Everyone I coach uses FeedBurner’s email option in addition to the RSS Button. Some folks (depending on their business), have a majority of readers subscribing via email.

Last week, I overheard two subscribers to one blog discussing the email subscription:

One subscriber said, "I never get the email updates. When does do they get sent?"

"Early in the morning, about the same time all that spam hits your box." said the other subscriber, "Maybe you’ve been deleting the emails."

Interesting.

Then this morning, another blogger asked how to switch the time on FeedBurner’s email delivery options. Hmm.  There’s probably more of you out there thinking similarly, so let’s answer the how…then the why.

If you’re using FeedBurner’s email option and have it active (and you should), here’s the path your mouse clicks should take:

1. Login to Feedburner
2. Top Navigation tabs, choose Publicize
3. Side Navigation, choose Email Subscriptions (make this active if it isn’t already)
4. Sub Nav, choose Delivery Options (the last of four options)

Here, you can select your time zone and a two-hour delivery window.  I would suggest late in the day, maybe the afternoon (giving your readers a break from their long day’s work — while it looks like they’re still working).

If you choose the 5 AM – 7AM slot, you may be caught in a traffic jam, trash bin slam when your readers arrive to their desktop.

When I work with someone, I give new RSS users a goal of subscribing to 20-40 RSS feeds, as well as a few search terms important to their own business.

After awhile, I teach them how to Prune their RSS habits. Man, reading feeds can become addictive – so I coach against the addiction.

The third step – and only after they’ve built some scanning muscles – is what I call the Skim, Scan & Save method of reading feeds.  Almost every aggregator has a "save" feature. Google Reader calls it "Starred Items."

As you read your feeds, starting with the headlines and moving fast, save those you will want to digest further (and later). Go back three or four times a week (or daily) and get the full dose of those items you save.

I subscribe to around 600 feeds. I don’t come close to reading every item, but I save and look closely at about 200-300 items each week. Considering many bloggers post multiple times each day, I’ll weed out 2/3 of the feed items by using the Skim, Scan & Save method.

If I miss something important, someone will blog about it (usually with a better headline or a few eye rests in the post).

How do you digest your feeds?

Photo on Flickr by _chance_

One of my mantras is "Search Once and Subscribe" – a way to use RSS feeds to monitor what people are saying about you, your company, your clients, your customers….you get the idea. 

If knowledge is power and time is money, then MORE KNOWLEDGE + LESS TIME seems a good business equation.

I’ve been looking forward to playing with Andy and TJ’s new tool, Fresh Feeds:

"Fresh Feeds is not a search engine. Fresh Feeds is an awareness engine . It finds recent items published, mostly in
the new media realm, and packages the results up in an RSS feeds and delivers it
to the subscriber"

Smart companies will know what’s being said in the Conversphere about anything that’s important to their business. Fresh Feeds will help them gain that knowledge easily.

(This article originally written for IowaBiz, July ’07)

Is email marketing dead?  Not entirely, but it’s changing. And RSS might be taking its place in the batting order.

Raise your hand if you’ve ever deleted an email newsletter that you subscribed to. Everyone (that’s honest) has their hand raised.  Sometimes we delete pieces we still want to subscribe to, we just don’t have time this issue, right?

Raise your hand if you’ve ever tried to unsubscribe to an email newsletter (how frustrating is that process?), and after unsuccessful attempts, just decided it would be easier to keep deleting the darned thing.

One company I work with shared these numbers with me:

1) Subscriber List: 3,348; Open-Rate: 326 (9.7%)

2) Subscriber List: 620; Reach: 198 (22.3%)

The top numbers are from their email list. They confessed the list isn’t 100% opt-in, they’ve added roughly half the addresses from various other sources (shame on them).  I’m sure the numbers would be higher had they not dilluted the process.

The bottom numbers are from their blog’s RSS feed. 100% opt-in. (Note: Open-Rate and Reach are pretty much the same thing. How many users actually opened the item)

Here’s one thing not told above. They send an email blast once or twice each month (total of 652 opened email each month). They update their blog an average of 3 times each week (total of 594 opened feed items each week).

The email service charges a small monthly fee. The RSS feed service is free.

An email newsletter can still be effective. However, RSS is proving to be at least as effective – maybe more so. With the recent addition of Feedburner to the Google family of tools, the measurement of RSS will become an integral part of your company’s web strategy.

Related Articles Elsewhere:
- What the Heck is RSS? by Brian Clark
– Email Open Rates Guide by Mark Brownlow
– And There Was Much Rejoicing… by FeedBurner

Related Books
- Web Analytics by Avinash Kaushik
- Email Marketing by the Numbers by Chris Baggott