Granted, RSS technology lacks the ease of use when compared to email. It's not that straightforward for the uninitiated to subscribe to and follow RSS feeds. It's hard enough explaining to an RSS newbie what an RSS feed is, let alone walking him/her through the installation and use of a newsreader program or a web-based aggregator.

And there are other problems too. "There’s the issue of recipient identity," said Neil Squillante, president of Landing Page Interactive at the MarketingProfs' Thought Leaders Summit on email marketing. "Currently most RSS feeds are just one feed for everyone to use, which means you lack the identity of email. Whereas with an email list of, say, 10,000 people, each email goes to just one person, and you can feel pretty confident that you have 10,000 people on your list."

Rok Hrastnik, owner of MarketingStudies.net and author of Unleashing the Marketing and Publishing Power of RSS highlighted ways within RSS to create a unique, trackable URL per subscriber, which do not have to be through HTTP authentication. There are also certain solutions in the market now that generally feed per user and even allow for data capture, e.g. the user can now register and receive a unique URL.

"One of the problems, however, is that if a user incorporates that into Bloglines and shares it with the world, you may have a situation where that one unique URL is actually being subscribed to by a bunch of people," says Rok. "That’s one situation where HTTP authentication can help, because that usually limits that particular feed to just one person."

Rok also added that email and RSS are often appropriate for different content types. "For instance, email is the top channel for delivery, whereas RSS is more useful for high-frequency content updates. It’s not only about getting your content delivered to end users, but about improving your online visibility, search engine rankings, driving new traffic through RSS search engine directories, syndicating your content on other web media and so on."

All good points. And in my view none of these are reasons to avoid or delay publishing your content via RSS. If you're not already offering RSS feeds, get on the stick! RSS augments your existing email and web marketing. It's a distinct channel that complements the email channel rather than cannibalizes it. And it's a channel that a non-negligible percentage of Internet users have come to love.

I'll be speaking on the topic of RSS at the New Communications Forum early next month, on a panel titled RSS as an Advertising Platform. Should be interesting. Hope to see you there!

Trying to do effective email marketing without good, reliable metrics by which to measure success, is like flying blind. Yet the reliability of such a key statistic as the open rate of an email campaign has been eroded for various technical and operational reasons. Let's have a closer look at this issue, with the help of the panel of email marketers who participated on the MarketingProfs Thought Leaders Summit on email marketing...

Jim Sterne, author, consultant, speaker and co-founder of the Web Analytics Association, explains that even though the yardstick of open rates may not represent an accurate total, we can still use it to compare ourselves to each other — as long as we all use the same yardstick. And we can use it to ask ourselves: "Am I getting better open rates than yesterday?" since the difference between the two would be a trustworthy number.

Chris Baggot, founding partner of ExactTarget, highlighted the fact that open rates typically fall into more of a branding-type measure:

If you can double the number of people who hit "reply," even if your overall open-rate goes down, what is the better metric? Part of the problem is with industry measures as well as the kind of email that people are sending. Gigantic retailers dominate by overall volume of email, but typically, they are not very good emailers.

Looking at a total pie that is predominantly influenced by people who are doing weekly blasts of coupons or of special offers that aren't very relevant, we need to drop back and say: "Okay, now tell me what happens when I add more data. Tell me what happens when I decrease my frequency for a certain segment of individuals and things like that," and measure what you are really trying to accomplish — not measure open rates or clickthroughs as the total goal of success. Again, that's an impression model left over from television, which, in our business, reeks of the dark ages.

According to Eric Kirby, senior VP and general manager for email solutions at DoubleClick, the yardstick is actually shrinking and here's why: over the past year, more and more email software clients have been adopting a feature that in many cases, by default, will block images from displaying in a message:

Given how we actually track opens in email (using uniquely-named, one-pixel images known as "web bugs") the act of opening will not be visible to the email marketer if the request to load the "web bug" isn't made. Previously, a display within the preview pane in Outlook would have counted as an open, as long as the recipient was online at the time. Today it won't — assuming the recipient hasn't changed that default setting in their new version of Outlook. ISPs and email software providers are adopting this feature because they figure that spam of a graphic nature won’t display, unless the user takes an action to display those messages. But in doing so, they simultaneously sabotage the marketer's ability to measure campaign effectiveness.

DoubleClick actually sees this downward trend in opens in data tracking quarter to quarter. Looking back over the past year of long-term trending data among a similar set of companies, they see slight declines occurring in email open rates. However, analysis indicates that it is being driven by the image-blocking phenomenon. The reason DoubleClick can say that is because other metrics that, over time, directly correlate with open rates, such as clickthrough rates, have actually maintained their performance levels.

