Eric G. Myers at ICE has an interesting post about the future of e-mail marketing, and its likely replacement with customized RSS.
His key points:
- Other people are ruining it for everyone.
- People have to give more than they want to, to get what you have.
- Unsubscribing doesn't always work.
- As e-mail effectiveness drops, costs rise.
- RSS puts control in the hands of the user, which solves most of these problems, as well as letting users see previous content before they sign up. [Sampling is often effective as a marketing technique]
- RSS feeds are indexed by search engines
Yup. Other people are ruining it for everyone. It's called the tragedy of the commons. The rise of trackback spam and useless Google search pages are the latest projects of these jerks. I think Eric's arguments make sense. He also has some suggestions for how to get good seats for this event now, before everyone gets in on the act.
[BTW, Eric is the only reason I have tags on this site, thanks to his tag generator, for which I am truly grateful.]
References:
Tragedy of the commons: Wikipedia article here. Scholarly article by Gareth Harden here, that speaks to this effect as it relates to pollution and overfishing.
Del.icio.us Tags: tragedy of the commons, will rss replace e-mail marketing, online customer experience
