donderdag 29 oktober 2015

A look at news feeds and how they can be useful

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



There are obvious convenience elements that prefer releasing news feeds over newsletters: No newsletter design hold-ups or costs, no printing delays, no printing costs, no postage costs, no subscriber list. However are news feeds more efficient than newsletters in delivering the message? And if so, can any individual with essentially no understanding of news feeds and with computer skills restricted to sending out e-mail and browsing the internet really publish a news feed upon their own?

Putting aside the apparent advantages of news feeds noted above, a crucial concern to ask when assessing efficiency of the newsletter versus the news feed is whether the information is time-sensitive. If the business is publishing info referring to such subjects as the stock market, real estate, financial investments, weather condition, new services or products, competitive analyses, item catalogs and costs (and you can probably add more to this list), the effectiveness of the newsletter considerably diminishes as the hold-up between the "event" and the delivery of the details about the occasion increases. If a newsletter is released every three months, usually the information is six weeks old! And it's not just that the information shows up far too late to be important to the recipient, but likewise due to the fact that receivers will come to know the newsletter is irrelevant to their affairs and tune out. Sadly, that means it will be viewed as spam and tossed into the trash without opening. Why would I care about an investment chance if, by the time I get that guidance, it's far too late to act upon it? (At my post office, a recycle bin is provided in the lobby so that you can easily toss away your junk mail without even taking it home.).

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 viewed as volunteering to get spam. Even when one does hesitantly send their email address to those hopefully-private lists, spam filters will frequently trash that email, and for the email that does make it through (and we all know how efficient spammers have actually ended up being), the email from the genuine companies normally gets lost in the middle of all that spam. Exactly what does it matter if the business has actually avoided the development, distribution, and delay issues associated with newsletters by using email, if in the end the message never ever gets to welcoming ears.
source:

http://www.macworldbound.com