A Free Email Subscription Marketing Service Or A Paid One?

Email subscription marketing is one thing that must not be neglected by any web publisher (big or small) who really wants to suck the juicy benefits that comes with it. One common way people get traffic and increased page views to their blogs or websites is through email subscription by readers. Visitors are turned into readers when they subscribe to your site’s update using their email address and they in turn, are automatically notified via their email each time you publish a new update.

That said, the pressing question which this article holds is – would you rather stick to a free email  subscription marketing service or go for a paid one? I decided to make this article interactive so that you get the chance to share your experiences and equally offer suggestions alongside other readers.

After several months of collecting email subscription requests using feedburner email subscription service, I came to an understanding that the need to throw open a discussion of this kind in an article is of high importance.

Let’s just put it this way, there are basically two blogging platforms that are highly embraced by many web publishers which you should know are Blogger and WordPress. My belief is that if you are reading this article, you are either publishing with Blogger or WordPress platform. Personally, I have been on Blogger, and one of the common free email subscription platforms readily available for all Blogger publishers is Feedburner Email Subscription Service. WordPress blogs on the other hand use it, but majority which I have seen use other services like Aweber, Mailchimp and the host of others. The differences in there services is what I am mostly concerned with.

I have subscribed to couple of blogs using free and paid email subscription services, and have seen areas where service upgrade especially that of email branding and delivery are needed. Unfortunately, for free email services, such service upgrades are never available for users. This also have to do with how subscribers are guided starting from the time they submit their email address to when they finally verify and confirm their email subscription to a site.

I will be making two instances here. First would be free email subscription services. I will be using Feedburner to drive home my point. Feedburner has limitations which to an extent causes so many web publishers their real and actual readership, visits and traffic. When a visitor submits his email to a site using feedburner, the process at first looks very nice, the person will be redirected to a page where he would be prompted to enter some codes which checks if the person is a spammer. Successful entering of these codes will confirm a successful acceptance of the person’s email subscription request. Now this is where the problem begins; most people stop at this stage thinking they have successfully been subscribed without knowing they still need to login into their email account to click on the verification link sent to them. Some on the other hand, knows about it, but they see it much stressful leaving what they are doing to sign into their email account at that moment, an exceptional case would be when the person is already signed into his email account and really want to get updates from the site he is subscribing to.

I figured the above as a major fallback which free email campaign services have. Everyday, my blog receives a good number of email subscription requests, but out of the 100% requests I receive; only about 50% gets to verify their subscription. This was the reason why I had to device a manual means of educating my visitors on how to subscribe to my blog updates by writing a step by step subscription guideline close to the email subscription form under my blog posts.

The second instance is for paid email campaign services. Now, I want you to notice that in the first instance, subscribers have nothing attached to their subscription, which means they have nothing to loose if they decide to stop half way. This is where paid email campaign services take advantage over the former. Using a paid email subscription platform, you as a blog owner have the ability to integrate your products and services which can be e-books, CDs, DVDs, etc., to your email subscription form, hence, making the subscription of your blog updates more appealing to visitors. It is no news people are easily attracted by freebies sampled on blogs and websites, such is what I call “real time opportunity”

Another appealing feature of paid email campaign services is the friendly communication they hold with subscribers starting from when they submit their email address. From the point a subscriber submits his email; he is properly guided and lured into signing in to his email account to verify his subscription link.

While the former lacks these features, the later I want to still belief have their own falls, which is why I will be needing your contributions in comments. The fact still remains that millions of blogs and websites run both free and paid email subscription marketing service, but the circumstances surrounding the one you use on your blog is what I would like to hear in comments.