How Online Retailers Can Benefit From RSS Marketing
It’s a shame that CompUSA will not be with us much longer, because it gives us a great example of the potential for RSS feeds for ecommerce sites. Check it out while you can: http://www.compusa.com/help/rss_feeds.asp
This is a close-up:
This is how a sample feed appears in my Google Reader:
Online retailers that use RSS syndication for product content are few and far between, the ones that do usually are electronics and computer related (more tech savvy audience, I assume). It’s likely that the general public still doesn’t understand what RSS is or how it can help them, so CompUSA provides a nice little introduction to what RSS is with links to resources and popular RSS readers.
Why might customers want to subscribe this way?
- Alternative to creating an account and giving up an email address / creating password (anonymity and time saving)
- Saves time figuring out how to subscribe to specials and unadvertised deals from within an account (with some retailers, you cannot subscribe to email offers from your account).
- Allows users to self-segment what they want to receive from you. Most email campaigns just send you whatever the marketing department decided was important
- More reliable delivery - no chance of getting flagged as spam or getting lost in a sea of offers
- On-demand retrieval - Customers can check news feed as often as they like, not when you decide to blast your email. Puts users in control
- Better organization and usability - With email, customers can’t organize your offers without creating folders or filter rules in their email program (which most email users don’t even think of doing). A newsfeed keeps all your offers/notices in one place - easy to come back to and scan
Why might customers want to subscribe to retail related RSS feeds?
- If someone received a gift card for Christmas and can only redeem it at your store, he or she may subscribe to all your best deals, or just the new products in the category(ies) of most interest
- For long term purchase decisions, customers might want to be notified of new products
- Hard-core buyers (example - gamers) who are loyal to your store and want notifications on each new release
- The purchase requires periodic upgrades (operating systems, software) or refills (printer ink, paper)
RSS marketing solves the email delivery problem as you’re pretty much guaranteed delivery, and when customers abandon email addresses, you can still reach them. You also provide better customer service, giving customers a choice of how they want to receive communication from you, and what they want to receive. You can easily track RSS subscribers and other stats with Feedburner for a very low cost.
RSS publishing is also a great way to send other forms of content to your affiliates (notifications, product feeds etc), suppliers / resellers, partners, investors and press contacts. If you’d like more information on how to set up RSS feeds, check out Practical Ecommerce’s RSS video tutorial.
If RSS becomes more mainstream and more retailers begin to offer this form of customer communication, this will also help ecommerce marketers keep tabs on the competition more efficiently. One could subscribe to new product feeds, sales, unadvertised specials and more and manage it all from one feed reader.
RSS is great for publishers and readers. PS - Have you subscribed to Get Elastic?
Wow, thanks for sharing Linda.. It’s really helpful. Cheers! :)
It’s strange that RSS has taken this long to become a part of eCommerce. It’s been around forever, plus all the other data languages that existed before RSS.
I can understand due to the limited number of users who even know what RSS is (think last I heard that only 20% of Internet users were familiar with RSS and out of that 20%, only 5% actually used it regularly).
I have used RSS on my personal eCommerce sites for nearly a year now. I have an ‘All Products’ feed, subscription options to any ‘Category’ or ‘Subcategory’ and my users can also subscribe to individual ‘Tags’ pages.
Over the entire year my subscribers are less than 500, but the ones who do subscribe to any of those feeds get real time updates of the newest product, price changes, product updates, etc delivered directly to them. In addition, I use an email subscription system, social bookmarks and even links for shoppers to add my products to their favorite social shopping network.
It has helped in many ways, mostly for search engines, but also for users. Since shoppers are taking much longer to buy, I wanted to give them a way,, other than browser bookmarks to save, subscribe or get notified of updates once they leave. It has helped me to generate more repeat buyers, inbound links, more bookmarks, more email addresses to add to my mailing list, etc.
RSS is a great strategy in itself, personally, I like to offer every option available for shoppers to save or subscribe to my site, if they aren’t buying right then and there (which is obviously the main goal).
I agree, Linda. This is certainly an under-leveraged solution.
This is exactly what we do for retailers - enabling feedcommerce.
RSS Marketing is driving retailer engagement with consumers on widgets, facebook, mobile
exciting space
best regards
fergus
nice examples u have there… hope it helps the customers…