Your FeedBurner Email Subscriptions May Be Unreadable

by Ben Yoskovitz

Most people subscribe to blogs via RSS feeds. But there are a number that also subscribe via email.

I always recommend that you offer both — RSS feed and email. With FeedBurner it’s a snap.

But recently one of my email readers, Carole Lane from The San Diego Beat, informed me that the font size was insanely small on the emails, making it very hard to read.

It’s not something I ever thought to check.

She sent me a version of one of the emails she received and the font size was definitely too small. So I logged into FeedBurner to see if I could fix the problem. Sure enough, it was possible and easy - but I had never noticed it before.

Once you’re logged into FeedBurner click on Publicize.
Then click Email Subscriptions in the left-hand navigation.
Click on the small link titled Email Branding which you see below:
This will give you a bunch of options including the ability to increase the font size. I changed the headline size to 13 and the body text size to 11. You can also upload a logo, change font types and colors. Make your changes and click Save at the bottom.

Maybe I’m the last person to know about these options but they’re fairly hidden inside FeedBurner, and since email subscription isn’t the biggest priority for bloggers this is the kind of thing that might fall to the wayside for many.

Hopefully these changes makes emails from Instigator Blog more readable and enjoyable for subscribers. And if you use FeedBurner for RSS I would recommend enabling their email subscription option as well - and then fixing the font size.

March 15th, 2007

14 Responses to “Your FeedBurner Email Subscriptions May Be Unreadable”

#1 Eric Olson March 15th, 2007 at 4:18 pm

Hi Ben,

Thanks for pointing out the customization features in our e-mail product. Our standard font and font sizes are as follows:

Headline Font: Arial
Headline: 18pt
Body Font: Georgia
Body: 13pt

I am not sure why yours would have been altered. If you still have the e-mail your reader sent you please forward it to me so I can look into the issue and find out if it was something on our end that mixed up the settings. Take care and thanks for using FeedBurner!

Cheers,
Eric Olson
Publisher Services - FeedBurner
erico@feedburner.com
312.756.0022 x2034

#2 Brian March 15th, 2007 at 5:22 pm

The first thing I did after setting up the e-mail subscription box on my new blog was to subscribe to the e-mail. How else would you know that it was working?

BTW, mine looks good. Actually, I like the look of it way better than reading the feed in google reader. (You do subscribe to your feed too, don’t you?)

#3 David Airey March 15th, 2007 at 7:09 pm

Before I heard about FeedBurner I signed up with Feedblitz for my email subscriptions. Now my feeds are with FeedBurner but I’ve kept using Feedblitz as I’ve had no problems with their service. At least none have been flagged up.

#4 Carole March 15th, 2007 at 7:29 pm

Thanks for the credit, Ben. You’re the greatest. - Carole

#5 Ben Yoskovitz March 15th, 2007 at 8:02 pm

Eric - I just sent you an email. Thanks for commenting.

Brian - I originally was on FeedBlitz way back when and I was subscribed. When I switched to FeedBurner I didn’t re-subscribe to the email feed. At first there weren’t any subscribers to it anyway, but that has since changed. I made the assumption everything was OK…

And yes, I subscribe to my own feed. *smile*

#6 Nathan Metzger March 15th, 2007 at 8:13 pm

Thanks for the tip. I have to run to feedburner and setup my email subscriptions

#7 Robin March 15th, 2007 at 11:38 pm

Glad to read your blog to find out where to fix this. I subscribed to my own feed via email and when I saw how it was coming through I wanted to stop promoting the option. Another thing I have are the annoying little symbols throughout my text of my blog post, any clue about this?

#8 Eric Olson March 16th, 2007 at 11:43 am

The little symbols could be caused by compying and pasting posts from Word into your blog platform. Are you doing that?

- Eric

#9 Cody McKibben March 16th, 2007 at 4:21 pm

Hey Ben, Awesome tips!

You know my email subies had MUCH smaller font by default as well. But now that’s no longer a problem!

Thanks
-Cody

#10 Robyn McMaster March 18th, 2007 at 5:42 pm

Hi Ben, I want to install nofollow on my blog, but when I went to Andy’s site he only had plug-ins for Word Press. I hope someone smart can advise my how to set this up in Blogger because I want to be a “player” who sends lots of link love.

Thanks so much,

Robyn

#11 Ben Yoskovitz March 18th, 2007 at 6:17 pm

Robyn - your comments are still getting caught in my spam folder - very weird.

I think you put this on the wrong post - but that’s OK!

I don’t know what can be done with Blogger, you’d have to do some research in their help files. I haven’t used Blogger in awhile.

Of course the better answer is to switch to WordPress *smile* - I’d be happy to help you if need be.

#12 Cody McKibben March 18th, 2007 at 7:35 pm

Robyn I think if you throw this code in the META section of your header in the template:

#13 Cody McKibben March 18th, 2007 at 7:36 pm

eh, sorry don’t know how to get the code to show up, I will try to email you.

#14 Robyn McMaster March 19th, 2007 at 2:15 am

Ben, Cody deserves a medal. He took time to get my email address to send the code. And, not only that he gave me tips beyond to help expand my capabilities.

Cody McKibbean is great and I just want to say so publicly. I’ll write a blog on this that is for sure. It’s folks like Cody who make blogging more fun and rewarding.

Thanks, too, for your suggestion, Ben. And, oops, after I posted the comment, I realized that I scrolled down too far.

Please use your real name or a handle that's not driven by trying to gain SEO / Google Juice from my blog. If you put in a "name" designed for SEO purposes, I will edit it. I support the DoFollow movement, but this is also a community, and comments are meant to inspire discussion, not gain link love. Thank you!