Groceries via RSS

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Neville Hobson picks up on Tesco's email blitzing of its customers (the UK supermarket sends around 16-20 million emails a month) and a single, measly, RSS feed (Deal of the Day).

"This is Tesco's toe in the water for RSS, I would imagine. Tesco is the only supermarket on whose website I could find an RSS feed - none of the others mentioned in the BBC story has a feed, not that I could discover. Yet I'd expect more supermarkets to embrace RSS. Still doing email, of course, but more RSS."

According to Mike Parry (of Interactive Prospect Targeting Services) 60% of Tesco's online revenue come from emails.

With numbers like that, I agree with Neville - they will continue to spam, spam, spam. In this respect, it shows how far RSS has still to go as a mainstream marketing vehicle. But if these 'consumer-focused businesses' don't even provide a way for their customers to subscribe to offers via RSS (as Neville notes), I'd say they're missing out on the RSS boom, and the millions of new 'consumers' that are just getting started with RSS.

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Tags: rss