Friday, July 2, 2021

Email Subscription Update

It took me a while to actually face the fact that Feedburner would no longer be supporting my blog's email subscribers, but I finally really looked into it last weekend, and I think there's a workable solution. In looking for said solution, I knew I wanted something timely (IE. subscribers would get email notification of each blog post very soon after it was posted), preferable free; and ideally, in a way that wasn't too complicated.


There were actually a couple of issues in losing Feedburner: one being the capability of gathering the emails of readers that wanted to subscribe to my blog posts via email; and two, my sending out of each post to those readers. I happened upon this article: Best Free Services for Email Blog Subscriptions by Jen Ryland, which proved very helpful in getting me started. It directed me to download the list of my current email subscribers, which I saved while working on the next step, setting up a new way to let readers subscribe, since Blogger's FollowByEmail widget was also going away.

Also, How to Integrate MailChimp signup form with Blogger website? by Techyleaf suggested  using AddThis to create that intake, and though I'm not 100% positive it's the perfect choice, I was able to add a pretty prominent banner across the top of my blog. AND it works. So I'll leave that in place for now, while I'm still learning the ropes.

Jen's article also led me to seeing Mailchimp as a possibility for sending out my blog posts via email. I thought that would be ideal, since I already use it (for a fee, due to my number of subscribers) for The Scrap Basket newsletter. It took some figuring out, but I was able to set that up using Mailchimp's "Automation" feature - yay! The best news is, I was able to pretty seamlessly import the list of subscribers I downloaded from Feedburner right into Mailchimp, so no resubscribing was necessary. Plus I can more easily see when emails bounce or whatever and keep that list more current.

Unfortunately, I missed the part on Feedburner about deactivating the email service or my subscribers would get duplicate emails (one from Feedburner, one from Mailchimp). So that may have happened on June 30, and if it happened to you, apologies; though I'd love to know that. I've now deactivated Feedburner, so subscribers, you should be receiving just one email from Mailchimp. Yes, it'll go away anyway sometime in July, but we don't really know when. Meanwhile, let me know how that's looking for you, ok? From my end, there's still a bit of tweaking to do, but at least it's working while I clean things up a bit.

If you happen to be a Blogger + Mailchimp user like me, here are a couple more articles I found helpful:

After the fact, I happened across Moving Subscribers Away from Feedburner and Into Mailchimp (Updated Guide 2021). Looks like there may be another way to add a subscribe option to the blog, so I may look into that. Besides that though, there's a lot of helpful info there that I managed to find out by searching. Maybe I can save you from some of that.

1 comment:

  1. So glad you worked out how to do this for yourself and your many blog-readers and subscribers! Looks like a great fix. Personally, I didn't want to import the 1500+ Feedburner subscribers I had to my blog. When I looked at email addresses individually, I say lots and lots of them that were very similar - only different by a digit or a letter. I assumed (perhaps incorrectly) that they were spammers or marketing address of some sort. So, I opted to not keep them, and started all over again.

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