1. Make subscription easy
RSS is new (it stands for Really Simple Syndication) to many of your customers. Companies often make the mistake of linking an orange RSS icon button to a page of XML code and force the consumer to get into tech speak. Obviously these companies are hoping their customers will “figure it out.” The ShoppeSimple offering includes our trademarked shopping icon and bag, custom landing pages in your company’s look and feel. It also includes merchant branded TransactionalRSS(tm) (TRSS) feeds in a consumers home page or Reader. ShoppeSimple also provides TRSS code for the newest technologies like IE 7/8 Firefox and Safari to alert your consumers s that there are TranactionalRSS Feeds on your website.
2. Use branding elements in your feeds. Nearly all RSS feeds are just a line or two of text, but through ShoppeSimple's TransactionalRSS template technology you can use your logo, fonts, colors, etc. This maximizes your brand identity, differentiates your feeds from your competitors, and makes the feeds more familiar to customers. With template technology you can include thumbnails, descriptions, buy-now buttons, and more.
3. Provide relevant content through personalization and category selection.
The key to retaining subscribers is providing relevant content. With ShoppeSimple you can select the product category of your choosig and push out feeds to your consumers based on these categories. Also a merchant should consider using their datafeeds or the ShoppeSimple TransactionalRSS Feed System to make TranascationalRSS publishing automatic.
4. Measure subscribers and their actions
As previously described, TransactionalRSS presents unique measurement challenges as it does not require an email address for delivery. TransactionalRSS is private and anonymous. The technologies behind web analytics solutions therefore do not work in RSS readers or My Home pages. ShoppeSimple analytic technologies enable merchants to track every TransactionalRSS (TRSS) Feed and measure the behaviors of each TRSS thread. Reports the company provides include subscriber counts, content reads, Hub visits, clickthroughs, most popular content, most popular feeds, TRSS readers used, search engines, traffic sources and more. Due to the ease of unsubscribing, per subscriber analytics is especially important to assess the performance of your TRSS program. By judiciously analyzing your customers’ content interests and making appropriate changes in your content strategy, you can build upon your active subscriber base.
5. Promote your feeds
Market your feeds using the ShoppeSimple's TransactionalRSS Feed System as a retention and customer acquisition tool. You company will find this new channel of marketing will increase your site visits by more than 20% and the TRSS order conversion is 5 times better than email. You will also see your TRSS order value increase by 20%.
6. Integrate with email and other marketing programs
ShoppeSimple has employed a Merchant Hub as a single consumer place that offers content as TransactionalRSS or email or social networking or mobile based applications. This will allow merchants to acquire more subscribers over time due to the fact that many customers strongly prefer one medium over another. By addressing concerns such as privacy (giving out email addresses) and
technology (unfamiliarity with RSS), you have a chance to build trust with your customers by communicating with them on their preferred terms.
Placing the ShoppeSimple Icon on your opt-out subscription area will also allow you to retain those who many want t unsubscribe from email but who may choose to receive your TransactionalRSS feeds rather than opting-out altogether.
ShoppeSimple will also append web analytics campaign IDs into all clickthrough links, allowing you to monitor your TransactionalRSS visitors after they have clicked through from their feeds. This technology will allow you to track customer behavior and measure the performance of your RSS
campaigns using your analytic tools like Google Analytics, Coremetrics, Omniture and more.
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