Why you really shouldn’t do RSS to Email

1. Overview

It’s a crying shame that I didn’t collect emails from the readers of baeldung.com up until a few months ago – email is a powerful tool, and one that I’m starting to appreciate more and more.

Once I did start to collect them, I figured that the logical course of action was to set up an RSS to Email campaign in Mailchimp – and I was done.

I didn’t pay to much attention to the fact that, most of the emails I was receiving from various blogs were not a word for word reproduction of the article. No, instead these were custom written emails talking about the article, giving the reader some context and only linking to the full article, not reproducing it.

What’s more – these emails were part of a narrative – they had a regular schedule / cadence – and most importantly – they were linking to evergreen content, not stuff written 4 hours ago.

So – I decided to learn how to do it intelligently, and I stopped my RSS to Email campaign for good.

2. Results of RSS to Email

First – let’s look over some early results of my RSS to Email campaign running for about 3 months:

Average Open Rate : 25 %

: 25 % Average Click Rate: 6 %

This is the raw data for exactly 30 emails campaigns.

3. The New Way = The Old Fashioned Way

A few weeks ago I decided to experiment – put aside the mental unease of writing these custom emails and jump straight in.

I’ll share the numbers here about how my last few email campaigns are converting – how my open rates and more importantly my click rate has improved:

Average Open Rate : 40 %

: 40 % Average Click Rate: 13.5 %

This is still early on – so I will keep updating this article as data comes in, but based on these last few campaigns – this is HUGE – the jump I’m seeing in clicks alone is 125%!

4. Conclusion

Growing your email list is the first step of better engaging with your readers.

However – that is really a first step – nothing more, and without crafting and thinking through your message and how you can help your regular readers – there’s little point to having an email list in the first place.

As I learn how to do email better – I can clearly see how the big jumps in conversions – the low hanging fruit (like this one) are going to be harder and harder to come by, but that doesn’t mean they’re not there!