RSS seems unlikely to stage a takeover anytime soon, according to panelists at a MarketingProfs Thought Leaders Summit on email marketing held earlier this year.

Rok Hrastnik, owner of MarketingStudies.net and author of the seminal e-book on RSS, "Unleashing the Marketing and Publishing Power of RSS had this to say:

Given the relative maturity of email marketing compared to RSS, you would be hard pressed to find the same level of marketing functionality, targeting, personalization, and metrics capabilities that "come standard" with most email marketing packages in RSS.

"RSS technology is progressing rapidly, but email technology is not standing still either," said Neil Squillante, president of Landing Page Interactive. "Much is being done to eliminate the spam problem. Mainstream media continues to report that the amount of spam being sent is increasing, but what they are failing to report is the amount getting through is decreasing. What the recipient is experiencing matters, and a lot of recipients are experiencing less spam than they used to."

Forrester analyst Shar VanBoskirk added that in the end, it is all about user choice. "Just as we have seen with email, some consumers simply won’t want to embrace RSS. But as Yahoo! rolls out RSS and MSN makes it available, consumers will have more exposure to RSS, and marketers will be looking for an additional tool to distribute the marketing messages they couldn’t maneuver past spam filters."

I agree with all these guys on this. Email marketing isn't on its way out, not by a long shot. I'm not unhappy about that either, since my company (Netconcepts) owns the email marketing service provider GravityMail. With that said, however, I think it would be foolish to ignore RSS as a marketing channel. It's about to enter a huge adoption phase.

NOTE: Don't miss Rok's webinar on marketing through RSS, this Thursday at 12pm Eastern, on MarketingProfs.com. Sign up HERE.

A plea for help! I am contributing a chapter to the soon-to-be-released 2nd edition of Rok Hrastnik's e-book "Unleashing the Marketing and Publishing Power of RSS". The chapter is on SEO and I am on the hunt for examples to incorporate on RSS feeds being used successfully to garner better search engine positions and traffic. Have you or any of your clients been able to leverage RSS in a way that benefits your search engine rankings? If so, I would like to hear how and what your results were.

I am particularly interested in examples:

1. where you can show that a lot of inbound links came about because of your RSS feed, or
2. where you were able to influence or control the link text used in those inbound links by incorporating good keywords into your RSS item titles and those item titles were used as link text, or
3. where you are clicktracking your links but still getting credit for the link as a vote (i.e. it contributed to your "PageRank" score). Specifically, if you are using 301 permanent redirects instead of 302 temporary redirects on your clicktracking script, then the PageRank from that linking site will get passed on to you, but not if it is a 302. In other words, I would like to hear from anyone who is doing clicktracking w/ permanent redirects in your RSS feed.

I am on a pretty tight deadline, so your responses soonest would be absolutely fantastic! Thank you very much!

My 2-part article summarizing the recent Thought Leaders Summit on Email Marketing has now been published on MarketingProfs.com (part 1 and part 2).

It is for MarketingProfs premium subscribers only unfortunately, so if you have been thinking about subscribing , now is the time to do it.

MarketingProfs has kindly allowed me to make available the audio recording of the Summit, which is available here. It's over an hour and a half long; lots of meaty stuff in there.

The Summit panelists included renowned author Jim Sterne, Forrester Research analyst Shar VanBoskirk, and RSS guru Rok Hrastnik, among others.

We covered a lot of ground during the summit, including:

• whether email marketing as we know it is doomed
• the role of RSS - to replace or to augment email
• reliability of email tracking
• navigating past spam filters
• CAN-SPAM legislation
• extraordinary versus ordinary email campaigns
• top most effective email marketing tactics
• objectively selecting an email marketing vendor, and
• what the future has to hold.

This was the third Thought Leaders Summit that I’ve had the pleasure of conducting for MarketingProfs, the first two being on search engine optimization and business blogging. Another on Buzz Marketing is due out soon, so watch this space for details!

Listen to the audio recording of the Email Marketing Summit

(File size is 26 M (Show length 1 hour 46 minutes)