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The LAB | November 13, 2023

What is an RSS Feed?

As a business owner looking to attract new customers while keeping existing ones to come back. But how can you invest time and resources that might not deliver the results you expect, especially if you’re a small business owner?

What is an RSS Feed by Accentuate Web Design and MarketingThere are certainly digital avenues for you to promote your brand, products and/or services on many online channels such as: SEO, search engine ads, social media, display ads, etc. Here’s an open secret, one channel stands above all: email marketing.

In the digital realm, the oldest form of digital communication is email. Sure, there are other forms of communication today, but email’s popularity has not waned over the years. It still enjoys a huge user base that surpasses even the most popular social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram combined, and it is still growing.

At its core, email marketing is driven by the concept of building and nurturing customer relationships. Marketers can reach their target audience genuinely interested in their offerings by using subscriber lists gathered through opt-in mechanisms.

The most recent data shows that the number of emails sent and received per day in 2023, is 347.3 billion – a 4.3% increase from 2022. Looking at the figure, that’s equivalent to well over 4 million emails per second. That’s a LOT of emails.

Email technology has already been improved and refined, making letter-sending much easier, faster, and more convenient. Based on the latest statistics, it only proves that email is still the most used form of communication medium for both personal and business interactions.

For businesses, email is also one of the cheapest marketing tools used by small brands to industry giants. The benefit of email for small businesses that don’t have sizable marketing budgets is, that email marketing can drive remarkable results by allowing the creation of targeted campaigns by leveraging data about your email subscribers.

Email marketing is easy to use, cost-effective, and boasts a high return on investment (ROI). This makes it a great choice for small businesses looking for cost-effective ways to use their marketing dollars.

 

Email Marketing Experts.

Although it may seem that email marketing might seem an outdated or ‘old-fashioned’ style of marketing, no one can dispute its effectiveness and cost-effectiveness. Email newsletters are in fact still one of the most critical marketing strategies to date.

Our experienced marketing team at Accentuate Web Design and Marketing are experts in consumer behaviour, which means our direct email marketing campaigns and content creation strategies are designed to create maximum impact. We can help you in creating insightful and engaging email marketing strategies that provide value to customers interested in what you offer, and help increase customer loyalty to your brand.

Our deep understanding of consumer behaviour is a valuable asset employed by our email marketing team in creating an ongoing Newsletter Email Marketing Strategy that’s in line with your business’s Marketing Message. Additionally, our expert team uses Digital Marketing formulas, ensuring that your newsletter recipients are engaged and interested in your content.

 

What is Email Marketing?

When it comes to making money online, email is the most powerful tool you have at your disposal. Email Marketing is a powerful marketing channel that has the highest conversion rates compared to other marketing channels. 

Email marketing is a strategic digital marketing approach that delivers targeted and personalised email messages to a specific audience, aiming to convert qualified leads into sales. It’s secondary, and likewise, valuable purpose is to educate targeted audiences on the value of your product or service.  

Email marketing, its effectiveness is by way of crafting valuable email content where you can share promotions, informative newsletters, enticing product updates, offering discounts, and other relevant services and information meant to build and nurture a loyal subscriber base.

The way people communicated with one another changed dramatically in the ‘90s, and marketers discovered that sending emails was an effective way to advertise. It has become a popular marketing tool because it forces the user to take action. An email remains in your inbox until it’s opened and read, deleted or archived. 

It is a great tool to help you build relationships with your audience, and drive traffic to your content, social media, or anywhere you direct people to go and visit. Unlike traditional marketing, emails are also a form of direct marketing since they require one’s email address and express consent from the recipient to receive business promotions and communications.

Emails can be segmented and sent to your target audience/s by demographic. What this means is you’ll only be sending emails to people who might want to see them the most. Email marketing is an effective marketing tool backed by statistics, which is why marketers are leveraging it.

So, just how effective is email marketing? Great question! A marketer can immediately gauge it with one vital metric: Return On Investment (ROI).

Your ROI is an essential metric that determines how successful your campaign is. Other common digital strategies can’t beat email marketing’s ROI, mainly due to the fact that emails can be easily automated, have a low barrier of entry, and overall minimal cost.

 

What is an RSS Feed?

RSS stands for Really Short Syndication. It is a powerful web technology that helps you automatically distribute fresh content from your website and/or other online platforms to subscribers. 

It helps your followers or RSS Feed subscribers to stay up to date with any new content you put out or publish. If you offer an RSS Feed, your subscribers automatically get notified whenever any of your posts go up, and they can read a summary of your post or the post in its entirety.

For users, instead of visiting sites in search of new posts or subscribing to sites to receive notification posts, an RSS feed allows them to read new posts in an RSS reader.

