MarketingSherpa Gets RSS All Wrong

Adrants provides a great critique of Marketing Sherpa’s recent RSS Report. Marketing Sherpa’s summary is a clear indication of the report’s contents: “It chills our blood when we hear email marketers and publishers blithely state, “I’m thinking about switching over to RSS entirely! Oh no. Please don’t. RSS is worthy of testing, but it’s not an email replacement and it never will be.” While Adrants, and most others, would agree that RSS is not a replacement for email, they take issue with MarketingSherpa’s poor research and question the author’s use and grasp of the technology

Comparing RSS to email, MarketingSherpa offers three drawbacks to RSS and gets all three wrong leading us to believe if the writer has ever used RSS. First, MarketingSherpa claims HTML graphics can’t be served through RSS. Wrong. While it does depend on the RSS reader used, any graphic can be served. Any publisher that sets their feed up to serve the full contents (and perhaps even just excepts – check with RSS gurus on this) of the article rather than an excerpt will serve exactly that including any image that is contained within the article.

The RSS report is available for free until May 23, go and check it out for yourself.