recipient’s specific interests and tastes.

I challenge you to name an online tactic as powerful as a well-done opt-in email newsletter to draw visitors back to a web site or drive sales across a company’s complementary product offerings. This technique truly has legs.

Sure, it’s easy to see where email newsletters work in categories such as online fashion apparel and leisure travel. After all, is there anyone who hasn’t opted-in at one time or another to a travel site’s “hot deals” email?

But a truly enduring marketing tactic has the ability to surprise us – to show up and shine where we’re least expecting it. The email newsletter certainly has done this for me.

To my knowledge, one of the most effective opt-in newsletters around is in a category of services that no one ever wants to use. That category is healthcare.

Private Health News provides private labeled emails that a hospital or other care provider can use as a way to deliver news about its own offerings. What makes this newsletter so effective is the the fact that consumers truly appreciate receiving it. That’s due to theses two factors:

  • The content is customized
  • The content is trustworthy

Consumers sign up for it by visiting the site of the provider (let’s say it’s “General Hospital”), and then selecting topics of interest. This customization makes the newsletter unique to each households’ needs, with a selection of over 25 health topics from Blood Pressure to Breast Cancer, Sleep Disorders to Stroke Rehabilitation.

When the newsletter arrives, it reports the latest research, originally seen in articles from over 350 prestigious healthcare publications. The publications include the Journal of the American Medical Association and Lancet. Interspersed with the news — which, mind you, is tailored exactly to a recipient’s current health concerns and interests — are brief bulletins and ads about General Hospital events and offerings relevant to that topic.

For instance, along with a Men’s Health article there might be a notice of a free prostate cancer screening held at the hospital in three weeks, along with a link to the place on the General Hospital site where you can sign up or get more information.

I first met Dan Ansel, the president of Private Health News, six years ago at a healthcare marketing conference in San Diego. When he described his fledgling product to me, I immediately saw how this was the part of the puzzle I was struggling to deliver to my healthcare clients.

Dan’s product was a way to ensure that the valuable minority of consumers who visit my clients’ sites – and care enough about their families’ health to be proactive – can receive, every month, several excellent reasons to come back for more information. In other words, it was a way to retain prospects and patients, and to cross-sell to them wherever appropriate.

Has it worked? My experience and those of my clients says it has. What’s more, Dan has made sure to periodically survey newsletter readers, to get the user’s perspective on its effectiveness. Here are a few of the results of his latest survey, which had a sample size of 10,157 newsletter subscribers:

  • 99% consider the health information in their newsletter valuable, with 25% saying it was “very valuable”
  • 75.6% have the health issues to which they subscribe or are making decisions for loved ones with those health issues
  • Respondents are making healthcare decisions for an average of 3.3 people
  • 67% indicate a new awareness of the provider’s services as a result of receiving their newsletter
  • Over 13% have used these services because of that awareness

That last metric is the one that always blows me away. Every time the survey is conducted, more that one out of every ten people surveyed said they used a hospital’s services because of awareness they gleaned from the newsletter.

If only half of those people are telling the truth, that means over 600 individuals in this relatively small sample went to the provider of the newsletter for a possibly very profitable high ticket item, all thanks to an email newsletter.

I’ll be returning to the wonderful marketing double whammy of customization and credibility in future examples of online marketing excellence. But I’m not sure any other online technique I’ve encountered has the same high level of ROI as this surprising opt-in newsletter that sells people services they would prefer to never think about getting in the first place.

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Girding for the looming battle for subscription space

Thank you, Seth Godin, for again saving the day. In early 2007 the next major upgrade of Internet Explorer (IE) will be released. Among its features is an easier way for IE users to subscribe to sites via their RSS feeds. I’ve struggled with how to explain to clients (and many of my readers) the urgency of acting now. If your site warrants it, immediately set out to begin adding an RSS feed that announces your new content, and then promoting this site feature like crazy before the competition for user subscriptions really heats up.

In my attempt to find the right metaphor to illustrate the situation, I’ve been reminded of a comment that Al Gore made in a pre-election interview in 2000. The interviewer asked this clearly very studious politician what he has lately been studying. “Semantics,” he said. He explained that this digital age has left us with a dearth of ways to communicate its concepts. Survival hinges on our society retooling its language to fit this new reality. A group of people, whether they are a corporate board or a national electorate, cannot affect change on something that they can’t discuss accurately.

The best I’ve been able to do in my attempts to set the scene is to quote those who have predicted that RSS — this lower-risk (from a privacy perspective) permission marketing alternative to the opt-in email — will quickly trump that tactic in user popularity and marketing effectiveness.

Forget about “bookmark this page,” I’ve stated, “the RSS subscription is a more aggressive bookmark — one that hollers when the ‘book’ it is ‘marking’ has added a ‘page.'” Notice the metaphors. They are all dusty; descriptively hidebound. They are semantically crude, mostly because they lack the dynamic element that push technology delivers.

Mr. Godin found a better metaphor. It was hiding in his iPod.

He calls it “shuffleworld.” Seth points out that the shuffle feature means that the muchness of a hard drive bursting with songs empowers the listener, but also makes it difficult to listen to a favorite song, or even artist (he mentioned Elvis Costello — Mr. Godin is a man of good musical taste!). If I weren’t tiring of comparisons that are soooo last millennium, I’d say that this shuffleworld phenomenon has hidden any particular song like a needle in a haystack.

His point: Web sites are hidden in a similar way, and can only rise to the surface when they are voted worthy of attention on sites like digg, or when a new headline is pushed into an RSS subscriber’s consciousness.

So many sites, and so little browsing time!

Subscriptions help. But any particular user can only subscribe to so many feeds before being overwhelmed with their new content announcements. IE will make subscribing easy for the typical user, but it will also make unsubscribing, or not adding new subscriptions, just as easy.

Okay, web marketers. You’ve got a metaphor to grasp the problem. And you have a deadline. Wake up now. Add and promote those RSS feeds before your best prospects are too overwhelmed with other feeds to consider adding yours.