When you want to let people subscribe to your RSS feed via email, there are a few options available to you, including the free FeedBurner Email Subscriptions. But if you are already using Aweber, then you should stick with using Aweber’s Blog Broadcast features. Here’s why:

It’s A Feed Broadcast And A Regular List

This would have to be my top and only reason to use Aweber Blog Broadcast over FeedBurner. You get all the options of a regular list. This includes autoresponder, broadcast and scheduling. This way, you can easily feature old but good posts and deliver them via autoresponder. You will expose subscribers to old content that may be buried deep in your blog and get them used to consuming more of your content.

You can also email the list any time and include the subscribers when you are doing a broadcast to other lists. All this gives you a lot more flexibility for staying in touch with your subscribers.

Oh yeah… because it is a regular list, you can also deliver a bonus for subscribing to your feed via email, killing two birds with one stone.

More Formatting Options

Branding your emails is also a lot more flexible on Aweber with all the nice looking templates. You can even create your own templates. You also get to choose how many new items are in your feed before it starts sending emails.

Better Metrics

While I think FeedBurner analytics are great for feeds, I much prefer stats for emails in Aweber which gives you finer details. Especially if your account has improved statistics turned on.

Custom Fields

This is related to the first reason. Because the Blog Broadcast is also a list in Aweber, you can make use of custom fields so you can opt to collect more information that would segment your subscribers and use that information in your automatic broadcast emails. Or – this is my favorite use of custom fields – you can capture affiliate ID’s as part of the subscription and whenever the blog is updated with your content, people receive emails to your blog that has affiliates’ ID appended to it. You can always tell your affiliates this so whenever they recommend someone to subscribe to your blog, they know people will receive emails with their ID.

Just these few reasons alone should be enough for you to ditch FeedBurner’s email subscription. Or better yet – if you’re not using them, learn more about Aweber now 🙂