Take a look at the blogosphere and you will realize that many bloggers rely exclusively on RSS syndication to get in touch with their readers. While I do believe that RSS is a corner stone of online publishing, I also think that offering email subscriptions can be very beneficial for a blog, and here are the reasons:
1. Email subscriptions can increase the number of subscribers to your blog: The blogs that offer email subscription usually have from 5% to 15% of their readers getting updates via email. This may not sound impressive for small blogs (if you have 100 RSS subscribers you will probably get only 5 or 10 more readers by offering email subscription), but it will certainly make a difference once your blog starts to grow.
2. Not everyone is familiar with RSS: if you are already publishing your blog it is very likely that you find new technologies such as RSS trivial, but you must bear in mind that the vast majority of the population is not so tech-savvy. There are studies, in fact, confirming that only 3% of adults and 6% of teens use RSS readers. Email subscriptions come as a natural way to fill this gap.
3. Email subscription gives you an opportunity to interact with readers: people getting your feed through RSS do not reveal anything about themselves (except what kind of reader they are using). Email subscribers, on the other hand, must leave a very valuable asset on your hand: their email! Now, while you should treat this information with privacy (i.e. affiliate offers and the like) there are certain situations where having emails from your regular readers can be useful. You could, for instance, send them a quick survey about what topics they would like to read about or what design they prefer for your blog.
Here is a list of Email subscription providers:
- Feedburner
- Feedblitz
- Zookoda
About Mark
Mark is an digital entrepreneur from New York City who recently acquired DBT. He started his ventures buying growing then selling several businesses and content blogs on Flippa. A perfect night for him constitutes pizza, wine, slow jazz and WordPress! He's an SEO expert and a growth strategist. When he's not working on his businesses he enjoys sharing his learned lessons with the DBT community.
I have used feedburner since several months ago, but now it is error. Then I try to use Feedblitz, but it did the same. When I registered to Zookoda, my e-mail have not been verified yet until this time, so I still cannot send any updates to my readers. ?
IT IS REALLY GGOD
Yeah i have just started using feedburner to offer both an RSS feed and email subscription, it is not going so well at the moment, not sure if the feed is set up correctly as it i had to code it myself in xml because its a static page.
My web designers have explained to me that having an email subscription can mean that hundreds of malicious emails are delivered to your site with resultant server problems. Can anyone tell me if this is a problem they have experience of, and if so what can be done to avoid it>
well looky here
HOLA
engtech, yeah the percentage of email subscribers will certainly be influenced by the topic of the blog, I have one blog about business and innovation where the email subscribers top 25% of the whole number.
While I understand the power and availability of RSS, the one feature it lacks in my mind is that the users are not encouraged enough to participate in discussions. (The extra clicks to post comments is enough to drop the comment rate.)
My blog is focused on software developers and therefore RSS prevails over email subscriptions by far. In fact my current relation between them is 6:1, something that clearly shows than when people is aware of available technologies, they choose better technologies (is obvious, isn’t?). I also prefer RSS over email subscription, because it’s not “intrusive” in the sense that you read your rss subscriptions when you want, versus being forced to read your subscriptions when you receive them in your email inbox.
Some things I’ve noticed in my experience
Nice tip. Email is still used on a much wider scale compared to RSS feeds or even instant messengers.
I haven’t used Zoodoko so far. But, I have used both Feedburner and Feedblitz. Both work really well.
Shawn, thanks for the comment, I just added the top three services of email subscription on the post.