An RSS feed centralises information sources in one place, acting as a digital conduit that delivers timely updates directly to a user’s email inbox or an RSS reader. Rather than having to visit each website or content publication you follow individually to see if new content has been published, you see all the content you’re interested in within a single interface. 

Some users prefer RSS as a simpler and more helpful alternative to participating on social media platforms. Furthermore, RSS feeds update even when the user is not online while keeping the latest content ready to be consumed/accessed on the go.

 

How do RSS Feeds Work?

RSS feeds work by helping you distribute your content and by using simple text files. Data is extracted from XML (eXtensible Markup Language), simplified and streamlined, and then uploaded to an RSS reader for conversion into digital updates. 

You might be wondering if bookmarking and RSS feeds are the same. Well, they’re not. When you find something interesting on a website while searching, you save that link for later. You may bookmark as many websites as you like and get back to them later. The big difference is you won’t get notified like an RSS Feed does, every time that website has new content posted. You can also mark RSS Feed articles you’ve already seen or read.

For businesses, RSS can be considered a superhero that helps in garnering more leads and gains a better search engine position for you. This is not an overstatement, it’s a capability inherent to RSS.

Create backlinks with RSS feeds to enhance your website’s click rate and hyperlinks. This results in higher traffic for your page and higher ranking on your search engines.

Not only does it enhance the digital marketer’s efforts, but it’s also useful for users who have discovered its potential.

 

Why are RSS Feeds Beneficial?

If you want your business to figuratively zoom at the speed of light, the simplest solution to accomplish this is with RSS. The first benefit of having an RSS feed is that interested visitors can subscribe to it and get notified whenever you publish something new.

As soon as you click on the publish button, that content is automatically delivered to your subscribers at no cost to you.

 

But wait, there’s more!

If you happen to have really special content, other websites and website owners may want to aggregate your content. An RSS Aggregator will scan subscribed RSS feeds, and just like your RSS reader, it will then post new items onto a website.

There are small businesses that use RSS Aggregators to display industry news on their site for the benefit of their visitors. If you have a working RSS feed, you can use it alongside your publishing tool to automatically publish new posts on social media.

Your RSS feed can be listed in RSS feed directories. What’s great about this is your site will be listed and categorised to help interested parties find you. Some directories may also share your syndicated content, giving you additional exposure and traffic.

A specialised RSS feed can help you communicate new products or services with vendors, affiliates, or customers, thus improving the speed at which you can communicate new opportunities.

One subtle benefit of having an RSS feed that an astute marketer can use is to leverage your RSS subscription as a Call To Action. Asking visitors to subscribe to your feed can get them hooked on your content, this is an opportunity that can make it easier for you to ask them to say yes when you make a request.

RSS is a great tool, and it does not take up space in people’s inboxes, it saves them a lot of time from doing research every week to stay current with any news about your business. 

The bottom line is that an RSS feed helps you in promoting new content, news, promotions and events, blogs, articles, new products and services, newsletters, or links directories. It should be an integral part of your digital marketing mechanisms.

Email is the core of communication. WordPress RSS feeds make it easy to automate your email marketing campaigns. It can be accomplished via RSS-to-email integration. This way, when you populate your website, your emails could easily be created and sent to your subscribers.

Yes, you can still control the content in your emails, but integration automates your emails to a great extent. Automated messages have amplified the email open rate and click-through rates. Additionally, email automation helps you minimise stress and lets you manage your time and money much more effectively.

Any content on the web today can be incorporated into an RSS feed. RSS is a great way to keep your audience up-to-date, so why not start using it? If you want an RSS system for your website, blogs, or email, don’t hesitate to get in touch with us, we’ll be more than happy to give you a hand.

 

Conclusion.

RSS feed is an essential element that can help strengthen digital marketing. It can provide benefits to both you and your audience. It is a fundamental ingredient that can add flavour to your content.

You can use RSS to target the most relevant audience and keep them engaged with new and exciting content. Furthermore, RSS helps in improving your website’s SEO and promoting its rank on search engines. They are a virtual goldmine for your marketing strategy.

In the world of modern marketing, strategies can come and go, email remains a steadfast pillar. It remains as an influential medium that can engage, inform, and convert your audience with excellent ROI. It remains as an indispensable channel for nurturing customer relationships and driving business growth.

At Accentuate Web Design and Marketing, our seasoned marketing experts can craft impactful email marketing strategies that resonate with your audience, fostering loyalty and conversions with your business’s unique marketing message.

Combined with the potency of RSS feeds, you can propel your business to reach your goals towards success. Don’t miss out on opportunities to leverage these dynamic tools. Embark on this transformative journey, contact us today and let’s start connecting your brand with your valued customers.

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