According to a recent study study by Pew Internet & American Life Project, it turns out that roughly 9% of users are familiar with RSS.
This may be optimistic. Another report, from Ipsos Insight commissioned by Yahoo!, shows that the percentage of users who are aware of RSS is about 4%.
The New York Times, however, recently reported that RSS is gaining some ground with retailers and users. RSS will not lead to the death of e-mail marketing, but in time it may be that consumer reaction is better to receiving occasional promotional messages within an RSS feed than to a deluge of spam that clutters their inbox. (This development may also strike a blow to plans by AOL and Yahoo! to start charging for some commercial bulk e-mail deliveries.)
Retailers are also aware that many consumers are getting fed up with commercial e-mail. Jon Nordmark, the chief executive of eBags, a firm that uses RSS at its Website, said in the New York Times that "I don't know how many e-mails you get a day, but I can't keep up. Rather than delivering a slightly relevant message to a person's mailbox, RSS allows us to get customers very detailed information directly."
The procedure is pretty straightforward. Using eBags an an example, the company places RSS icons near the site's products with messages offering users regular updates on those products. Once a user has indicated a product preference, the user then clicks on the icon telling the company to send the alerts to his personalized page (such as MyYahoo). eBags will then send an alert only when it has new information or a promotion relevant to the specific product. Mr. Nordmark sums up the advantages of this new arrangement by noting that "[RSS is] a way to basically position highly relevant microsites in front of consumers."
Adding to Mr. Nordmark's remarks, a recent MarketingSherpa poll showed that RSS ranked third out of ten in a list of "tactics that US marketers would spend $100,000 to experiment."
In the meantime, several other companies, in addition to eBags, are using RSS. Simply Hired, a job search engine that searches nearly 4.5 million listings on other job and corporate sites. Subscribers receive an RSS feed when a job that meets their parameters pops up. At the same time, some travel sites, such as Travelocity and Orbitz, have begun using RSS feeds to offer destination suggestions and to alert customers to deals and offers.
To read more about RSS, please check eMarketer's research database here where you will find 38 additional charts and articles on this subject.