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A FeedBlitz Branding Experiment ...

Tuesday, April 25, 2006

An experiment over the next few days; comments welcome. "Pro" users can modify the subject lines of their emails, standard publishers can't. The standard email used to have "[FeedBlitz]" at the front to show that it was a legitimate email from a trusted service.

From today, however, we're going to drop the "[FeedBlitz]" from the subject line for a while as an experiment. If you have an opinion as to whether we should make this change permanent, please comment below. Personally, I think it makes the update subject lines more anonymous and thus less likely to attract attention and be read. On the other hand, it may make them look less "spammy" and so increase the likelihood that a reader will open the update.

Do you prefer this way or the old way? Don't give a hoot either way? Go ahead and let us know in the comments. Meanwhile, if you're tracking open rates, see if they improve or decline in the next few days. We'll give this a week or so to run.

   

Table of contents added for standard RSS to email updates

In our ongoing drive to continually improve the experience for your readers, FeedBlitz will now add tables of contents (TOC) to standard emails. There are two sets of TOCs:
  • For the email as a whole, linking to the blogs within it
  • For each blog, linking to the entries within it
Each TOC will appear when there is more than one of the relevant entries to navigate to. To show you how it works, there will be at least two posts today to the FeedBlitz blog so that subscribers will be able to see the multiple-post index appearing. The index also appears on the preview page and test emails.

Or take a look at the preview for this blog: http://www.feedblitz.com/f/f.fbz?PreviewFeed=http://feeds.feedburner.com/feedblitz

   

Subscriber import available for all FeedBlitz customers

Sunday, April 23, 2006

The subscriber import facility is now available for standard as well as premium customers. There have been no issues at the premium level, so we're making it possible for everyone to migrate their existing lists over.

To import your subscribers visit your feed management page at www.feedblitz.com/f?Lists and click the subscribers icon for the feed you want to import subscribers into. You will see a new option to import readers into that list on the page that appears.

   

Sent and post count tracking added to FeedBlitz real-time analytics

Monday, April 10, 2006

More real-time analytics for all FeedBlitz newsletter bloggers. Available now to all with about a week's worth of history, you can track how many subscribers were mailed with each issue, and how many posts were in that mailing. The links are:

Sent (number of subscribers mailed): http://www.feedblitz.com/f/f.fbz?Analyze=3&format=1&cat=0&feed=-1&link=-1&range=7

Post counts (number of entries in each mailing): http://www.feedblitz.com/f/f.fbz?Analyze=4&format=1&cat=0&feed=-1&link=-1&range=7

All feature interactive drill down by clicking on the right portion of the chart.

   

Pro Users Gain Custom Confirmation Page

Friday, April 07, 2006

As you all probably know by now, FeedBlitz Pro users gain the following capabilities:
  • Custom look and feel for outbound emails
  • Customized from / reply to addresses
  • Customized subject lines
Your Pro template design is used by FeedBlitz in several places:
  • Emails to subscribers
  • Subscription verification screens
  • Hosted signup forms
  • Master templates (for Pro Plus subscribers)
Today we added an additional capability: Your Pro template is now used on subscription confirmation landing pages. (The landing page is the one the user reaches when they click the verification link in the email sent by the subscription process (that's the dual or confirmed opt-in part)). Before today, the confirmation page always used the standard FeedBlitz look and feel, no matter what level of service you were using; for Pro publishers it's now your look and feel instead.

What this ultimately means for Pro publishers is very simple: All necessary subscriber interactions now use your Pro design template. Neat.

   

Improved subject lines and publisher notifications

Tuesday, April 04, 2006

A couple of quick updates to let FeedBlitz publishers know about today:

1) The single post subject line for standard service users has changed from "There is 1 new post in <blogname>" to include the title of the entry itself: "<the item title> from <blogname>" - this is a change to improve open rates for standard users.

2) Subscriber activity email notifications for publishers are now actually useful. Previously you were told that a user had started the signify process, but that was it - not a lot of value there, let's be honest. Now fixed: As of today, publishers will be emailed a notification when a reader completes the signup process. In addition, unsubscribe notifications will now be sent , as long as the notification email option is enabled. To get the big picture, try combining these notifications with FeedBlitz's real-time subscriber analytics.

   

FeedBlitz adds email open tracking to real-time analytics

Saturday, April 01, 2006

To answer the question: are your readers opening the updates? FeedBlitz adds real-time open tracking. Set it on in your feed's settings, like the click-through and subscriber activity analyses. You can see the resulting analytic reports using the same "pie chart" icon option as before. As with all the real-time email metrics, open tracking reports give you the choice of:
  • Different time ranges from today to all time.
  • For all feeds, individual feeds and metric-dependent detail.
  • Chart type.
Each analysis also comes with a table showing the data in text as well as graphically. The open reports split the data down by poll cycle (e.g. nightly), the date of the update (e.g. nightly 2006.03.31) and the day the user opened the update. For privacy reasons only aggregate user data is available; we are not showing publishers which individual clicked on which link or who opened which update.

While tracking opens is a useful metrics to measure, a quick word of warning is merited. Junk filters tend to view open tracking as being hostile and potentially a violation of the reader's privacy. While FeedBlitz isn't using an invisible web bug for this, it is possible that enabling open tacking will reduce your deliverability. Additionally, it only works for HTML mails which enable image downloads. Users who block images or who read the text version cannot be tracked, so your open rate is likely to under-report somewhat. What is therefore important with open tracking is, if you use it, for you to watch the trend more closely than the absolute numbers.

Better quality, real-time and interactive email analytics. Available for all publishers now.

P.S. Subscriber analytics have been updated as well for an extra level of detail. You can now click on the status change values for each feed to drill into the activity for just that status (e.g. to only show unsubscribes, for example).

   


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