Legal Marketing & PR

Why RSS Beats E-Newsletters Hands Down

By Michelle Golden

E-Newsletters are notorious for WYSINWYG: What You See is NOT What You Get.

Overcoming format foibles in the delivery of an HTML newsletter that I was testing for launch, is what first got me looking into blogs back in 2005.

When I found out how easy, painless, and beneficial RSS was over e-mail, using blog technology, with a Feedblitz email delivery option for those not RSS savvy, was a no-brainer.

Feedblitz is awesome and automatically distributes my RSS feed to the subcriber by email whenever I post. It's reliable and self-administered by the subscriber so I don't have to worry about anti-spam law compliance, administering my list, or any other regular maintenance. And did I mention it is free??

This is why I was surprised this evening when I received an e-newsletter (!) from another great (and free) blog tool provider SiteMeter. I love SiteMeter, too. And I subscribe to their RSS feed to stay current on product news so I'm not sure why I received this e-newsletter (because I don't remember signing up for it) but out of curiosity, I clicked. And look at what happened when it opened...

And I bet someone spent a lot of time making it look "just so."

I can't understand why companies still spend so much effort and money formatting e-newsletters when they can just use a blog/RSS and benefit from both "push" marketing to subscribers (both RSS and email readers) AND "pull" marketing, too, to grab web readers and searchers who might be future customers.

Is it just me or does it seem weird that an RSS feed tracking tool company still uses e-newsletters?

I'm not saying e-newsletters are necessarily dead... (can you imagine the hate mail I'd get??) but I have to ask why they are still so widely used when they are clearly suboptimal.

Full post as published by Golden Practices on December 06, 2007 (boomark / email).