RSS to Email: 3 Tips To Get You Started

Posted by Justin Premick

More bloggers than ever are converting RSS to email to connect with a wider audience. (Maybe you’re one of them.)

Now that the idea that RSS and email can and should coexist has taken hold, what can bloggers learn from the email marketing world and use to make RSS to email (even more) worth their while?

RSS to Email Tips

While this is by no means everything you can do to make the most of RSS to email, hopefully these tips will form a list of best practices we can all build on to better engage our blogs’ email readers.

OK, here goes…

Start With a Plan.
A number of articles I’ve read on “emailing for bloggers” (like this one) set this as the first thing you should do.

And no wonder. This is step #1 for any successful email campaign.

After all, if you don’t know why you’re converting RSS to email, you’re going to have a hard time convincing anyone to sign up, let alone deliver the kind of value that will effectively engage your readers.

Ask yourself: What is the goal of my email campaign? How will I know if I am meeting that goal?

The answers to these questions will help shape decisions about what content to include in your emails, how often you will send emails, and other tactical questions.
Decide How Often To Email (and How Much To Send In Each Email)
Frequency and scheduling aren’t typically the first things you should think about for your email newsletter.

However, with a blog I recommend thinking a bit more about them at first – especially if you have an established blog, or if you post frequently (if you haven’t gotten to that point yet, you might be better off focusing on creating content and getting potential subscribers to your blog).

And it’s important to think about how much content to send in each email – you don’t want to overload subscribers, but you want to make sure there’s enough to make opening and reading your emails worth their time.

Ask yourself: Will I send an email every time I have a new post? Once every few posts? Once a week? How much content is appropriate for one email? How many emails per week/month will my subscribers want to get?

The answers to these questions will help you decide how often to schedule your emails.
Define Why People Should Subscribe
One of my favorite lines (as anyone who has come to a webinar knows) is “Nobody wakes up and says, ‘Gee, I’d sure like to sign up for some email today.’”

If you don’t give people a good reason (better yet, several good reasons) to subscribe, well… they won’t subscribe. Even if they love your blog.

Sometimes the selling point is the simple convenience of being notified about new articles on your blog. Or only getting notified once a week instead of every time you post.

Other times it’s getting something of value that non-subscribers don’t – this tip was offered by a couple people when I asked for RSS to email tips on Twitter:

Whatever your “hook” is, clearly define it and then come up with a few (2-4) simple phrases or sentences that sell visitors on subscribing.

These will serve not only as headlines for your signup form, but also as calls to action to help you get more subscribers faster.

Use these tips to develop your own effective blog newsletter (if you’re not already doing so, you can discover why you should here and then use AWeber’s RSS to email tool to automatically turn your feed into an email newsletter).

What’s Your #1 RSS to Email Tip?

If you blog, and convert your RSS feed to email, I (and the readers of this blog) would love to hear your best-loved tip on using email with blogs effectively.

You can either share your tip here or reply to me on Twitter – your tip just might make it into a future RSS to email post here…

Tags: blog newsletters, rss to email

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6 Responses

L
November 11th, 2008 at 8:35 pm

Email for bloggers is very important. It can be a heart beat of the blog, driving traffic, engaging and creating conversations.

In my opinion, it is blogger’s opportunity to bring the blog to the reader instead of the other way around.

I’m using aweber’s newsletter service with much success to drive more traffic to my blog.
RSS to Email: 3 Tips To Get You Started « The Scrappy Email Marketer
November 13th, 2008 at 6:34 am

[...] 13, 2008 by thescrappyemailmarketer Justin over at AWeber has a great post on tips to convert RSS to email. Check it out and and as always…great stuff [...]
Daily Digest 11/14/2008 | Get A New Browser
November 13th, 2008 at 10:30 pm

[...] RSS to Email: 3 Tips To Get You Started [...]
Andrew Darlow
November 15th, 2008 at 7:51 am

Thanks for these helpful tips. Here are three tips that have helped me to add RSS to e-mail subscribers:

1. Below my main newsletter subscription form, I add another box that reads:

Get our blog posts via email:

2. After people add their name to subscribe to my newsletter, I forward them to a landing page that thanks them and asks them if they’d like to get blog updates via e-mail. It looks like this:

http://www.imagingbuffet.com/thank-you/

3. I include, under each blog post, a link for people to sign up for my newsletter or to get posts delivered via e-mail.

All the best!
Jenna
November 19th, 2008 at 11:23 pm

I’ve been publishing a monthly e-zine but I’m excited about the idea of publishing a emails directly from my blog to my subscriber lists using Aweber’s blog broadcast. Is it important to keep doing the e-zine also? It seems like a neat way to switch away from what is feeling increasingly like a cumbersome process to one that is streamlined and easy…
Can YouTube Boost Your Affiliate Sales? - Inbox Ideas: Email Marketing Tips by AWeber
December 11th, 2008 at 2:53 pm

[...] RSS to email feature, and how it can convert blog subscribers to newsletter [...]

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