I do not if anyone noticed but I recently removed the email subscription box in my sidebar. The reason for it was that it felt a little dated and I am pretty sure most people were subscribing to my feed as opposed to wanting email updates. I pretty much thought that the idea of email notifications for a blog was an old one.
But then I came across Zookoda blog email service. It is similar in that you signup to receive post notifications but that is where the similarities end. With Zookoda you get to control what content and how much of it is sent and how often. You also get analytics to see how your subscriptions are doing.
The best part about it is that it is free.
The other service I used sent out a daily email but it had the entire feed so there wasn’t any reason for people to visit my site. With Zookoda you can specify a partial excerpt with a link back to your original article. In scheduling you can specify how often you want emails sent out whether every month, week, day, or 15 minutes. That is really cool.
Zookoda offers several different templates that you can use to format the emails that are sent out so you can give them a personal touch. The template also allows you to manually edit the content before you send it out if you want. From reading their FAQ’s it looks as though in the future you will be able to include ads in your emails as well.
Zookoda offers more in the Blog email subscription arena then I have seen from any of the competitors. I will definitely be keeping an eye on them to see what they add to their services in the future.