» RSS Vs Email - Email Marketing & Delivery Blog - Enterprise Email Application Software Blog

After reading MarketingSherpa's latest article called: RSS in Reality: Not a Replacement for Email - Metrics & Best Practices it is pretty clear that they do not understand RSS.

RSS is a content medium just like email is - RSS even supports attachments, these are called enclosures in RSS. RSS is consumed by a client - the clients can be web based, desktop applications, or whatever. The only real difference is that the RSS medium is pulled, and email is pushed - its simply a case of push vs pull.

I'd like to point out some of the incorrect statements made in the MarketingSherpa article:

RSS challenge #1. No HTML graphics You can't put your logo, or a product shot, or a photo, or any graphic to our knowledge in a typical RSS feed. It's like sending text-only email. You can send words and a hotlink.

That is incorrect, they have obviously never used RSS. RSS does allow you to format your posts with rich HTML, including images. In-fact most email clients limit the HTML you can display far more than most RSS readers do. Many email clients disable images by default. RSS Feeds also support a logo that can be used to identify the feed.

RSS challenge #2. No table of contents You can't send a newsletter with a variety of items in it for people to click on. You can only send one item, one article, one hotlink. You'll have to break your typical email newsletter into "pieces" and publish each as a separate item in the stream.

This is again incorrect based on their assumption that RSS does not allow you to use HTML. However, most RSS publishers do tend to publish each article separate, and this is probably a best practice because the articles are organized by the reader.

RSS challenge #3. Very little space You don't have much space to get your message across in a feed -- unless you can get the viewer to click to your site. There's no function anyone can use to open and view your message on a big, dedicated window as there is in email. You only get enough room for perhaps 100 words, and that's it. Arguably that's more than most people read per email currently, but still, it will severely cramp some email publishers' style. No more personable "letters to readers." Just headlines, summaries, and click here. To put it another way, an email newsletter is like a print magazine while an RSS feed is like a telegram.

Again, I don't know where they are finding this limitation, there is no limit on the size of your articles in an RSS feed. I would suggest reading the RSS 2.0 Specification for more details.

RSS's biggest challenge of all -- tracking and measurement ... and there's zero sophisticated tracking we know of at all. ... No deliverability, open rates, hard vs soft bounces.

One of the resources they linked to FeedBurner does provide tracking for RSS feeds. While there are not many tools on the market currently, you can find read rates (by embeding hidden images), and click through rates (by crafting special links) just like you can with email. And the notion of a bounce does not even make sense with RSS, let alone a hard of soft one!

This article does a good job of scaring marketers from RSS - RSS should be used in conjunction with email. You should allow people to subscribe to your newsletters by either RSS or email. It is a new market, and is relatively small but has a loyal following, and should not be ignored.