Well, Paul, email has been announced as dead and obsoleted several times and it is still the dominant messaging technology. Nothing wrong with RSS for them what partake, but email is still king and, in my humble opinion, will be so for another decade or two.

There are too many people who don’t even know what rss is to claim that rss is king. I think that the simplicity of email will make it stay king for the years to come. That’s the reason why services such as feedblitz exist…

Paul, we have always required people to register on SuccessTALK in order to listen.

I’m ok with losing listeners because of that. I’d rather have 1,000 listeners that I know than 10,000 that I don’t know.

As an ol farm boy from rural Manitoba who spent a lot of time scratching my head when podcasting first began saying “I don’t think that’s going to work” its very interesting to watch the people who argued endlessly for “free” and anonymity are now growing up and getting mortgages of their own.

Paul

I remember when snail mail was pronounced dead — it isn’t. E-mail will be the best way to get your marketing message out for a very long time.

Take a look at the huge numbers of people still coming online. They can use e-mail and a browser. They aren’t going to be delving into RSS right away. I believe there will always be a significant multiple of e-mail users compared to RSS users.

However, it also depends upon your market. If you’re marketing to the early-adopter, high-tech crowd — RSS may be your best marketing vehicle. So, it just goes to show, you should never discount anything. Don’t look at what you think is king — look at what your customer thinks is king.

Paul -

I love this one. I remember when folks started to rant this mantra as well. I can tell you as the owner of an email marketing service provider that email is FAR from being dead. As Marty said above, email is THE dominant application on the internet. As a marketing tool it delivers one of the highest ROI’s of any online medium (top 3). So while some people keep saying that RSS will kill email, they have it all wrong.

Here is my take. RSS and email are complimentary mediums to one another. They both serve a purpose, deliver content to a subscriber. That subscriber should have a preference on how they receive that content, whether it be via a feed reader or their inbox. We believe that it should be a choice for the consumer, which is why we have built it into our subscriber preference center in our latest upcoming release Publicaster 7.0. We believe that all of our publishers (clients) should offer their content via both channels and let the consumer decide what channel they prefer.

I wrote an article on our corporate website on the growing trend of RSS to Email a few weeks back, you can find it here:

http://www.blueskyfactory.com/factoryNews/FN070516.htm

Thanks for the post. See you at Podcast Academy 6 and the Podcast & New Media Expo!

- Greg

I should also point out, that its also one of the reasons that we recently acquired RssFwd - www.rssfwd.com, a leading RSS to email service. While we are one of the smaller providers at the moment with 32,000 active users and growing there is no doubt the inbox is still the dominant location for eye balls.

You can also see that the other RSS to Email services like Feedburner, Feedblitz, R-Mail, all have impressive user counts… and growing.

- Greg

I was an owner and founder of a top email marketing service called Proautoresponder.com. And I can tell you that if email isn’t dead, then it’s certainly on life support.

Here’s why:

* There’s Too Much Spam Email.

1.9 trillion spam emails were sent in Oct. 2006 alone.

So while legitimate marketers like you may be sending info to people that actually requested it, those messages are getting lost in the flood of daily spam email.

Of course you could always spam filters to sort your email. I’ve seen how that has worked for a number of sales organizations. They ultimately moved to yahoo groups to communicate.

It’s gotten so bad that we now misspell words just to get emails past the spam filters.

* Spam Complaints Generate Blocking.

Blocking is dynamic. You don’t know when it’s going to happen. And unfortunately for you as a marketer, you don’t know when blocking will affect your mailing. Hence you never really know if/when your message will be successfully delivered.

I dealt with this issue every day.

* Spam Email is an Annoyance.

I’m overloaded with it. I’m guessing you are too.

When my customers unsubscribe from my mailings, they usually tell me that “I get too much email already… don’t need more” even though it’s been weeks since I’ve written them.

* Too much Sexually Explicit Email

WOW! Have you read some of the subject lines?

I don’t allow my kids near my computer when I’m checking email.

And do you really want your marketing message to appear right next to some sex performance enhancer?

* You Can’t Turn Spam Off.

You can change your email address but your friends and family won’t be able to reach you.

Let’s face it… If something could have been done to stop spam email, it would have been done already.

* Autoresponders are Turning to RSS

With domains being blocked and emails going undelivered and unread, autoresponders and email houses are now turning to this alternative delivery method – RSS!

* Emails are no longer Rich Media

There was a time when I could send graphics and audios in my emails. Response rates went thru the roof. But not anymore. Try including them today and you’ll find them blocked or in the junk folder.

What are the odds that your readers will sort thru their junk mail to read your message?

* Phishing Scams are on the Rise.

Average loss per victim was $1,244 (Gartner, 2006). If people don’t trust your email, how will they trust you?

And that’s the real issue. Trust.

I’ve moved away from email and I’d recommend you do the same for your business.

Am I abandoning email altogether?

No. I’ll keep sending email to my old lists until they die. But all my new lists are using RSS to deliver messages to my reader’s desktops. That way I can completely bypassing the email inbox and all its problems.

Now I can deliver rich, engaging multimedia marketing messages in a sequential, personalized manner to engage my readers just like I used at my old autoresponder service.

And the best part is that my messages are always delivered. And my readers always expect them.

Regards,

Enrique Garibay

I just viewed a television commercial for Expedia.com. They’ve just introduced a desktop communicator…

Are you wondering why?

I was reviewing the evolution of email marketing recently. I recalled how “enterprise” email marketing solutions that came about years ago. As the masses saw how enterprise was using email marketing, they began adopting it for their small businesses. That’s when autoresponder services came about and the masses began to employ email marketing.

And now enterprise is moving to desktops.

Can anyone predict a new trend here?

Regards,

Enrique Garibay
www.deskping.com