July 5, 2007

Moving to Feedblitz from Constant Contact: Why I did it?

For years, I've sent my newsletter Small Business Technology Report to now almost 3,000 subscribers via Constant Contat.

Constant Contact's service is 100% top notch and their email newsletter tool is simply excellent. I guess this is why over 100,000 small businesses are using the service.

However, over the past 2 - 3 weeks, I've migrated my audience to Feedblitz.

Feedblitz started out by just offering a way to let people get your RSS feeds via email. Their new email newsletter service lets newsletter publishers have these feeds published to an 'audience' via an email newsletter which you can indicate when it goes - weekly, daily, etc. You can also set up a template to make the design of the newsletter, like you want it.

Small Business Technology Report (SBTR) consisted of two main parts: 1) my weekly editorial of the weeks news 2) and the main draw - pulling together that week's posts into a summary that my readers could click through to, to read the full article.

When Feedblitz announced their new service, I jumped at the chance to save 20 minutes each week compiling the newsletter by letting Feedblitz do it for me automatically.

My first newsletter, using Feedblitz went out on Tuesday, 3 July and I got a ton of comments and ressponse - people isntantly noticed the diference.

Migrating to Feedblitz, was NOT easy. Their's no customer support number to call (like Constant Contact) and since it's a new service, I was probably one of the first Guineau Pigs using that size of an email list.

The interface is NOT nearly as nice as Constant Contacts, and there were a lot of glitches. For example, when I important my email list, it did not go through. When I wanted to send an eamil, notifying everyone of the change, it did not go through.

I stuck through it and now I hope things are fine and only get better.

Phil Hollows, founder of Feedblitz, was very helpful the entire time - answering questions and manually getting around the glitches. Of course as Feedblitz grows he's not going to have time, nor should he have to respond to each customer like this. But because of his personal help - I'm using the service.

Of course Google recently bought Feedburner, which owns Feedblitz so I'm now using yet another Google tool!

If Constant Contact launches a similar service, will I go back...hmm.....let's wait and see.

2 comments