FeedmailPro.com Sent Over Half A Million Messages In The Last 6 Months

In: Business Ideas|FeedmailPro.com|Updates By: Brian Armstrong

16 Mar 2010

This is pretty cool. Was looking at the stats recently for FeedmailPro.com and about 600,000 messages (blog posts going to email subscribers) have gone out since it started just six months ago.

306 blogs with 132,844 total subscribers are now using the service
9 paying customers so far which is a 3% conversion rate on a freemium product

The main untested theory behind the site, which is that you can let users import subscriber lists without another opt-in by testing the list first seem to be working quite well. You can weed out spammers without punishing the good guys.

It has also saved people a lot of money who have switched from Aweber.com. I was previously paying $70 per month to manage the email list for this blog and one other with Aweber, so in the past 6 months FeedmailPro.com has saved me $360 just by switching.

Maybe it can do the same for your blog? If you’re looking for a more versatile email newsletter for your RSS feed (at a fraction of the cost) check out the site.

There is also an affiliate program.

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18 Responses

College Town Menus (CTM)

March 16th, 2010 at 4:44 pm

Its been a while since an update on this, nice to see its growing and working autonomously! Great work!

Brian Armstrong

March 17th, 2010 at 5:18 am

Thanks! I’m trying more of these “behind the scenes” type posts. I always find them interesting on other sites, just like the “making of” special features on DVD’s are sometimes more interesting than the movies themselves :)

Chuck Cohn

March 16th, 2010 at 7:02 pm

Very cool. I’ll check it out for my blog. Any idea how your conversion rates on UniversityTutor (~1%) and FeedMailPro (~3%) compare to other sites with freemium models?

Brian Armstrong

March 17th, 2010 at 5:21 am

Hey Chuck,

I’ve only heard anecdotal evidence but these appear to be right in line with other freemium models from what I’ve read about like DropBox and EverNote. I think UniversityTutor is doing between 1 and 2% right now.

Paul Buenaflor

March 16th, 2010 at 11:25 pm

Brian,

Recently I heard someone throw out a “rule of thumb” that made me think. I suppose you know how many online businesses really focus on list-building – getting email addresses from as many prospective clients as possible. And then they use email services (like Aweber and FeedmailPro!) to start building relationships and marketing to that list.

The rule of thumb was this: Good online businesses with good lists generate an average of 50 cents to $1 of revenue per month for every name on their broadcast email list (buying customers and non-yet-customers included).

Have you heard this before? From your experience, would you agree? Comments?

By the way, congrats on the move to the Bay Area, even though it’ll cost a few extra pesos.

Regards,
Paul

Brian Armstrong

March 17th, 2010 at 5:25 am

Haha, thanks :) Yep I have heard this figure also from the internet marketing community (which I generally distrust) about $1 per email per month. I’m sure it’s true for some people (JohnChow.com is probably a good example). But I’ve never personally gotten it to that level. Using my blog as an example, it only generates about $500 per month and has 3,000 subscribers (which is about 16 cents per subscriber) but I also don’t do anywhere near as much marketing and affiliate stuff like John Chow. If you factor in indirect compensation I receive like (1) meeting cool people (2) free marketing whenever I launch a new business, etc – then the rewards are probably much higher than that, and this is my primary purpose in blogging. There is a trade off to running that much marketing on a blog and pushing scammy products – it hurts your reputation. Hope it helps!

Paul Buenaflor

March 23rd, 2010 at 4:14 pm

Pithy comments. Yes, it helps. Thanks for the perspective.

Ash

March 18th, 2010 at 3:10 am

Your “making of” posts are the most valuable.

I haven’t heard much about FeedmailPro, I’d actually forgotten about it. How did you promote Feedmail?

Brian Armstrong

March 18th, 2010 at 7:37 am

Thanks Ash. My original plan was to get a few promenant bloggers to post about it. I hoped to entice them with the affiliate program, and several of these bloggers (JohnChow.com, ProBlogger.net, ShoeMoney.com, etc) had already promoted the Aweber affiliate program. So I figured it would be an easy sell, but was wrong. Unfortunately none of them took me up on my offer. I’m still not sure why but I think it was mainly because these guys get bombarded with requests and my site was not high profile enough yet. I may still be able to reach them when the site gets bigger.

So when that didn’t work I commented on a variety of blog posts where people were discussing Aweber, posted in the Feedburner forums helping people with problems, and in that way engaged with some early adopters. I’m still looking for a good way to help it reach a wider audience though. Ideas or introductions are always welcome if anyone has ideas.

Thanks!
Brian

Andrew

March 23rd, 2010 at 3:09 am

Hey Brian,

Congrats on your success. Keep up the great work and I look forward to your upcoming posts.

Oh and yes, USAA is the best. Love the fact I can have a check, photograph it with my iPhone and have the funds immediately deposited. No more visits to the bank.

Brian Armstrong

March 24th, 2010 at 2:45 am

Keep hearing great things about them, would love to try it. Thanks Andrew!

Leonardo Rodriguez

April 13th, 2010 at 10:05 pm

Hi Brian. I’d like to know more about your experience with SuretyMail (ISIPP). Seems like a great deal when you have a lot of customers, but the $500 setup fee and $200-$300 per month for the Email Marketing and Campaign provider option is a bit scary for starting out (http://isipp.com/prices.html). Do they have an API or are you sending them the emails for them to forward? Was it easy to hook your app with them? How was the application process?

Some time ago I was researching mail delivery services and didn’t hear about ISIPP. Sounds like a great alternative. Thanks for sharing your experience. It’s really useful.

Brian Armstrong

April 14th, 2010 at 5:42 am

Hi Leonardo,

Good question…to be honest I haven’t set anything up with them yet. We discussed it but I haven’t hit the volume yet for it to be necessary, so I can’t say for sure how effective it is. I don’t believe they have an API or anything. You just keep sending emails and normal, and they put you on some whitelist for a handful of email servers. To really do it right, you probably have to register with return-path and the other big ones too. Hope it helps!
Brian