RSS Technology

When it comes to RSS Feeds, there are many options to consider.

ONE-SIZE-FITS-ALL RSS FEEDS
This is about as standard as it gets —- publishing one RSS feed to meet the needs of all of your target audiences at once or publishing multiple topical RSS feeds, which always remain the same. The easiest to do, can be done with any RSS publishing tool on the market …

CUSTOMIZABLE RSS FEEDS
The more and more complex you get with the different feeds you’re offering, the more difficult it is for your visitors to select what exactly they want, simply because an individual subscriber might be interested in 10 of your 100 feeds, but he doesn’t want to be subscribed to that many feeds by your company.

In this case the best way to go is to also offer your visitors the opportunity to customize your RSS feed they decide exactly what content type and content topics they want to receive in one or a few RSS feeds they’ll be subscribing from you.

The opportunities here are quite endless, as you can allow them to customize their feeds based on topics, content types, authors and more.

If this is the way you need to go because you are offering so much content via your RSS feeds that it makes it difficult for someone to subscribe to only one or a few feeds from you, you will need your RSS publishing solution to support feed customization.

SEARCH-BASED RSS FEEDS
Search-based RSS feeds are a subset of customizable RSS feeds, and they work just like a search engine. You type in a certain keyword or keyword combinations and the search engine gives you the most relevant or the latest results for that keyword combination.

You can do the same with RSS, allowing your visitors to enter specific keywords and then get the content from you only based on those keywords.

PERSONALIZED RSS FEEDS
Giving users the choice to customize the content they are receiving from you is one thing, but certain content may actually demand you to personalize the feed using your subscribers personal information.

The most basic variation, used to lift response, is addressing your subscribers by name or using other data about the customer from your database, such as his address, previous purchases etc.

In other cases a bank might want to deliver information directly relating to your bank account, directly via RSS, such as your latest credit card transactions, and so on.

RSS FEEDS WITH CONTENT TARGETING
Now imagine that you want to create individualized campaigns to individual subscribers, based on the information you already have in your database about their activities, demographics and so on, for example to send a promotion for product A only to those subscribers that might be most interested in product A.

In this case you will need an RSS solution that can pull this data from your database and then segment your subscribers based on the actual data.

AUTORESPONDER RSS FEEDS
Since their introduction, e-mail autoresponders have become a relatively mainstream internet direct marketing tool, although they haven’t really made their way to the world of public relations.

The concept is simple a certain action by your visitors on your website triggers a sequence of e-mail messages, delivered to that visitor, provided you have his e-mail address, over a period of several days.

Direct marketers use this to automatically communicate with the prospect after a certain action, trying to get him to do what they want.

The most common application is offering your visitors a free report, delivered to them via e-mail. After subscribing they start receiving consequtive parts of the report day after day or a every few days, receiving both new information as well as being exposed to the marketer’s promotional message.