In a recent survey of their customers HubSpot found that their customers preferred to subscribe to blogs via email subscription nearly 12 times more than their preference for RSS. HubSpot serves mostly small and medium businesses in a cross-section of verticals. Therefore, the results are not surprising. In doing educational seminars and speaking to a variety of different groups, I usually have to describe what RSS actually is. Most will admit to see the RSS logo on websites that they visit often but not knowing what it was. Those of us that live and breath technology and digital marketing channels such as social media tend to take for granted that we integrate technologies into our lives well before mainstream society.
Comparing email and RSS subscribers of this blog reveals the exact opposite trend. Only 5% of you choose to subscribe via email. What’s interesting about this is that if you take a look at this blog, you’ll notice that the email subscription call-to-action is larger and more prominent than the 2 calls-to-action to subscribe via RSS. While there are many reasons why this may occur, I think it boils down to a couple of reasons:
1. This is possibly due to topics that are covered around here and the subscriber that attracts.
2. It could be that many of you feel overburdened with email and therefore do not want yet another email to have to read on a daily basis.
3. Some may not like providing their email address due to a fear of spam and feel that if they subscribe via RSS it is easier to opt-out.
For those that are in the 3rd bucket, I can assure you that on this blog your email is held confidential (see my pledge to you on my Newsletter page). But, I can understand the hesitance to provide your email address especially since every big box retailer, restaurant chain or other business asks for your email address.
I only subscribe to a couple blogs via email, mostly blogs that I manage to ensure that everything is working properly. There are only a few others that I subscribe to via email because they provide a daily digest of the news within the vertical that they cover. Otherwise, and more often, I prefer to subscribe via RSS. Currently, I’m subscribed to 200+ blogs and read, in general, between 400-600 articles per day. If I was to subscribe to even a portion of these blogs via email, I would have a full inbox at the start of the day before business and personal emails began to fly in.
Where do you fall? Do you prefer to subscribe via RSS or email to blogs? If you use both methods, what factors weigh in your decision?
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Photo Credit: HubSpot
