If you're an e-mail subscriber to this blog, you might notice a couple of changes to your daily e-mails. This past week I spent some time working to improve the options that I offer to people who subscribe to the blog. I love the fact that some of you choose to get my posts sent straight to your inbox every day so I wanted to put some time into making it the best possible experience for you and any future e-mail subscribers.
*note: if you didn't know that you could subscribe to blogs, learn about some of the options you have for receiving updates.
What I did?
For the tech-savvy readers of the blog that want to know what exact changes I made to e-mail subscriptions, I switched from using feedburner's e-mail subscription service to using mailchimp's rss-to-email campaign service. Feedburner has a great plug and play option for e-mail subscribers but as soon as you want to control any elements of that process it becomes significantly more difficult. There were several things that I was looking at implementing as a part of my blog subscribers list so I did some research and quickly chose mailchimp as my go-to service for e-mail subscriptions.
What's new with my e-mail subscriptions?
- More options. Previously when you subscribed to get blog updates, you automatically got them everyday. As I thought about the blogs I read, I realized that sometimes I'd prefer to read blogs in chunks only once a week. Now when you sign up to get on the e-mail list you can choose the frequency of your e-mail updates.
- Give-aways. I don't have any immediate plans to do something like this, but if I ever wanted to have exclusive e-mail subscriber only give-aways switching to mailchimp would allow that to happen.
- It's sexier. I care a lot about design and feedburner's daily e-mails did not look great. Mailchimp allows me to customize the design of daily/weekly e-mails. Expect the e-mails to still be very simple, but also much easier on the eyes.
- It helps me understand you better. I want to know if you actually read the posts that I send; switching will help me do that because it gives me some great tools to better understand how you interact with the e-mails I send.
If you already are an e-mail subscriber, I hope you welcome these changes and find them helpful to your blog reading routines. If your not a subscriber you can get on the e-mail list and get updates sent straight to your inbox, you can add my feed to your RSS reader of choice, or you can just keep checking back every day.
What's your preferred method for tracking your favorite blogs? I use Google Reader.