Beyond Newsletter Marketing – RSS

In “The 7 Essential Steps to Successful eBay Marketing” we talk a lot about customer retention and customer loyalty. Like we mentioned in other posts on this blog, one of the best ways to do this is via newsletters.

There are several services that integrate with eBay and allow you to easily develop, automate and maintain newsletters. However, there’s a new trend going on – RSS marketing.

This is similar to a newsletter, however the content shows up in a newsreader or an aggregator site like NewsGator or MyYahoo. This is pretty much like a newsletter, because people opt-in by setting their aggregator to the feed, and then they see new content every time it’s available in their custom pages (right along side their favorite news stories from the Wall Street Journal or San Francisco Chronicle, for example).

One service in particular – AuctionContact – allows you to create both traditional eBay newsletters and RSS feeds all in one place. For newsletters, you can automatically send emails to your opt-in list based on your current listings. Newer items and their images are inserted at the top of the gallery. Newsletter subscribers enter keywords, and the newsletter they receive shows only the items that match those keywords.

Just like with an HTML email newsletter, the RSS feeds contain gallery views of all your products. Whichever method you choose (you should do both, really, to cover all bases), you’re developing customer loyalty and retention while advertising your products to new prospects as well. Remember, emails and links are viral, too.

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Amazon.com and Walmart.com have the lowest prices for "The 7 Essential Steps to Successful eBay Marketing" (McGraw-Hill, 2005)