Auto-generated emails are a cheap and simple way to add more value to your message
Audience is the lifeblood of every publication, whether online, in print or on television. The success or failure of a publication depends on maintaining an audience, so you should always be giving readers a reason to stick around—like more value.
Publications are businesses, though, and you can’t give away the farm to sell a cow. You have to balance costs with value delivered. You should seize every opportunity that delivers more value to your audience with little or no extra cost to you.
That’s why we want to mention FeedBuner Email.
FeedBurner is a free RSS feed service that is loaded with features, one of which is FeedBurner Email. This feature will automatically send every RSS feed update in an email to a separate list for free.
This is a great way for you to start emailing your audience, giving them more value, with little or no cost to you. It essentially adds an email newsletter to your RSS feed for no cost, as long as you are using FeedBurner.
The idea, according to FeedBurner Vice President for Publisher Services Rick Klau, is to branch your audience beyond readers that are comfortable with RSS feeds.
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Most internet users are familiar with email, but not everyone is aware of RSS feeds, Klau said. Offering both formats will help prevent limiting your audience.
FeedBurner Email is limited and fairly bare bones, though. Publishers cannot control how often emails are sent because they are automatically generated when content is loaded to a feed, preventing a daily publication from emailing its list only once a week.
“You can adjust the time of day the email goes out, but you may not alter the 24-hour interval between emails…[but] if you don’t update for three days, then there is no email to send,” explained Klau.
The emails look similar to this and can be sent in text or HTML. Publishers can control the template’s font, font size, font color and logo for the HTML version. The email is also sent from a publisher-specified email address.
Unlike FeedBurner’s reporting for the over 800,000 RSS feeds it serves, its email service does not offer any metrics like open rate.
FeedBurner Email is too limited for hard-core email marketers, but it is great for a busy publisher looking to better serve an audience. It is totally automated after adding some lines of code, and its simplicity leaves few chances for mistakes.
If you’d like to explore FeedBurner Email, you simply add a few lines of code to your webpages to get the subscription box on them and start building a list.
In case you missed it, Google recently acquired FeedBurner, which has the possibility of exploding their already high level of service.
“It’s been a tremendous couple of months,” Klau said. “I truly couldn’t be more excited about what the acquisition has meant in terms of what we’re going to be able to do for our publishers.”
Klau declined to comment on any specific FeedBurner services to be added, but he did say “over the next six to 12 months our publishers will see incredible growth in what we can do and how we can help.”
