Feedburner is widely used as RSS subscription platform by major blogs or websites, forums. Many times we bloggers arrange some competition on our blog where visitors needs to subscribe for the newsletter to win the contest. Or some times it is really important to take a look on email subscription list if this month, and send the latest subscribers a decent welcome message to show them your punctuality. So here is the complete analysis guide for Feedburner email subscription which can be used for many purposes. Benefits of Email Subscription Management,
1. Use the final filtered list of subscribers to pick contest winner of a month
2. Send welcome message to each subscriber in a month
3. Use Subscription IDs as launching pad for any product like eBook on your blog
4. Know your subscribers pretty well and engage them with different benefits
5. Analyse the subscription data to know the quality of email subscription on your blog
There are many ways thru which a visitor can subscribe the RSS feed of your blog. It may be thru Readers, Browsers etc. But here we are taking Email Subscription for analysis which is a direct communication between your blog updates and subscriber’s mailbox. Take a look at the “Analyze” tab of Feedburner Admin window of your blog,
Expanded Window,
To get the number of your blog’s email subscribers, go to the “Analyze” tab of your blog’s feedburner page and then scroll down a little to get the number of email subscribers for your blog (see above images). Now you have the numbers, we will start the analysis on these numbers. Click on the “Feedburner Email Subscription” link provided over there to get another link named “Manage Your Email Subscriber List” below at the same place. Click on the link to get the list of your email subscribers. That link will redirect you to the “Publicize” page of the Feedburner under “Email Subscription –> Subscription Management” tab.
Note: You can directly go to the “Publicize” tab and then “Email Subscription” panel from left and then “Subscription Management” to get the list.
The downloaded file is a CSV (Comma Separate Values File) format file which will open in Microsoft Excel. Use Excel 2003 or 2007 to do the analysis. In below attached video, I have used Microsoft Excel 2007 for showing the subscription management.
Open the CSV file in Excel, and expand the columns to get readable values. You can see three columns as Email, Subscribed and Status. Email is the email ID of subscriber, Subscribed is the date and time of subscription and then status is the subscription status. Subscription status “Active” is for those who have verified their subscription and started getting newsletters in their mailbox and “Pending Verification” is for those who subscribed the newsletter but have not verified their email ID. In that case, newsletters is still not going to their mailbox. Anyways, Now you have the list of subscribers, we can start with the analysis.
Note: Cut – Paste the Status column from column C to Column D, So that you can free Column C.
First of all select the “Subscribed” column on excel and right click to format the column in below format of date and time. To do that, click on “Custom category” on format cells window and then paste the below mentioned format in “Type” box,
mm-dd-yyyy hh:mm
Since the data provided by Feedburner comes in this format of date and time, it is really important to tell excel the same. So you will not find any changes in the column but internally it matters. Now click on the “Data” option on Excel Menu bar. Go to “Text To Columns” option under Data menu. Select “Delimited” from the window and click on “Next”. Now select “Space” as delimiter so that Date and Time can be separated in different columns. Click on Next and then select the “Column Data Format” as Date in format “MDY” because the date on spreadsheet is in same format. Click on Finish to separate Date and Time portion.
Now You can see the Subscribed column Date as “02-12-2008 00:00”. Select the column and right click to again format the same. This time paste remove the hh:mm part from the “Type” box of Custum Category” option. Then you will get the column with values as only mm:dd:yyyy.
Now select the Subscribed column and go to the “Data” menu on excel again and select “Filter” option from there. Now you have set the filter on “Subscribed” column which is having only dates in month/date/year format. Click on the Filter button on Subscribes Column, You can see “Different Years, Months” to select from. Uncheck “Select All” and then select a particular month by expanding the Year part. To expand the particular year, click on the + sign besides that year. That will show you the months from that year. Select a particular month to get the list of subscription in that month. You can take down those email IDs and send them Welcome Mail for subscription or you can use those IDs for picking up winner for the ongoing competition on your blog.
Here is the similar look of Final Excel sheet of Email Subscription,
Basically you can use that data in many ways to communicate with your subscribers and engage them in many ways. You can also shout about any product launch on your blog and share the initial info with them so that they can also spread those info within their community or areas of influence.
In our previous post, we had discussed about the Newsletter Subject line customization on Feedburner, which is also worth reading.