A core strategy of content marketing is distribution and one of the core distribution methods is email. If you have a blog you need to be able to give readers the option to subscribe via email. The industry standard tool is Feedburner. Feedburner, now owned by Google, is a tool that allows you to “burn” a feed and provide various subscription options including email. Feedburner is the industry standard both because it is reliable and because its free. That said, having your email list stored in Feedburner prevents you from leveraging or marketing to those subscribers outside of publishing to the blog.
If you agree I have good news for you. We have developed a custom addon for Interspire Email Marketer that allows you to publish and send RSS feed content (like blogs) to designated contact lists. The addon has a lot of configuration options that make it easy to set sending frequency, designated contact lists, full feed content vs previews, etc. Learn More here.
This added functionality allows a modern digital marketer to better distribute and market to contacts. Email addresses are still super valuable data points and touch points for reaching customers and potential customers.