I’ve been blogging for some time now, and one of the best aspects of blogs – being easily syndicated via RSS feeds, has one big downfall: about 80% of the people in the world have no idea what RSS Feeds are. Enter Feedburner, a great service, recently acquired by Google, that takes RSS feeds and makes them able to be subscribed to via email – a technology anyone can appreciate. We have used Feedburner for a long time now, and recently we found a service that seems to leave it in the dust…along with many of the other email services out there like Constant Contact and iContact which cater to more sophisticated email newsletters.
MailChip is an online email marketing service not unlike Contant Contact or iContant, but offers the ability to send out newsletters pulled from RSS feeds, just like Feedburner. And the best part is the price. It’s about half of the price of Constant Contact and iContact and has just about all the great features, like very nicely-designed email templates and the ability to manually sign up subscribers to your list, which Feedburner (also free) lacks.
MailChip has the ability to also track user actions via Google Analytics, which is…wonderful. Not to mention it’s very easy to use and is FREE for those out there with 100 subscribers or less. And if you have more than that, $10 a month is enough to get you rolling, which is less than most other enewsletter options out there.
So, we’re going to give MailChip a try and I have a feeling it’s going to become the RSS email syndication service of preference that we’ll be recommending to our clients from now on.