Imagine you had a travel portal and you sent out the following email to your mailing list
Dear Mr. Smith,
Find out fast when you can save on flights to your favorite destinations! It's easy and it's free, thanks to our new RSS feed. Just choose the destinations you'd like us to watch, and we'll keep you informed through My Yahoo!, My MSN, Pluck or another RSS news reader of your choice.
You have actually sent out an email encouraging people to pull content even though they had already permitted you to push content to them!!
Does this mean you no longer push content via Email? Nope, that's where your Integrated Push Pull Strategy should help you decide what and when to push and pull. Here's a sample strategy below.
Integrated Push Pull Strategy:
1)Push important messages that need to be acted upon quickly
2)Encourage users to create custom feeds and pull it
3)Push if user no longer pulling your feeds.
4)Ensure same content doesnot get pulled and pushed
So what's your Push Pull strategy going to be?
3 comments:
June 28, 2007 at 7:15 AM
Great post! Sometimes it makes sense to be direct and just ask them to subscribe to the rss feed!
I question is on tracking subscriber centric email behavior and aggregate rss behavior. How would you tie those two together? I was challenged to do this once before and we ended up creating a unique feed for each customer to subscribe to. I'm curious to your thoughts.
Great article!
June 28, 2007 at 12:36 PM
Yes the feed url needs to be unique, but you might not need to create a seperate feed per user if you have a servlet that could generate dynamic rss feeds based on input query string parameters.
The feed customization/subscription page link in the email you send out could have customer_id appended to it, to make a unique feed url as well as to help associate feed interaction data with the customer record in database.
July 15, 2007 at 3:55 AM
Great post!, well uniqueness of feed is Undoubtedly important, but as users demand and choice changes with time, it's important to have a dynamic rss feeds.
i agree with the concept of rss feeds based on input query string!
Cheers
Anil
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