RSS vs/& E-Mail opt-ins

[A Posse Ad Esse]

Evening all,

I'm having a bit of a dilemma.

I've heard quite a bit of talk recently along the lines of "email marketing is dying". This is quite a worrying thought for a n00b who's major plan of income was building a list.

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My thought is this:

I'm working on a page foucused on implementing an RSS feed in such an ABC way that people who didn't previously know what it was and who didn't have an excess of tech knowledge could be led by the hand through the installation and the pros of RSS compared to e-mail newsletters.

In this situation, does anyone think I could justify having an RSS feed as a replacement to e-mail capture instead of a complementary option?

I know the sound advice is to provide the user with the information the way they want it. But promoting RSS awareness seems to make so much more sense from all points of view:

Consumer: no spam, totally opt-in, total control.
Marketer: cheaper, increased deliverability*, cheaper, easily adopted by other sites, cheaper (I'm a student )

*deliverability- this is one of the only things that concerns me about RSS. Yes, it doesn't get blocked by filters...but does it actually get read?? I have InfoRSS installed for firefox, it's a ticker setup that's constantly scrolling at the top of my screen, I look at it occasionally but not that often.
Are more widely used RSS aggregators/readers better?
I'm looking at a 3rd party RSS hosting service that gives tracking abilities to feeds and items, so you can measure click-throughs etc.

cheers,
Mark

[Rosalind Gardner]

Hi Mark,

Good question.

I'd do both, just as I've done with my Blog and the Blog Alerts which are emailed to subscribers whenever I make a new post.

That way your visitors have a choice as to whether they want to use a newsreader or stick with email.

... and I don't buy that email is dying. If you build a list of subscribers who WANT to read your GREAT information, they'll look for what you send to them.

Cheers,
Ros

[tcwatts]

Ha! I've heard the whole "email is dying" thing since 2000 when the whole PDA/wireless scene was starting and there was talk of push email, SMS/text, etc.

I think email usage is growing. I just read over at Ask Yahoo that Verisign estimates about 2.25 BILLION email queries daily. http://ask.yahoo.com/20060324.html

Heck, I'm still buying stuff that email marketers send me!