Using FeedBurner or FeedBlitz for your newsletter (mailing list management system) on WordPress

Summary: This article discusses using the Feedburner or Feedblitz services, in conjunction with your WordPress blog, to publish / manage your company newsletter (mailing list management system).  It discusses the advantages and disadvantages of this system, compared to competitive newsletter management systems such as Constant Contact, Emma, Aweber, Vertical Response, etc.

Here is a cool trick that I am using with many of my clients these days.  It consists of using either FeedBurner (free) or FeedBlitz (paid) services, in combination with a Wordpress blog, to manage your newsletter (mailing list management system).  What you do is publish your newsletter to a blog, and configure the FeedBlitz or FeedBurner service to periodically poll your blog and then email new posts to your subscribers (this is called “RSS-to-email”).

The advantages of this system are:

• FeedBurner is free for any number of subscribers, while FeedBlitz is very reasonably priced, especially for small lists (under 500 subscribers).  FeedBlitz offers possibility of newsletter template customization, subscriber import, and auto-responder sequences.
• You can use the free Windows Live Writer program to compose your newsletters (mailings) offline.  This makes it much easier to create rich content by cut-and-paste of images and video into your content.  Other newsletter management systems (Constant Contact, Emma, Aweber, Vertical Response, etc) require you save your images and then upload them to the web, and offer much more limited options for image editing. More information on this article.
• You can easily publish video email (and even for free) simply by publishing a video to your blog.
• You can put your newsletter archive (previous articles) on your site itself.  If your site is Wordpress, the newsletter archive is available in the side-bar under “Recent posts”, optionally filtered by category.  Alternatively, create your site in Joomla and use the RSS Feed Plugin for Joomla to put your newsletter archive anywhere on your site.

The main disadvantage of this system, is that FeedBlitz does not have as good a newsletter template editor as its competitors (Constant Contact or Emma), especially for long newsletter with side-bars and hyperlinked content (ie multiple articles in a single newsletter that are hyperlinked from a table of contents).  However, if your newsletters are single-focused, such as a specific article or event announcement, FeedBlitz or FeedBurner work really well.