If you go back to 1994 when I began marketing in email with Text and then with HTML email the road we as marketers have followed in the email marketing channel has been paved in GOLD. In fact, email is so ubiquitous today that a merchant would be foolish not to use email as a marketing tool. It is one of the most profitable in their arsenal. Now if you follow the email GOLD road and apply it to where the world is today with TransactionalRSS(tm) (TRSS) and where we all see TRSS going in the next 15 years shouldn't you be jumping into this marketing channel? Shouldn't you be making TRSS part of your strategic plans for 2009/2010? Look at the following TRSS metrics....

General Mill/Pillsbury launched a TRSS feed for Recipes 6 months sooner then Kraft and they already have nearly 10 times the TRSS feed subscribers with their first move strategy. Pillsbury now has 98,000 RSS subs to only 9,000 for Kraft. Source:Google.

More to the point...Where will you be if your competitor moves into TransactionalRSS before your company does?

Intuit now has 20% of its visitors coming to its site from its TRSS marketing efforts Source: Experian

"Now this blog post hit my desk yesterday and it provides some solid metrics on email marketing nearly 18 years from where it began in 1994. Here are some key metrics about your e-mail customers." from Kevin Hilstrom Minethedata.com.

Once you read the bullets think about how this applies to TransactionalRSS (TRSS) and why you need to get into the know about TransactionalRSS. To learn more...why not give the team at RSSCheck/ShoppeSimple a ring or click. For details checkout RSSCheck.com.

• Half of all customers who purchased in the past twelve months subscribe to e-mail campaigns.
• E-mail buyers have a 77% annual repurchase rate, among the most loyal of any channel.
• Only 25% of your e-mail file bothers to click on at least one e-mail campaign, per year. The remaining 75% are inactive.
• Only 5% of your e-mail file buy something from your e-mail campaigns, on an annual basis.
• E-mail is what I call a "transition channel". It is the channel that your customers migrate to as they begin to rely upon catalog marketing less. After the customer buys from an e-mail campaign, the customer is likely to buy from your website, without attribution to any other marketing campaign.
• 80% of your e-mail purchasers buy merchandise on sale, or buy when free shipping is offered. As a result, your e-mail buyer file is over-populated with discount shoppers.
• When you offer full price merchandise via e-mail, you generate $0.05 per e-mail campaign.
• When you offer sale merchandise, or you offer free shipping, you generate $0.25 per e-mail campaign.
• Over time, you optimized e-mail performance based on the metrics you had available to you ... open rates, click-through rates, conversion rates. As a result, your optimization best practices resulted in a program that sale/promo customers love. Your customers are no longer interested in e-mail marketing unless there is a marketing promotion.