Thursday, October 29, 2015

A look at news feeds and how they can be useful

Numerous companies regularly send newsletters by postal mail to keep subscribers present on their affairs or industry-related news, for the purpose of preserving a loyal customer base to whom they can market extra services or products. With pervasive use of the internet for info dissemination, and with RSS News Feeds gaining momentum as an effective online interaction tool, one needs to ask whether businesses are now much better served by publishing news feeds in lieu of newsletters.



There are apparent benefit elements that favor publishing news feeds over newsletters: No newsletter design hold-ups or costs, no printing hold-ups, no printing costs, no postage costs, no mailing lists. Are news feeds more effective than newsletters in providing the message? And if so, can anybody with essentially no knowledge of news feeds and with computer skills limited to sending out email and searching the web really release a news feed on their own?

Putting aside the evident advantages of news feeds noted above, an important question to ask when evaluating effectiveness of the newsletter versus the news feed is whether the info is time-sensitive. If business is releasing information pertaining to such subjects as the stock market, property, investments, weather condition, brand-new services or products, competitive analyses, item catalogs and rates (and you can probably add more to this list), the efficiency of the newsletter drastically lessens as the delay between the "occasion" and the shipment of the details about the event increases. If a newsletter is released every 3 months, typically the information is six weeks old! And it's not just that the information arrives too late to be vital to the recipient, however also due to the fact that recipients will familiarize the newsletter is irrelevant to their affairs and tune out. That implies it will be seen as junk mail and tossed into the trash without opening. Why would I appreciate a financial investment opportunity if, by the time I receive that advice, it's too late to act upon it? (At my post office, a recycle bin is offered in the lobby so that you can easily toss away your spam without even taking it house.).

Acknowledging this time-sensitivity problem, companies have been depending more and more on email broadcasting to a subscription list. You have actually seen the come-on-- "Register for our e-mail list". To many, this is deemed volunteering to get spam. Even when one does hesitantly send their email address to those hopefully-private lists, spam filters will often trash that e-mail, and for the email that does make it through (and all of us know how effective spammers have become), the email from the genuine companies generally gets lost in the middle of all that spam. Exactly what does it matter if the business has actually avoided the development, distribution, and hold-up problems associated with newsletters by utilizing email, if in the end the message never gets to inviting ears.
source:

cowesweek2.co.uk