RSS Helps E-Marketing
From the International Association of Online Communities:
Our research has shown that on travel distribution Web sites (hotels, airlines, destinations, rental cars etc) the most visited pages or content is always related to special offers. However, from an end user or travel consumer perspective, manually checking every Web site looking for new deals becomes extremely time consuming. Email special offer and newsletter subscriptions is an extremely good solution to reach these customers for a travel marketer, however, the growing challenges with email marketing are well documented at this point. Enter RSS.
Subscribing to an RSS feed where you are notified of new special offers or events for a destination, hotel or airline of your selection seems like a perfect solution. RSS lends itself perfectly to distributing this content in a simple well formatted manner…and on the end users terms! An example of this being applied can be seen at SmarterTravel.com .
One of E-site Marketing’s first applications of the technology was for a spa resort Web site we developed. We RSS “enabled” the online store where in addition to room reservations, they sell signature products, spa treatments and gift certificates.
Of particular note, and an attest to BL’s comment on Tuesday about the impact of RSS on Search Engine rankings, after only 1 week the store was ranking number 1 out of 256,000 results for a spa related keyword search. This type of result would typically take months to achieve, but because of the high priority being given to RSS content the search engines immediately listed and ranked the Web site. After 3 months the Web site was ranking number one for the highly competitive keyword “spa resorts” out of 11,000,000!
