B-to-B Marketer Finds a New Way: RSS

How do you build readership for a business-to-business e-zine? One way is to add an RSS feed.

“RSS has taken off for newsletter consumption,” says Ed Schipul, CEO of Schipul, a Web marketing company. “It’s a great way to get the newsletter out there.”

Schipul serves as a Web service provider solution for associations. With technologies that change daily it’s important for the company to keep its customers up to date on how to use new technologies and take advantage of available capabilities.

“Our goal is to build a global company to facilitate communications on the Internet,” Schipul says. “I like to include editorial that will aid my readers,” Schipul continues.

The e-zine is now sent to approximately 250 clients and prospects. And while the company is hyper-conservative when list building, it optimizes readership of the newsletter in many ways.

Tendenci is distributed in newsletter form, it is posted on the company Web site and even before it is released, employees run the newsletter content through software to optimize the amount of hits it will receive from search engines. Additionally, the articles are added to the RSS feed for distribution as they are written.

“It’s completely opt-in and you don’t have to worry about spam filtering,” Schipul continues. “If someone chooses to get your RSS feed, they get it.”

Schipul is a huge fan of RSS distribution and its immediacy.

“The problem with e-newsletters only sent once a month is that I’m getting the best editorial you have to offer, but not when you wrote it,” he notes.

Despite that, he still ads original content to the newsletter.

“If I have five articles I will publish those articles on the Web site and they’ll go on feed. Then I’ll add those to two or three fun interesting things for the newsletter,” he says. “Then we re-post the newsletter as an article itself and syndicate it in the RSS feed.”

According to Schipul, there were 6,500 article reads last month.

The newsletter was originally launched four years ago. But staffing got light and employees became too busy to continue the publication, says Schipul.

“Last April our new marketing guy was aghast that we let it stop,” he says. “So we started it again. And that was a wonderful thing.”

There’s no tracking of opens for the newsletter. “I think they’re a scam because they lie to you,” Schipul says. “When people figure out that they’re being tracked, they won’t have warm fuzzies for those who aren’t treating them ethically. It comes with sacrifice, but when they realize who is and who isn’t tracking them, those who aren’t tracking them will be elevated higher in their eyes.”

What he does allow to be tracked are key words from the newsletter to optimize its distribution. After all, he says, if you use the wrong key words in editorial, you will have a disconnect between someone searching for content and someone providing content.

Although Schipul believes that involvement devices are a good idea, he has very few in the newsletters. One involvement device that he feels was beneficial to the company was a nine-question customer satisfaction survey asking readers if the company was meeting their expectations and requesting feedback. “People won’t call me. So if the newsletter can help me grab data, then clients like to feel like they can respond.”

Schipul calls his policy ultra conservative when it comes to growing the list. In fact, he says his biggest challenge was controlling his business development manager who wanted to use the company database for subscribers.

“We have fanatically loyal clients,” he says. “I’d much rather get yelled at because they’re not on our list and want to be on it, than the alternative which creates a bad brand impression.”

Schipul admits that he can’t measure ROI but says that the newsletter is part of the company’s overall marketing efforts. He adds: “It’s pretty much a no brainer, you know the newsletter is going to people who are interested in your brand and the delivery costs are lower than any other mechanisms known to brand.”

A concrete benefit that he has seen is greater attendance at events and training classes after articles written about features of certain software are published. “Not only is there a jump in training, the trainers love it because they get different questions,” he says.

As for future plans he plans to tailor the newsletters as much as he can for RSS because he sees it as the wave of the future. His one piece of advice: “Quit worrying about tracking and start worrying about content and RSS delivery.”