COMMENTS
This corresponds with our experience at Cambridge Innovation Center, where our email subscription reaches roughly 100 people for every person who is on our RSS feed.
Many blogging platforms come with built in RSS feeds. But what's the easiest approach for putting together & managing an email list & version of the updates for email subscribers? Any particularly good plugins for WordPress or Drupal?
David
ResidentialSolar101.org
@David - there are a variety of ways to turn blogging platforms into email list generators, from Google's free FeedBurner (no corporate support of course and features that are limited for a true email marketer), to tools like my company's (full disclosure - I'm the founder) like
FeedBlitz.
Adding these tools is pretty easy and fast.
Phil Hollows
Founder
FeedBlitz, LLC
www.feedblitz.com
Twitter: @phollows
Thanks Phil! I'll check out FeedBlitz now.
-David
RSS is still a bit esoteric for most mainstream people so they don't know where to get started. Also, most people use their inbox as reminders, so they end up falling behind with a reader.
The social aspects are the only reason I use a reader.
Ryan
Same can be said of subscribers to our blog deBugged, we have many more email subscribers that RSS.
I totally agree with Ryan that its easier to keep up with an email subscription.
There's a bigger point here that everyone's missing for business. Email subscribers are leads; you can target, segment, brand and personalize. You can't do any of that with RSS. That's why email subscriptions are a better choice for businesses to promote - there's much, much greater value for the business in an email subscription than for RSS.
Phil
www.feedblitz.com
Glad to see this is being "revealed". I gave up on RSS a long time ago. The biggest part of my feed 'mess' was the time needed to delete the unread information from subscribing to everything but only having enough time for some things.
Bottom line. I am always in my e-mail so if you want my attention and I think it is worth the time to receive the update in my inbox I am a MUCH more qualified reader and potential lead.
Otherwise, a feed is just part of the increasing level of noise that we all have to sift through daily.
It's important to note that services that offer RSS feeds delivered via email are a fantastic way to streamline your content (Blog content is delivered as an email). Services like Feedblitz and MailChimp offer terrific ways to meet your readers' needs and reduce the level of effort necessary to distribute your content and information.
We use both on our site, but I personally prefer email for the content that I know I am going to want to read. All the ancillary material I eventually want to get into, gets diverted to RSS
I offer email and feed on my blog/site. I also offer following with Google Friend Connect. I like seeing all the little faces of course but I have no idea what following a blog or site this way really means. Can someone explain? Thanks!
Also, a question for Phil at Feedblitz: Is there a way to count or to see my Feedblitz RSS subscribers...or only my email subscribers? Thanks!
If you use our RSS services (a FeedBurner alternative) we track RSS stats - views, reach etc for you and the results are visible at RSS | Reports.
RSS doesn't report individual emails so a service like FeedBlitz can't see *who* is subscribing through major aggregators like Google Reader. Which is why RSS is a poor lead generation tool for business - you're too removed from the consumer of your information, whereas you're not with email and with visitors to your site. RSS is great as a vehicle to push articles out to subscribersm, don't get mne wrong, but if you want to be a more proactive, targeted marketer it's something of a dead end.
@Julie - forgot to mention, your email subscribers are visible at FeedBlitz via Newsletters | Subscribers | View Subscribers.
Phil, many thanks. I'll check the RSS Reports you mention. I use your 'view subscribers' to track subscribers and it's super helpful. I always recommend FeedBlitz to friends for their blogs and sites. Thank you!
Great post guys.
Given that most folks sign up for email subscriptions, I wonder how many of your customers are doing email marketing to optimize sales and better understand what their customers want.
In other words, it's one thing to convert RSS to email (as with Feedburner) and automate blog broadcasts. But it's another thing all together to have muptiple opt-in email lists targeted towards specific behaviors (downloading a free ebook vs purchasing a product).
@John Haydon - you can target behaviors in FeedBlitz by settings up "traditional" mailings as well as automated ones and have groups subscrieb to them instead. We'll even autaomtically create a subscriber preference center for you. But, if you have a targeted list of subscribers, you can (if you wish) send them updates from your blog, filtered by tag, that sends them only updates on specific topics. And we (FeedBlitz) have autoresponders too, so you can reward any subscription with a link to a PDF, for example.
