If you use Feedburner to deliver email newsletters to your subscribers, you might have subscribers who didn’t complete the email verification process which is required when signing up for any newsletter. This happens quite often. Some users are ignorant of the subscription process and that they require to verify their email address. Others might have not even received the verifying email or the mail might have ended up in the spam box.
ProBlogger writes about a great idea of getting these unverified subscribers to confirm their subscription. He suggests writing back to them and letting them know that they can try again if they had some problem with the process. If you aren’t aware, FeedBurner lets you see every email subscriber you have, both verified as well as unverified.
To find this list login to your FeedBurner account, click on the Publicize tab and then click on Email Subscription on the left to expand it. Under Email Subscription click on Subscription Management. Scroll down the page and click on View Subscriber Details to find the list.
You will be surprised when you see how many subscribers are unverified. If you have a large site there might be hundreds of unverified subscribers, and there lies your difficulty. To copy and paste each email address individually is a time consuming process.
To automate this task, Daniel Harrison from PowerDosh.com has written a Greasemonkey script that automatically generates a list of all email subscribers who have not completed the verification process and copies this list to the clipboard. All you have to do is paste them to BCC (so that you don’t reveal the email addresses to others) in the mail compose window and explain to them how they can complete the subscription process. ProBlogger says he got back 40% of these subscribers.
To use it, install GreaseMonkey in Firefox and restart. Then download and install the script. You’ll see it working when you go to Publicize > Email Subscriptions > Subscription Management, on your FeedBurner account. This is likely to work on Opera too (I haven’t tested it).
If you use WordPress you might also want to use this plugin I wrote http://techie-buzz.com/wordpress-plugins/notify-unconfirmed-subscribers-google-feedburner-compatibility.html to send out personalized messages to individual users :-)
ReplyDeleteThat's a good one Keith.
ReplyDeleteNice. Thanks.
ReplyDeleteYou can also just download the CSV file from Feedburner, sort by Unverified, and grab the email addresses.
ReplyDeleteThis is very nice tip. I found a lot of subscribers not verified in my subscription list. I downloaded the CSV file and sort the unverified emails. Now I used iMacro addon on firefox to subscribe again with the email ids I got on the csv file so that the subscribers will get the activation email again in their email IDs. This worked perfectly for me. Need to delete all the unverified subscriber list from feedburner once the csv file has been downloaded, so that a fresh list will be always available.
ReplyDeletesimply download CSV file, separate unverified users by data filter, copy past into email bcc, and write a letter to them to verify subscriptions.
ReplyDeletehttp://pmodels.blogspot.com
I could not see it as told above, help me pls.
ReplyDeleteWhy would I want a thrid party to access or use my list... dowbload the csv file and sort .. as pointed earlier.
ReplyDelete@buzzparas, you can't edit your newsletter in Feedburner. But you can if you use Feedblitz.
ReplyDeleteThanks for this great tutorial
ReplyDelete@Kaushik, Feedblitz pricing is too crazy though..
ReplyDeleteThanks for the useful tip! Surely I'll try it when my unverified subscriber list will grow to much :)
ReplyDeleteThanks for this tutorial. My blog has more than 500 subscriber on which 300 are unverified. Your tutorial will really help me to convert all those unverified subscribers into verified subscribers.
ReplyDelete