RSS Radars are not just a tool to help you enrich your website content and allow you to easily conduct business intelligence, but can also be used as a B2B Customer Relationship Management tool to help you maintain customer loyalty and provide your customers with some additional added value.

Just recently I received an e-mail from David Koopmans of Mokum Marketing, who gave me the idea for this post.

David’s idea is simple:

• Tag articles of interest to your customers using a service like Diigo or Del.icio.us
• Provide them with an RSS feed to deliver them the articles as they are updated

This is how David sees the usefulness of such an application:
"The idea is very attractive though; in B2B we often manage a relatively small number of relationships, but they are deep and we want to make them deeper."

But, there are two problems:

• Tagging the articles using a public service like Diigo or Del.icio.us would make the feeds publicly available, making the service less value due to lack of uniqueness, as also noted by David
• Tagging relevant articles every day takes time … time that busy B2B marketers usually don’t have, especially if you want to cater a tag-based RSS feed for each of your clients

This is where RSS Radars can come in, enabling you to aggregate dozens or hundreds of RSS feeds, filter them for the relevant keywords to get only the most relevant content for a specific client, and provide that client with his own customized RSS feed, using a service like MySyndicaat.com or pipes.yahoo.com.

Plus, using .htaccess you can easily password protect each feed for each individual client.

More details in the 2007 edition of the RSS e-book:)

Defining Online Conversion: Combining Action and Exposure Elements

Conversions aren’t just about new sales or subscribers versus your website visitors.

First, let’s review the conversion rate definition from Defining Online Conversion: What Is It?:

The conversion rate is a % of unique actions that result from unique exposures.

The conversion rate metric can be used to measure anything you want to track, analyze and optimize, and is by no means linked only to sales or subscribers and your website.

Here are just some quick examples of conversion rates not used as often as the standard sales/visitors CR:

• sales / e-mail clicks
• sales / e-mails delivered
• order finished / add to cart
• sales / ad impressions
• phone calls / website visits
• product recommendations / product views
• etc.

There are countless combinations available, depending on what specifically you want to measure and optimize.

Let’s return to our conversion rate definition for a second:

The conversion rate is a % of unique actions that result from unique exposures.

As you can see from the definition, the conversion rate is a combination of actions and exposures, with a simple formula of:

conversion rate = actions / exposures

Consequently, conversion rate optimization begins first with defining what you want to measure and optimize, and then by defining the action and exposure elements that help you get to the numbers you need.

Let’s presume you want to measure the overall effectiveness of your e-mail e-zine in driving sales.

1. The overall effectiveness of your e-mail e-zine can be measured as a conversion between the number of unique e-mail messages delivered [exposures] to your list and the number of unique sales generated [actions] from the e-mailing. [CR = unique sales / unique delivered e-mail messages]
2. However, this will only give you the overall effectiveness and a trend to watch over a longer period of time, telling you whether you are increasing or decreasing your overall effectiveness. It does not tell you what you need to optimize to increase your sales.
   To determine this, consider the steps needed to make the sale via the e-mail campaign.

3. It starts with getting the click from the e-mail message delivered to your website. Increasing the number of clicks requires increasing the attractiveness of the Calls-to-Action [CTAs] in the e-mail message.
   Hence you need to know how effective the CTAs are in driving recipients from the e-mail to the website, by measuring the conversion between the number of unique e-mail messages delivered [exposures] and unique clicks [actions] to your website [CR = unique clicks / unique delivered e-mail messages].
   This will of course only give you the basic information — getting more will require measuring each individual CTA.

4. A click of course does not mean sales, so the next step is measuring the conversion from the e-mail clicks [exposures] to purchases [actions] –> [CR = unique purchases / unique e-mail clicks]. This will help you optimize the actual landing pages to which you lead the subscribers to your e-mail list, using your e-zine.
5. And finally, to fully optimize your process you may want to measure the conversion on the sales process level to help you optimize each step that leads to the purchase after the click, such as how good the product landing pages are in getting clickers to add the product to the shopping cart [CR = unique add to carts / unique e-mail clicks].

Much like everything else in series so far, this is just a simplistic demonstration, here primarily for the purpose of helping you see how to combine action and exposure elements.

In the case of e-zine optimization for sales, you would also need to measure relevant clicks (since only relevant clicks will increase your sales), different CTAs, open rates and so on.

The point is, combine different actions and exposures to come up with conversion rate formulas that will impact your bottom line.

Part of the upcoming 2007 edition of the RSS Marketing e-book are also the interviews we are doing with various internet marketing experts and RSS practitioners. In the following days and hopefully not too many weeks, we’ll be posting those interviews here.

I’m sure most of you have heard of Bryan Eisenberg before. Bryan is the leading worldwide authority on internet marketing optimization and website persuasion architecture. He was also one of the few marketers that got on the RSS Marketing bandwagon early on.

Recently, Bryan started exploring RSS Radars as a tool to increase the traffic to their optimization portal GrokDotCom.com, increase visitor loyalty, position the website as the key news source for internet optimization … and naturally facilitate online sales of their books and consulting services. Take a look here.

But while most RSS Radars are based on contextually filtering content from selected third-party RSS feeds, the GrokDotCom.com RSS Radars go far beyond anything else we have seen on the market so far.

