This means that they totally blow Feedburner Email subscription away as far as features are concerned.

Apart from one important aspect.

Exclusive: Aweber Will Soon Report Email Sububscriber Numbers To Feedburner

In the announcement Justin Premick mentioned

This is just one of a number of enhancements we’ll be making to the Blog Broadcast tool. Stay tuned…

I probed a little deeper and we can expect to have counts reported to Feedburner in the near future, but no specific time frame.

What Does This Mean To The Blogosphere?

Internet marketers who concentrate on email subscriptions from their blog using Aweber will soon be able to benefit from the same social proof as if they were RSS subscribers. I know a few marketers that previously only had a few thousand RSS subscribers who will suddenly be propelled into similar subscriber counts as… Techcrunch 600k+

I think that shakes public perception up a little

A Confession About Feedblitz

Feedblitz also have this capability and a bunch of cool features, and I exchanged emails with Phil Hollows 1st December after an exchange of comments both here in the past, and on Problogger.
There seem to be a number of ways that Feedblitz could meet my needs for email in the same or similar way to Aweber, though it might take a little work with existing scripts

I really need to spend some time on full evaluation, but my house move and subsequent lack or intermittent connectivity has disrupted my workflow.

Sometimes there are people you just want to link through to as part of the conversation, sometimes you want to link through to someone as some kind of reciprocation, and sometimes you link purely for selfish gain.

First of all I would like to congratulate Todd And on his deal with Advertising Age – I have actually twice thought about applying for the list, but I don’t think I have ever hit the submit button.
I always wanted enough multimedia elements on the page – graphics, video and sound to max out on those “And Points” and despite logo designers complementing me on my logo design occasionally, I know my overall design will eventually have to have the rough surface polished, after a heavy site structure revamp.

So where would I be on the list currently? (figuratively speaking if I did apply)

Pagerank 5
Bloglines 147 – 11 points, just shy of a 12
Technorati Rank 1445 – I think that is 27 points without publishing themes
Todd And Points – How can I judge?

Here are the criteria:-

Todd And Points (1 to 15) – As the only subjective measure in the Power 150 algorithm, 1 to 15 opinion points were assigned to each blog. Todd And values frequent, relevant, creative and high-quality content. The use of audio, video and graphics is also heavily weighted in the Todd And Points.

I do use video on occasion, most often when talking about Jason Calacanis, or Rich Schefren

Graphics use? I use them most when talking about SEO

I do publish relatively frequently, everything else is subjective.
I am going to give myself a 12 just because I am biased, and because Todd has given so many of my readers a 13 ;)

Total: 5+11+27+12 = 55

That would place me somewhere between 35th and 41st and among some great company.

But the list is a little bit subjective

It is almost totally devoid of affiliate, niche and “internet” marketers, and I hope that will become something that changes over time.
I don’t mean any disrespect to Todd in that statement because I think he has had his hands fairly full managing the list he currently has.

Another major problem comes from metrics as in many fields of marketing “reach” is calculated not just on Bloglines subscribers. I am sure if reach included Email subscribers I wouldn’t appear in the top500.

RSS To Email Services Currently Suck For Marketing

First of all I would like to point out I haven’t explored every avenue yet, and have mainly concentrated on the cheaper options.

I don’t want to host email delivery on my own domain, so I am forgetting about plugins for now. I certainly don’t want to have to manually handle bounces, it is bad enough for comment subscriptions.

• Feedburner – whilst the delivery rate is great, there is no way to give incentives for signing up. That is vital, because unfortunately email subscription confirmation is only hovering above 60%. As I pointed out when they were taken over by Google, legal compliance is borderline for commercial email.
• Zookoda – The delivery options are great for a free service, but it isn’t a “marketing tool” where you can easily migrate list members around. They have their own counter for subscribers, but it would be nice if they reported numbers to feedburner. I have seen discussion regarding poor delivery, but nothing confirmed and haven’t done any testing.
• Feedblitz – Actually Feedblitz might not suck, especially their new(ish) Newsletter Edition – they have been working on their delivery a lot recently, and it will be interesting how easy it would be to move over from Feedburner.
  They are not cheap compared to many high volume “marketing” email providers, but possibly an option.
• Getresponse – I hate seeing “I have just updated my blog” emails from Getresponse users, knowing that what blog readers really want is full content. The Getresponse emails don’t even link through to the permalink. Come on Simon, you guys can do better than that. Getresponse also don’t report email subscribers to Feedburner (which could be optional)
• Aweber – Aweber can send RSS > Email immediate broadcasts, and can send updates after so many posts, but from what I can see they don’t support the ability to schedule an email at the same time every day containing all the posts for a single day. They also don’t report subscribers to Feedburner to my knowledge.

Ideally I want these services to also handle all my comment subscriptions in some way, not only providing a delivery via SMTP, but also managing bounces.

this isn’t a conclusive list of email service providers, I will keep looking.

Sometime over the next few days I will make a decision which service I will go for. Most likely is unfortunately Aweber… because support for Aweber is also provided by membership site software that I intend to use, but I could possibly also explore the other services depending on how they can handle subscription requests.

Check out Todd’s full list of Marketing Blogs