After literally years of frustration trying to use Google’s Feedburner to manage and send out website newsletters, I’ve finally gotten rid of it. Feedburner, while fairly simply and seemingly powerful, has proven itself to be unreliable and slow. Although it has a direct link to my site’s RSS Feed, and is configured to send an email every day that there’s new RSS items, it still consistently lags behind. It will wait a good 2 weeks without sending anything, and then all of a sudden send my subscribers an email with the last 13 blog pots in it – that’s a very long email.

I’ve finally made the switch over to MailChimp. I considered a few before settling on MailChimp: AWeber, Constant Contact, Verticle Response, ExactTarget, etc. However, MailChimp seemed to have the features I needed, good pricing (Free for small lists like mine), and an easy to use, clean website. The big features for me with MailChimp are the ability to automatically create an email based off of new rss items. Other mail services can import RSS too, but requires user interaction to send each email. With MailChimp, I simply need to specify my custom template, RSS feed, and sending schedule, and MailChimp takes care of the rest. MailChimp’s template designer is also easy to use and looks good – and gives me the future flexibility to get even more in depth with the design. Finally, with MailChimp (and actually with Contstant Contact), there’s an iPhone app, so I can manage my email list and newsletters on the go – very useful for traveling.

There’s the details, now find out firsthand what I’m talking about by subscribing to my newsletter. You’ll get an email every time I update my blog.

Email Marketing and Email List Manager | MailChimp.