Like most e-retailers, DVDEmpire.com does e-mail marketing, among other vehicles, via an e-mail newsletter that goes out once a week. But it’s moving toward the greater use of RSS feeds as an e-mail alternative, with the goals of making RSS delivery of the newsletter an option this summer, and customizing the daily feeds it already does with customer-specific content and coupons.
Unlike e-mail, “You don’t get spam blockers, you can get the content you want, and it’s a lot easier to get to things that you want to read without going to the site. You just open up your RSS reader,” says director of operations Alicia Berry.
Though RSS doesn’t support the measure of click-through to sales, the subscription-based RSS format allows the company to communicate with customers more frequently, with more updated content and without delivery issues attached to e-mail, the company believes. Berry says that since January, subscriptions to DVDEmpire.com’s RSS feed have at least doubled, even though the company does not actively promote it but simply provides a subscription link on the home page.
Berry says another indicator of the growth of RSS as a preferred communications vehicle from the company is a major upswing in the number of customer suggestions on RSS content. The company’s web site has a suggestions form offering account credit for any original ideas for the site, supplied by customers, that the company ultimately decides to adopt. “The things we have been getting the most suggestions on are search, or things we could stock. Suggestions on the RSS feed had been nothing, but since December, we have had a real increase in suggestions on what we could put into the RSS feed -- people are taking more of an interest,” Berry says.
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