Why have I selected Aweber as my newsletter software over the free service from FeedBurner or FeedBlitz? I have thought a fair bit about this before taking the plunge, particularly because making a choice between fee and free is never easy for someone with a tight budget! Perhaps my thinking might help someone else who is considering email for their blog.
One of the decisions I had to make when considering setting up my new newsletter was should I use FeedBurner, look at using Feedblitz or find some other newsletter software.
FeedBurner has several advantages
- I know it well
- It could be nice to have a visible subscriber count chicklet
- It’s free!
- Less maintenance, just post to the blog
- Easy to implement, copy and paste, job done
- Subscribers trust it
- Easy to subscribe to
The problem is those advantages were outweighed by the following 10 points against using FeedBurner and in favour of Aweber
- There is zero customisation available with FeedBurner – not even the email subject! [EDIT: It now allows email subject to change]
- You can not personalise, not even “Hi Chris”
- People using various email services have complained about FeedBurner delivered emails being buggy – their support staff were curteous but if your program can not render it there is no fix available
- I wanted both an email newsletter plus an article sequence. As well as news I will be sending out a series of educational posts
- Down the line I will want to segment the list further, not something I can do even in a limited fashion with FeedBurner
- Services like Aweber have unparralleled delivery rates, I don’t want to take any chances
- I have complete control over look and feel, even down to being able to write seperate HTML and plain versions
- Provision for “thank you” pages etc allows me to see where people struggle or drop out – I am a testing and stats geek 🙂
- Scheduling is under my control, with FeedBurner and competitors there is either no control or limited
- In future I will be able to import subscribers and add them manually, for example from business card drops at conferences etc
To top it all Aweber have introduced a service that can read your RSS and post it out to subscribers.
Sorry FeedBurner, for this goal only a full service list would do!
Which email list management software do you use? Let me know in the comments …
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