How to Create a Custom Subject Line for Feedburner E-Mail Updates

One of the best ways to build a loyal readership for your blog is to encourage visitors to subscribe via e-mail or RSS feed.

Many bloggers use Feedburner (owned by Google) to manage their blog’s feed. Up until now, people who subscribe to Feedburner blog updates via e-mail have received a generic e-mail whose Subject line reads something like: Blogging Bistro – Latest Updates.

Feedburner just added a new feature: users now can now set up their feed to include a dynamic subject line. I just added this feature to this blog, so if you subscribe to updates, you’ll now be seeing the following in the Subject line:

Blogging Bistro: How to Create a Custom Subject Line for Feedburner E-Mail Updates

It’s a small, but important change. Most people scan their Subject lines before opening an e-mail. I imagine that a Subject line that contains the headline from my most recent post will entice more readers to open it than the bland, “Blogging Bistro – Latest Posts” subject line.

Here’s how to tweak your Feedburner settings so it will create dynamic Subject lines:

1. Log in to your Feedburner account.
2. Click “My Feeds” and then click the name of the feed you want to update.
3. Click the “Publicize” tab.
4. In the lefthand sidebar, click “Email Subscriptions.”
5. That’ll open a sub-menu. Still in the left sidebar, click “Email Branding.”
6. Copy the following line of code and paste it in the form that says, “Email Subject/Title”:

${latestItemTitle}

If you update your blog more than once a day, click the box that says, “Change Subject when an email has 2 or more items” and paste in the following code:

“${latestItemTitle}” plus ${m} more

Here’s a visual to follow:

Sources:

• Daily Blog Tips
• Problogger
• Technotip

*Feel free to reprint this post on your own blog. I’ll be happy to e-mail you the HTML, so all you have to do is copy & paste, and the formatting will remain intact. If you reprint it, please include the following byline:

Laura Christianson, aka The Blogging Barista, owns Blogging Bistro (www.BloggingBistro.com), a Seattle-based social media marketing company.