FeedBlitz Email Review

Today I am reviewing FeedBlitz. This is my third in a series of reviews on email broadcasting services. FeedBlitz is yet another free web-hosted email broadcasting service. It offers more features than FeedBurner, but fewer features than Zookoda (unless you want to upgrade and part with some money). Of the three services I tested so far, FeedBlitz appears to be the most reliable (more about this in this post).

Set-up

Setting up the newsletter requires just entering the feed source. After that, just copy and paste the subscription code to your site. FeedBlitz does offer a nifty feature — a text link for signing up subscribers. You can insert this alternative link in place of the subscription form. Comes in real handy in email messages and places where a form won't work.

Subscribe

The sign-up process, like FeedBurner, has three steps: (1) enter email address, (2) image verification to screen out bots, and (3) confirmation email. Here is strange note I saw during the second step: "Important: You must accept cookies from www.feedblitz.com to be verified." I'm not sure why cookies are needed to sign-up for a free newsletter. Is the cookie used to track subscribers? As far as I know, Zookoda and FeedBurner do not require cookies to sign up for a newsletter. [Update from FeedBlitz: "...we use cookies everywhere to track your login state etc. It's used on the image verification to avoid replay attacks (where a spammer repeatedly uses the same image and text to add bogus entries)."]

Navigation

Navigating through the FeedBlitz dashboard can get confusing. Sometimes I have to click around quite a bit before I discover the right sequence of links to click on. In addition, there's a link labeled, "Subscriber import" on the My FeedBlitz nav bar. However, if you click on it, the link leads you to an April 23rd post about the subscriber import being a standard feature at FeedBlitz. Heeellloooo. I'm logged in and I'm using the publisher's dashboard. If I click on a subscriber import link, I want to go to the area where I can actually import my lists. I don't really want to read a post about it now being a standard feature on FeedBlitz.

Details

In the Details menu, you can set up a bunch of stuff for your newsletter. With FeedBlitz, you can set the maximum post length, teaser text (ie – "read the entire post"), enable click and open email tracking, and enable sign-up notifications. You can also add a question for the newsletter sign-up if you want to limit the types of people who can sign-up for your newsletter. For instance, my subscription form is setup to ask if you are a goof ball. If you're not a goof ball, you can't sign-up for my newsletter. I'm not sure why this section wasn't included in the initial setup of the newsletter. I didn't even know about this section until 25.34 seconds ago. [FeedBlitz comment: "Challenge question - this is a new feature for a client in the alcohol industry. Their question is age related, no surprises there, and is required to at least ensure that subscribers have acknowledged the constraint. It keeps their lawyers and regulators happy. Hope that makes it clearer as to why it's there."]

In the Details section, you can also setup the service as an autoresponder. This is not a feature you normally see in a feed-to-email service. I didn't have time to play with this feature, but if you are looking for an autoresponder, FeedBlitz has it.

Subscribers

You can view a list of your subscribers online or export them (OPML or tab delimited file). You can also import subscribers to your list by either typing them into a text box on their site or by uploading a file. There's no info on what types of file you can import. I was able to upload both csv and tab delimited text files. However, FeedBlitz will not allow you to import generic email addresses like info@ken.com.

Emails are sent to the list of people you imported. The emails just tell people that they have been moved to a different email service. They don't have to do anything unless they want to unsubscribe. FeedBlitz gives you the ability to customize the notification email. Note: the customizations are not saved so you have to recustomize the notification email each time you do an import.

Reports

With FeedBlitz, you can view reports on click-throughs, open analysis, subscription changes, sent analysis, sent analysis, and post counts. I didn't play around with the reports, but publishers have the ability to drill down the stats.

Branding

FeedBlitz is plastered all over the email. Its in the from field and in about six different places in the email, including an in-your-face FeedBlitz logo. Even worst, the service indirectly promotes other newsletter and sites to your subscribers ("Find related content to this feed using FeedAdvisor" and "FeedAdvisor searches The Subscription Web, built by FeedBlitz subscribers"). [Response from FeedBlitz: "FeedAdvisor is a service like Amazon's 'other people who bought this book also bought ....' That's it. Many readers find that useful, not a downside. You can opt out of the results (i.e. hide) in the free service and premium customers can suppress the recommendations in the emails."]

Upgrades

FeedBlitz does offer a couple upgrade options. For about $5 per month per feed, you can customize your email to your liking. Been itching for a polka-dotted design? Now you can by upgrading to their Pro service. FeedBlitz also has a Turbo upgrade for publishers want to customize the broadcast schedule. The Turbo upgrade will cost you about $10 per month per feed.

Conclusion

FeedBlitz offers more features than FeedBurner, but fewer free features than Zookoda. If you don't like someone else's name all over your email, then FeedBlitz is not for you. If you need an autoresponder or if reliability is a big concern for you, FeedBlitz is the service for you.