Phil
Phil,
Good to know. But Feedburner doesn't do all that, right?
John
David - does your blog have an email subscription? ;-)
@John Haydon: No, they don't, which is why those with more sophisticated needs - or simply want support - head our way.
I can definitely vouch for Feedblitz offerings! Terrific flexibility that I've used on several client blogs. Great product, Phil!
@Deana: Thank you! Please feel free to repeat your remarks on Twiiter, your blog etc :-)
But seriously, thank you - our pleasure. More good stuff on the way.
I am not surprised that email reader subscriptions are 12x times more than rss subscriptions. RSS readers like Google reader lack 'delete' and 'archive' functionality which is necessary for controlling information overload. SO it feels inconvenient reading lots of rss items that still stay as 'read' in the rss inbox. So people naturally prefer a medium where they can delete what they have read, that is email.
Interesting data! Personally, I've noticed that I have more RSS subscribers than email subscribers. But I always get excited to see the number in email subscribers increase. From time to time, my email subscribers do tend to respond to an article with an emailed response as opposed to a direct comment on the blog (I always find this interesting).
The other part that I'm focusing on growing is my newsletter. I've yet to determine a mailing frequency... For now, the goal is to increase the subscriber base here...
Thank you for this article! While many of my readers are peers within the Internet marketing industry, just as many are small business owners. By a 2 to 1 margin email subscriptions top rss in general, and among business owners, its 8 out of 10 that chose email.
What further matters to me is that I get more return traffic through email subscribers than RSS. Lots more.
It frustrates me when I go to a new blog that I find fascinating, only to discover there's no email subscription option. I sincerely hope that changes.
Thanks for everyone's thoughtful comments! After reviewing what you guys discussed, I think it may be helpful for me to do two things: explain the data analysis methodology and provide specific examples of websites with a much higher number of e-mail than RSS subscriptions.
1. Data Analysis Methodology
@App Developer: thanks for raising good questions on the data! Customers included in this study are predominantly North American companies, with few exceptions.
We decided to merge similar industries such as non-profit and government primarily for obtaining larger and thus more representative sample sizes, which to us are important for drawing more objective conclusions. The charts are designed to provide a comprehensive overview of general trends across major industries—it is possible that we find more nuanced trends within more narrowly-defined sectors.
2. Specific Examples
Some viewers requested specific examples of sites with significantly more e-mail than RSS subscriptions, and here we list a few in hope of providing you a more concrete idea of the types of businesses with success in e-mail subscription:
www.link2exchange.com
http://www.rouradermsurgery.com/
http://www.green-leads.com/
http://www.kenlauher.com/
Lastly, I’d like to share my thoughts on various benefits of using e-mail and RSS.
@Phil: I agree that e-mail subscription gives the company—the e-mail sender—more control over leads and thus is more fit for business promotion. On the flip side, as App Developer mentioned, RSS gives recipients—leads—more control over the content they subscribe to. The difference between the two parallels that between outbound and inbound marketing: whereas leads give a company one-time permissions (by clicking “subscribe”) to sell its message to them, RSS subscription allows people to more actively select contents of interest and thus voluntarily find out about a company.
These comments represent my personal view based on analysis of the data put together by the HubSpot team. As a novice to the online marketing world, I’m also exploring different tools and welcome questions, feedback, and suggestions!
Thanks for your participation in the blog post and hope to produce better ones in the future.
As one of the examples listed by Lily, I'll just add that the simple "subscribe" box at the top of Green Leads'
B2B Blog is our most active call to action/conversion event for the site. So RSS feed or not, it continues to gather audience and long term...leads.
Great post. I added the e-mail subscriptions as soon as Wordpress made it available. Still, I haven't had lots of e-mail subscribers yet. Any ideas on how to promote it beyond the subscription button on the sidebar? A lot more subscribe to the comments than to the blog itself!
I'd be interested to know what the "open" rate is for RSS vs. email. I know I've subscribed via RSS to many blogs but never open my reader to read them. I read all my email though.
@Mike Bennet - that's your clue. Put a "subscribe by mail to this blog" link or form next to the "subscribe to comments" button and / or at the foot of the comments too. If that's where they're signing up, take advantage of it.