April 28th, 2006
FeedBurner Email Subscription Service
While my primary email subscription service is still FeedBlitz, I’ve started experimenting on FeedBurner’s own email subscription service on one of my blogs after a positive review from TechCrunch. The verdict: Not so good.
Admittedy, the blog branding aspect of FeedBurner’s email solution is way better than its competition, e.g. FeedBlitz, since all FeedBurner advertising is right at the end of your emails. In comparison, there’s a pretty huge FeedBlitz plug at the very start of each email sent by them. Moreover, HTML and CSS rendering seems to work better in FeedBurner than FeedBlitz, where indentation can get really screwy at times.
But, subscriber management is a pain in FeedBurner. Subscriber lists are easily importable and exportable in FeedBlitz while FeedBurner has yet to implement an automated means of importing subscribers. Furthermore, you can easily have list views of your subscribers and their email addresses in FeedBlitz, and can therefore, easily add and remove them from your list.
Last but not least, let’s not forget that when using FeedBurner’s email service, you lose the overall top-down view of all your email subscriptions (i.e. list of feeds with number of subscribers), not unlike the one you see for your RSS feeds when logging into FeedBurner’s My Feeds page.
So, until FeedBurner makes its email subscription service more “independent” of its current RSS feed service (with all the features that comes with such independence, e.g. easy subscriber list importing, top-down view of email subscribers), it’s unlikely I’ll be switching over from FeedBlitz. Oh yes, did I forget that integration with its current RSS feed service shouldn’t be sacrificed in the process of making its email subscription service more independent?
Tough trying to be the best, isn’t it?
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3 Comments
April 28th, 2006 at 11:20 am
There’s a debate right now at the FeedBlitz blog about one aspect of the FeedBLitz branding (which of course can be customized by you for a small monthly fee, but is another thing you cannot do in FeedBurner). Current sentiment, perhaps unexpectedly, leans towards retaining the branding in the subject line. Intersting market perspective: http://feedblitz.blogspot.com/2006/04/feedblitz-branding-experiment.html
Phil
April 28th, 2006 at 11:49 am
Thanks for the feedback. We definitely plan to offer more subscriber list management features in subsequent releases (import, export, view/manage, etc.). There has been some discussion of some of those features in the comments on our announcement post for the service – http://www.burningdoor.com/feedburner/archives/001793.html.
Regarding your comment on top-down view of subscribers, the number of email subscribers is built in to our standard subscriber stats for feeds (just like the other partner services FeedBlitz and Squeet), organized for comparison with aggregators, browsers, etc. Though I suspect you are looking for something more prominent and “independent”.
Again thanks for the feedback and visit us again after we release a few more features, hopefully we will address most of the points you are bringing up.
April 28th, 2006 at 12:13 pm
Remarkable response time, on both sides too. In both cases, I’ve actually read the posts referred to, but thanks for the tips.
Phil: Not much of a surprise there really, and I feel just that one change can bring FeedBlitz from good to great. Of course, your marketing-types might think otherwise.
Chris: Yeah, I am looking for something more “independent”, lol. It’s just a personal gripe really, but having an overall top-down view feels much better in the morning when you log on for your stats.
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