According to Eric, one other metric you probably want to be thinking about is purchase rates — because the only purchases we can directly, in most cases, attribute back to email are those that we can track back to a click from that email:

Most companies aren't sophisticated enough to actually look at the multi-channel impact of their email messages, such as when, for example, an email campaign recipient goes in to a store and buys or opens up a catalog and buys over the phone. That isn't being captured today in most cases in email metrics, which actually causes people to under-report or under-credit the impact of email in their overall marketing efforts.

It's surprising how few marketers are looking at trends. Even though the technology and the data are there, marketers aren't utilizing them. Rok Hrastnik, author of Unleash the Marketing and Publishing Power of RSS, explains it well when he says that email tracking is really about trend-watching, rather than exactly pinpointing the actual and absolute numbers. The trends are enough to give us an impression of what works, what doesn’t and what, in fact, makes the sale. In the end, that is the most important thing.

Most email marketers agree that ethically, email address harvesting and sending unsolicited opt-out messages are taboo and should be avoided. I of course agree. It's always fun to talk ethics, but let's bring the discussion to a practical level. I contend that harvesting and opt-out are both impractical for legitimate email marketers.

Let's look at why...

Harvesting of email addresses from the Web will inevitably pick up "honeypot addresses" that will end up in your opt-out database. A honeypot is an email address hidden in the page somewhere where no one will click on it, but email harvesters will still capture it. Any emails received at the honeypot address will then get the IP address of the sending mail server "blackholed" for a period of time, so that emails to other addresses on the receiving email server will not get delivered.

Frequently the ethical question is posed as to whether the opt-out email is spam if the content is squeaky clean. The answer is an unequivocal YES. It's still spam because you do not have a prior business relationship with the recipient, you were not granted permission by the recipient in advance, and your email is unsolicited. It doesn't have to be "bulk" to be spam. Spam is spam to the recipient regardless of whether you sent 100 or a million; it's immaterial to the recipient what is going on outside of their inbox. And spam does not need to be a sleazy message to be considered spam. A church could "spam" people with donation requests by email if they are unsolicited.

So back to the practicality and repercussions for a moment... Imagine this: you send out unsolicited emails requesting people to opt-in and you have no prior business relationship with them. Some of them inevitably will report you to SpamCop. Your ISP will be notified by SpamCop, and they will need to either give you the boot or justify in a response to SpamCop why you don't deserve the boot. ISPs take SpamCop very seriously, as they don't want their SMTP servers blacklisted. More than a couple SpamCop complaints and your ISP is going to be very grumpy with you.

So in all, this whole approach is quite an impractical one. Spammers must be very good at hiding their tracks (e.g. by sending spam out through "zombies" which are PCs compromised by viruses/trojans) or must 'move house' constantly. Unless you're willing to live like that too, you'll find that the email harvesting and opt-out approaches will burn you.

With the one year anniversary of CAN-SPAM passing into law now past, I am seeing a number of articles (like this one) all concurring that CAN-SPAM has been totally ineffective in stemming the tide of spam emanating from the United States. In fact U.S. orginating spam has grown significantly. I can't say that I am surprised, however. Disappointed, yes.

The reality is that CAN-SPAM has failed miserably. It's not just that it's failed to put a dent in the spam problem. It's needlessly complicated the lives of legitimate email marketers.

MarketingSherpa, in a recent article, brought to light another CAN-SPAM compliance headache — an often overlooked requirement within the legislation called "Do Not Email." A simple opt-out is not sufficient. You have to provide an opt-out to ALL promotional mail that you might EVER send to that email list from ANY email address or staffer ever again. This could be a major problem for marketers because a lot of times email addresses are kept in separate data silos (e.g. prospect lists, distributor lists, affiliate lists, lists that might be rented from list houses, address books, etc.). Ugh!

It's time to ditch this watered-down law that doesn't work and start again — replacing it with a law that has some real teeth.

If you haven't heard about RSS yet, you need to check it out! RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a standard designed for syndicating headlines and other web content to other websites. It has evolved into a popular means for individuals to keep up with the latest articles and musings across favorite websites — using RSS newsreader software (which is starting to get built into web browsers and email clients). RSS is widely used in blogs (including this one — just check the RSS link on the bottom right column) and on news sites such as the BBC and CNN.

RSS, in my opinion, has the power to turn email marketing on its head. RSS represents a separate web-delivered channel that, quite unlike email, is impossible to spam. If the subscriber doesn't add your RSS feed to his or her newsreader software or web-based news aggregator (like My Yahoo!), then you can't break through to him or her. What a brilliant idea! I think it's inevitable that most newsletters and promotional content will eventually be delivered through RSS feeds rather than to our email in-boxes. The overload of spam is driving many consumers to RSS as a secure and unspamable way of getting news and commentary. And, as David Sklar opines, RSS will hopefully become the standard for companies to actually conduct real business with their customers. David is spot-on when he calls RSS the "ultimate opt-in."