Instead of relying only on contextual content filtering to select the most relevant third-party content, they are employing a number of additional filters, such as the amount of linkage the story is receiving, source relevance and credibility, and so on … and they’re calling it a discovery engine.

• What are their RSS Radar marketing goals?
• How their RSS Radar is different from what you can generally see online?
• What concrete results are they achieving?
• What you can learn from their RSS marketing?

All of these answers, and more, available in the audio interview.

Click here to listen to the MP3 file [14 minutes; 3 MB]

I have to apologise to Amazon for missing on two of their RSS content delivery options, which I previously missed.

Sorry guys, and thank you for the heads up.

1. Product Discussions
Most Amazon.com product discussions are now available also as RSS feeds. An excellent way of keeping track of the conversations surrounding your favorite products, and certainly something more websites should implement … especially those that provide content that people are pashionate about.

The first one that comes to mind is TV.com and their community show reviews.

2. Customer Reviews by Author
Like a product reviewer? Subscribe to their Amazon.com reviews RSS feed.

What works best in RSS marketing? How are RSS subscribers different than e-mail subscribers? RSS publishing best practices if you want to sell?

These and other practical questions are all revealed in the 2nd part of the RSS interview with Bryan Eisenberg. Without doubt, this is one of the best and most practical RSS marketing interviews we’ve done so far.

In part 1 of the Bryan Eisenberg RSS interview we focused on how the GrokDotCom.com is going beyond traditional RSS Radars by employing intelligent content aggregation tools, instead of relying just on contextual filtering, and what kind of results they are achieving.

In part 2 of the interview we move beyond RSS Radars to their overall RSS marketing strategy.

In this interview find out about …

1. How RSS subscribers are different from e-mail subscribers and why?

2. How to sell products through content-rich RSS feeds?

3. Do RSS subscribers mind seeing product promotions in your feeds?

4. When to publish your latest RSS content to get the most links from other websites and most readership?

5. What’s the right RSS publishing frequency for promotional content?

6. Why branding your RSS feed is important and how to do it?

Click here to listen to the MP3 file [8:33 minutes; 2 MB]

I interviewed Greg Reinacker of NewsGator end of January, as part of the interview series for the 2007 edition of the RSS e-book.

NewsGator is one of the leaders in the Enterprise RSS space, a provider of top-breed RSS Readers and also a branded RSS Reader vendor.

So, you can imagine we had alot to cover.

In part 1 of the interview, find out about how Windows Vista and Internet Explorer are changing the RSS landscape …

• How are Vista and Internet Explorer changing the world of RSS marketing and RSS content consumption?
• How much and how quickly will they make an impact?
• Are they really the game changer every marketer expects them to be?
• What changes can we expect?
• How can marketers take advantage of the advances Vista offers for RSS?

Click here to listen to the interview [MP3; 8 min.]

In part 2 of the RSS interview with Greg Reinacker of NewsGator find out how online media can take advantage of RSS beyond publishing RSS content.

• Why should online publishers care about branded RSS Readers?
• Does it still make sense to provide a branded RSS Reader, especially with the wide adoption RSS is getting through Internet Explorer 7?
• What kind of value can publishers bring to RSS Readers?
• How can online media enhance the user experience through third-party content via RSS?
• Is visitor ownership still a possibility, or are services like MyYahoo! owning the game? How can online media compete?
• How can small businesses compete with large portals and large media sites?
• Does syndicating your content via RSS mean that you’re giving up content?
• Is RSS becoming a significant traffic driver?
• How can companies profit from pulling together relevant content on a specific topic from third-party sources?
• Is there a difference in how summary and full-text feeds drive visitors to your website? When to use which?
• Best practices for re-publishing third-party content on your website
• Can you put ads next to re-published RSS content on your site? How to do it?

Click here to listen to the interview [MP3; 14 min.]

In part 3 of the RSS interview with Greg Reinacker of NewsGator find out how Enterprise RSS makes information management easier within a corporation.

• What will happen in the RSS space in 2007, for marketers and business?
• Will RSS become integrated into every enterprise application? How will that change how information is used?
• Will RSS improve information management within an organization?
• What challenges do RSS management present to IT departments in larger organizations?
• Will centralized RSS tools help solve the internal information management crisis?
• What is Attention XML and how will it help you get more of the content you need and less of the content that is not relevant specifically to you?
• Are smart RSS Readers only for corporations, or can consumers also take advantage?
• What are NewsGator’s plans for 2007?

Click here to listen to the interview [MP3; 13 min.]

Just got a notice from Amazon (thank you) that they soft-launched RSS feeds for tags.

But first, how do their tags actually work?

• You can tag any product you like, including your previous purchases, with a keyword that best describes the product.
• Easily search and access products tagged by others, using the keywords you’re interested in.
• Tags are also used as a way for Amazon to provide you with personalized recommendations.

The good part is that Amazon now added RSS capabilities to their tags, available through most tag pages.

• Subscribe to RSS feeds for the tags you’re interested in, and get latest product releases that match these tags.
• Use the RSS feeds to display Amazon products on your website, using the appropriate tags, to earn affiliate commissions.
• Share RSS feeds for tags with your friends, as a recommendations vehicle.

More information here.

An excellent RSS e-commerce application from Amazon!