Case Study: Winning With RSS Marketing

By 2004, RSS had moved past the early-adopter phase that defined 2003 and started showing up in tools built specifically for marketers rather than publishers. FeedBurner launched this year, giving anyone running a feed real subscriber counts and click data instead of guessing. In November, Mozilla shipped Firefox 1.0 with a feature called Live Bookmarks, letting anyone subscribe to a site’s feed directly from the browser toolbar without installing separate reader software. Together, these lowered the barrier for using RSS as an active marketing channel rather than a passive publishing format.

Here’s an illustrative scenario reflecting how a small B2B software company might have used that shift.

The problem

Picture a small company selling project management software to mid-sized firms. Their product improved constantly, adding features every few weeks, but almost none of their existing customers knew about updates unless they happened to notice a change in the interface. Email announcements for every minor feature felt excessive and risked training customers to ignore the company’s messages entirely.

The approach

The marketing team set up a dedicated “What’s New” RSS feed, separate from their existing blog feed, publishing a short entry every time a feature shipped or a meaningful bug was fixed. They ran the feed through FeedBurner, both to get subscriber and click statistics they’d previously had no way to see, and to make the feed easier to find and subscribe to through a single, clean URL.

Rather than treating the feed as a one-way broadcast, they linked each entry back to a short page with more context and, where relevant, a call to try the new feature. They promoted the feed’s existence in the product itself, a small notice in the application’s dashboard pointing users to it.

What happened

Growth was gradual for the first few months, matching the slow overall pace of RSS reader adoption at the time. Then Firefox 1.0 shipped in November with Live Bookmarks built in, and subscriber numbers for the feed roughly doubled within the following two months, based on the FeedBurner data the team was now tracking. A meaningful share of new subscribers were existing customers who had simply never had an easy way to subscribe before Firefox made it a one-click action from the browser toolbar.

More useful than the raw subscriber count was what the click data revealed: entries about specific, practical features consistently got more clicks than general announcements. The team started writing shorter, more specific entries as a result, and saw click-through rates improve further.

Why it worked

The feed succeeded for three reasons that had less to do with RSS itself and more to do with how it was used. First, it targeted a real gap: customers didn’t know about updates they would have cared about, so the content had built-in demand. Second, having actual subscriber and click data through FeedBurner meant the team could see what was and wasn’t working, rather than publishing blind. Third, the timing lined up with a real shift in how ordinary users could discover and subscribe to feeds, thanks to Firefox putting the feature directly in the browser rather than leaving it to specialized software.

None of this required a large budget or a dedicated RSS specialist. It required treating a feed as a real marketing channel worth measuring, at the moment the tools to measure it had just become available.