Back To The Basics: E-Mail Marketing & RSS
With 93% of all American adults using e-mail as primary online communication tool, any content distribution strategy will need to entail e-mail marketing solutions. So it is not wonder that e-mail subscriptions for Blogs and other sites are important and need to be optimized.
Three features should any e-mail marketing system have:
- RSS Feed driven newsletters,
- support for CRM sy stems and
- a flexible API that allows access to the open/click statistics per subscribers.
Among the many companies offering e-mail marketing services, I have only found one that has all features and then some. We looked at Feedblitz, Jango Mail, Constant Contact and MailChimp. Our clear favorite and we are not getting any money from them or other perks, is MailChimp. It is easy to use - very important for our clients -, it offers back-end integration with a reliable, extensible API and offers integration with major CRMs as SalesForce, Highrise and Batchbook. The flexibility is quite impressive. We built various web sites that integrate via the API. Our site registration process synchronizes the MC subscribers list and allows access to open and click statistics per subscriber. We have published our API Wrapper for Coldfusion as open-source to remove barriers for other developers to use the system.
With Mailchimp you can manage an extensive action and reaction history with your contacts. You are able to target specific groups of subscribers and be more flexible in managing relationships. The closer you are able to target your communication, the higher is the probability that your service suits your recipients needs. We embraced Mailchimp wholeheartedly after they also allowed RSS driven campaigns to automate notification of your lists of updates on your blog. We have integrated quite a few news pages with Mailchimp and our clients have been very happy with the outcome and the increased traffic to their web sites.
Examples for an RSS feed campaign in Mailchimp
Examples of an RSS Feeds campaign in Feedblitz
Examples broadcast e-mails
