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Feedburner Stops Email Services – Switch to Follow.it Now
Google announced that they will terminate Feedburner’s email subscription feature in July 2021 [Update Aug 1st 2022: email subscriptions have now stopped for good]. This leaves many bloggers & website owners wondering: what service to switch to?
Why follow.it is the best Feedburner alternative
If you don’t know follow.it yet, please have a look at our intro.
Here are the key reasons why you should switch to follow.it:
- Reliable email delivery: Emails land in inbox, not spam folders, due to follow.it’s excellent sender reputation
- Mature: follow.it (and its predecessor SpecificFeeds) has been around for over 5 years
- Free: follow.it’s “Basic”-plan includes many features, allows unlimited followers & emails, and is 100% free; optional premium plans are priced very fairly
- Used by many: follow.it is used by over 100,000 websites
- Cool filter options: Your followers can do much more with your feed, e.g. see Techcrunch’s follow page as example
- More delivery channels: It’s not only email – followers have a choice of delivery channels which include RSS, news page, Telegram, and several others to be available soon
- Legal compliance: We take legal matters seriously, esp. see our Privacy Policy and learn about our GDPR compliance
- Integrations: You can use Zapier with follow.it, e.g. to sync your followers’ emails to your other email applications or CRM
- Excellent reviews: We’re getting very positive feedback from our users, such as the highly tech-savvy AppSumo community
- Use pop ups for free: MyPopUps is free for all follow.it users
- Multiple languages: follow.it is already available in several languages (you can see them at the bottom right on here), and we’ll keep translating it into more
- Keep innovating: We’re only getting started – have a look at the planned enhancements on our Product Roadmap
- Excellent documentation & support: In addition to our thorough documentation, we take pride in our top notch customer support. Whenever you have a question, just ask! We’ll respond swiftly.
For a general introduction, please have a look at the video our friends at AppSumo created:
FAQ
Sounds cool! How can I switch?
To make it super-easy for you, we’re happy to walk you through the process step by step. Just sign up here, and then email us, stating a) the email address you used for the sign-up, and b) your website addresse(s) (urls).
If you want to do it on your own (it’s quite easy) please have a look at our documentation how to switch from Feedburner to follow.it.
How do the emails (which my followers receive) look?
This depends on how you selected it. Some publishers prefer “Headlines only”, in which case it will look like this, and others prefer “Full stories” in which case the entire content (as provided by your RSS feed) gets used, ending up looking like this.
The followers I move from Feedburner to follow.it – will they have to confirm their subscription (again)?
No – users you import are immediately active, i.e. will receive updates from your feed without receiving a separate email where they are asked to confirm it.
However, in the content emails which are sent (when you publish a new story) your followers will see an additional line at the top as long as they haven’t confirmed it. If you don’t want to show this extra line, you can get in touch with us and provide evidence that the imported users have subscribed to your site previously. Then we will remove this extra line.
Do I get a subscription form to place on my site?
Yes of course. We offer subscription forms, follow-icons, and also pop-ups in collaboration with MyPopUps. To get the code for your subscription form, go to https://follow.it/ni, enter your website url, and follow the steps.
How come it’s free?
In case you wonder about our business model, it’s made out of two parts:
A) On the „Basic“-plan which is free (allowing unlimited followers & emails) we place a Suggested reading section with other content the reader might be interested in. However, this is at the very bottom of the emails only (i.e. all your content comes first) and they are not annoying to your readers. The „Super-cool“ plan (which is very fairly priced, you can simulate it on the pricing screen) doesn’t contain those.
B) While the „Basic“-plan already has a lot of features for free, we do hope that at some point you’ll decide to upgrade to one of our premium plans because you enjoy the service so much 🙂
How are you better than other providers?
In a nutshell, if you are planning to create beautiful, hand-crafted newsletters which contain separate content from the content you post on your site, there are a few decent options out there. However, if you’re interested in alerting your subscribers about your latest posts automatically, without any effort, and with the main aim for them to notice your content, and come back to your site to read it (and increase your website traffic accordingly), then we think follow.it is the best option on the market.
Here are more specific points to support the above:
- We optimized the entire process to get visitors back to your site (see here)
- We’ll get you more active subscribers, while still adhering to the law in all countries, see our patented Smart opt-in process
- We give your subscribers more options to follow you – for example, have a look at the follow page of the Techcrunch feed: Users cannot only follow you by email, but several other channels as well (which we’ll further expand soon, see our Product Roadmap) which means more ways to follow you, more chances of seeing your updates
- Our pricing is better: Apart from our generous free plan, our premium plans are priced very fairly
- We take pride in our top support (you won’t get that level of attention at a large provider)
- Etc. (please have a look at the points at the beginning of this article)
Can I first try it out myself before I offer it to my readers?
Yes you can! Just spin up a demo website on TasteWP by clicking here, and then place the subscription form code (or icons) which you got after entering your website url on https://follow.it/ni.
My question isn’t covered here – what can I do?
You can browse through our documentation, check out the Q&A on AppSumo, contact us via our contact form, or chat with us by using the chat app at the bottom right.
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