I am a big advocate of offering email as a subscription option for RSS feeds. Not only does it give people another choice to consume RSS feeds, but this option has been far more popular among reader of my blogs than subscribing with RSS readers.
There are various ways to do this, but I’m going to share how it’s done via AWeber, since that’s the vendor I use.
In addition to the ability to collect emails for RSS feeds via AWeber, they also enable you to build email lists for newsletters, autoresponders, and more.
Anyhow, when you’re in AWeber, you can start an RSS opt-in list by going to “Blog Broadcast”. It’s an intuitive process where you setup the email subject, select a template (or design your own HTML), choose frequency, whether you want click tracking, etc.
I have a number of different RSS lists going, and some drop daily, while others go out weekly.
The default for the subject in your emails is the name of the RSS feed. Based on feedback I received (people thought I kept sending them the same emai), I changed the subject in the interface, so the email subject is always the title of the first blog post in the email.
I’ve seen my open rates increase since that change.
There is also an option to have your RSS email subjects syndicated to Twitter through an AWeber account.