Alternative to Feedburner – Follow.it Review

You have always relied on Google’s Feedburner to send your site readers newsletters with all the latest articles published. You, therefore, panicked when you discovered that the service in question has decided to stop sending email newsletters and you have not yet been able to find a valid alternative to use.

Well, if that’s the case, let me tell you about Follow.it: a service that allows you to retain the users of your site by offering users the opportunity to follow your content in an active and personalized way, by setting filters related to the content to be received, not only via email but also via RSS feed, Telegram or other channels. All with a free basic plan and with the possibility of obtaining detailed statistics on the progress of subscriptions.

In short, it is a service that offers a new way, flexible and comfortable for everyone, to put content creators and their followers in communication, with the guarantee given by Inisev, the company behind Follow.it and which has been operating for years. in the online services sector by offering solutions for creators of blogs and other online content. Whether you are looking for a valid alternative to Feedburner or a completely new solution to retain and consolidate your users, I really think you should take a look at Follow.it . Read on to learn more!

Index

• What is Follow.it
• How Follow.it works
• How to switch from Feedburner to Follow.it
• to know more

What is Follow.it

On average, 70% of users who visit a site after finding it on a search engine do not return to visit it. Here, tools such as Follow.it come into play , which optimize each step of the funnel (i.e. the process that leads the user from discovering a product/service to then use it actively and, possibly, constantly) to retain visitors and transform them. from occasional visitors to followers. Going into more detail, there are 6 main steps provided by Follow.it .

• Many people see the option to follow you via pop-ups, sign-up forms, follow icons or via the it directory.
• ‌Many people decide to follow you by subscribing to your newsletter and following you on social networks, using special icons that allow quick registration to your social profiles. Registration does not involve any form of spam, does not require users to enter additional data with respect to the email address and provides easy unfollow options. Another very important thing to underline is that users can customize the news to receive through filters by keywords, tags or authors. Finally, they can choose their preferred delivery channels from emails, RSS feeds, Telegram and others.
• Notifications are sent via email and other channels so that followers can see the latest news published in a timely manner. Follow.it has an excellent reputation and therefore guarantees a high deliverability of emails, which therefore do not end up in the users’ spam box.
• Followers become “active”. Subscription to your own content can include a double or single out-in: in the first case, the user must confirm the registration by clicking on a link sent via email (with the certainty that only users who are really interested in the contents receive them, without spam, respecting the regulations on the subject of all countries and having the ability to easily move subscriber lists to another provider); in the case of single out-in, however, the user is subscribed to the contents without having to confirm the subscription: in this way you get more followers but you risk being labeled as a spammer by some people, you are not in line with the laws of all countries and you do not have the option to move your follower list to another provider. Follow.it uses various solutions to activate the greatest number of followers, including an intelligent opt-in & trade process in which followers who enter their email receive a request to confirm their subscription but at the same time already start receiving the content.
• Notifications are displayed and clicked. Follow.it ensures a high rate of reading and interaction with the content sent to users. This is because the news arrives directly in the inbox, which many people consult many times throughout the day and/or use as a to-do list throughout the day. Messages are sent without delay, with one exception: if the follower has selected the Newspaper delivery option, in which only one email per day is sent, containing all the stories of the last 24 hours.
• You can optimize everything with analytics. Follow.it provides advanced statistics on the status of subscriptions, with graphs and data relating to total followers, the conversion rate between occasional visitors and followers, number and reasons for unfollows, and more. By analyzing this data, you will be able to establish and implement the best strategies to increase your followers.

Follow.it provides a basic free plan that includes the ability to offer up to 5 feeds from your account, delivery on all channels, filtering options, the ability to view and download followers’ emails, function to import followers, possibility to set the language of the registration page and confirmation emails, access to statistics (with only unfollow and 1 month of historical data) and support within 72 hours. The content update cycle is every 6 hours, the history of saved messages includes the last 100 stories.

For those who need more extensive features, there are paid plans, the price of which must be calculated based on the number of followers. The Cool plan includes all the advantages of the basic one, but with 20 feeds, more advanced statistics with 1 year of historical data, redirects, inclusion in the Follow.it directory, email alerts for follow and unfollow, possibility to define subscription options default for followers, customization of sender and subject of emails, repair of faulty feeds and priority support within 12 hours. The content refresh cycle is every 30 minutes, the history of saved messages includes the last 1,000 days.

Finally, there is the Super-cool plan which includes all the benefits of the Cool plan, but with unlimited feeds, unlimited data history in the statistics, possibility to approve stories before sending, view the reasons for unfollows, the ability to remove the Follow.it logo from emails, Google Analytics tracking, support for subscribers and priority support with replies as soon as possible. The content update cycle is immediate, the history of saved messages includes the last 5,000 days. For all the details, consult the official website of Follow.it .

How Follow.it works

Using Follow.it is really very simple. If you too want to allow your readers to easily subscribe to your content, connect to the main page of the service and type the address of your RSS feed or your website in the appropriate text field, which you find in the middle of the page; then press the Go button.

The page will open to create the follow form to show to your users. You can therefore choose whether to adapt the size of the form to the space on the site, whether to add a border and you can set a background color. You can then define the description text and the compilation field by choosing font, style, color, size and alignment. Alternatively, if you already have a form for your site (eg it was in your theme, or it comes from another provider) you can enter the HTML code in the provided field. Once you have the desired result (you can see a preview of the form on the left), click on the Continue button.

The next step is to choose the icons you want to follow, to download and place in strategic points (eg at the end of your blog article), in order to invite visitors to follow you after consulting your content. Then click on the Done button ! to move forward.

You will therefore be offered to create a pop-up to invite your readers to follow you. If you want, you can do it for free thanks to  MyPopUps.com , one of the best pop-up creation services, by clicking on the appropriate button and following the instructions on the screen.

To conclude, click on the Continue button on Follow.it , enter your email in the appropriate field and press the Start button. Then complete the captcha that is proposed to you and click on the button Start the claim process, in order to claim your feed and access all the services offered.

The procedure is very simple: you just have to insert the meta tags indicated in the email received from Follow.it on your website, then you have to create an account on the service and click on the confirmation link contained in the same email.

To create an account on Follow.it, just click on the Subscribe button on the site and fill in the form that is proposed to you with email or username and password. Alternatively, you can authenticate with your Facebook, Google and Twitter accounts.

To give you a practical example of the final result, you can consult this Follow.it page where you can subscribe to the contents of Aranzulla.it filtering the contents of your interest based on keywords, tags, authors or popularity.

Once you have made your choice, indicate the output channels from which to receive the news (single email, newspaper email, RSS, Telegram or telephone) and save the settings by clicking on the appropriate button to activate the subscription.

You can then unsubscribe or customize the news to receive at any time. Convenient, right?

How to switch from Feedburner to Follow.it

Follow.it also makes it very easy to switch from Feedburner. All you have to do is export the list of your followers from Feedburner in the form of a CSV file, delete your feed on feedburner and start using Follow.it as explained above, importing your followers into it via the function dedicated. For all the details, I refer you to the official guide on the Follow.it website.