EMail marketing is one of the best methods for marketing your blog and selling your product. Top bloggers use it to drive traffic to their blogs and sell products.
Recently, we moved to MailChimp and our experience with it has been great.
FeedBurner
FeedBurner is one of the most loved services for bloggers. It’s free and has lot of useful features.
Although it's not that reliable with stats but gets the job done.
Pros
- Free: FeedBurner is free for feeds as well as email updates. You can have as many subscribers as you want without paying anything.
- Simple: Like everything Google, it is simple to use and the user interface is very easy to get used to.
Cons
- Fluctuating Stats: It has become a routine now. If you have watched your blog’s stats for last 2-3 weeks, you must have noticed the fluctuations! While I understand that problems may occur with services, they should not occur so often!
- Incomplete Solution: FeedBurner is not complete solution for email marketing. Yes, it can send updates but you can’t send custom emails. You can’t even change the subscription confirmation email!
- Support: What’s the one area where Google comes up lacking? It is support. And since FeedBurner is under Google, it has non-existent support! I have had a small issue once and asked in support forums about it. No prizes for guessing that no one replied!
MailChimp
MailChimp is a superb email marketing solution that is fantastic for bloggers as well as marketers. Let’s take a look at its pros and cons.
Pros
- Features: MailChimp has loads of features. If I start writing all of them, it will be a separate post altogether, please check out MailChimp Features.
- Support: MailChimp has great support staff and problems are resolved very fast. And on top of that, there’s a superb knowledge base.
- Free Tutorials: MailChimp offers a lot of good tutorials and there are even free guides to increase your newsletter subscribers.
- Lots Of Stats: While FeedBurner stats are good, they are not very informative and it takes a full day to understand what things like “reach” are!
- Good Pricing Structures: MailChimp’s pricing structure is comparable to the similar services.There’s also a free plan that allows you to send up to 3000 mails per month and manage 500 subscribers. And not to forget that you get awesome social media features for an awesome price that no other competitor offers!
Cons
- FeedBurner Integration: MailChimp’s FeedBurner integration is not that good! We still use FeedBurner for delivering feeds and it would be great to have MailChimp report number of subscribers to FeedBurner but it doesn’t. FB stats show MailChimp as agent and subscriber count as 0 for it! I contacted both MailChimp as well as FeedBurner. FeedBurner didn’t respond while MailChimp said it’s FB issue!
It’s hard to find many negatives with MailChimp; the only con may be a personal issue or it may be affecting just FB integration.
Which Way To Go?
I won’t answer this as the choice is obvious and the only factor to consider is your wallet. But the price is justified and then you can use MailChimp for free if you have under 500 subscribers!
Which service do you use for email delivery? And how’s your experience with it?
Sign Up And Get $30
If you sign up for a non-free MailChimp account now, you will get $30 credited as Monkey Rewards in your MailChimp account. That's 3 month cost for a list up to 500 subscribers and allows you to send unlimited mails! Click here to sign up.