If you’ve read here for any amount of time, you know that I am often breaking stuff and screwing up, and then you get to benefit from my dumbassery. Last week, David Wood was kind enough to share with me this screenshot of how my emails from MackCollier.com look in his inbox:
EVERY day when the latest post from MackCollier.com arrived in David’s inbox, it showed up in the same format:
Sender: MackCollier.com Subject: MackCollier.com
Seriously? I was mortified when I saw this screenshot! I assumed (first mistake) that Feedburner was making the title of my post as the email Subject, but that clearly wasn’t the case. Apparently, Feedburner by default picks your site URL as the email subject.
Thankfully, it’s a dead simple change to make, and here’s how you can change your email subject so that it’s the title of your blog post:
1 – Log into your Feedburner account.
2 – Click the Publicize tab at the top (If you have multiple feeds being managed by Feedburner, you’ll want to login and then click the feed you want to change and THEN click the Publicize tab)
3 – Click Email Subscriptions on the left.
4 – Click Email Branding.
5 – In the Email/Subject Title: box, put this: ${latestItemTitle}
6 – Click Save.
Now for an example of how big this change can be, before I made this change, last Thursday’s blog post showed up in the inbox of email subscribers with the Subject: MackCollier.com.
After I made the above switch, it showed up as Subject: How is Twitter Impacting SEO and Search? Here’s the (Visual) Proof
Which email Subject do you think would get more opens?
This leads to another important point: Subscribe to your own feed. I was already subscribed via RSS, but I should have subscribed to my own Email feed as well, so I could have seen how the emails were showing up for subscribers.
So hopefully that helps you, if you’ve been using Feedburner for a while, what do you like best about it? What could be better?