Blog Updates by Email Wins By a Big Margin

The recent poll on email vs. RSS for blog update delivery generated quite a few votes and comments. As I mentioned in my previous post, I like to test the waters every year or so as Internet users become more sophisticated. Yet, with this sampling of savvy Web users, the results barely budged.

 

Email wins again with 75% of the vote. RSS follows with 23% and a new entry in the poll - audio (podcasts) garnered 2% of the vote. (Note: this is not a scientic poll by any means, but does give a good picture of how people are consuming blog content.)

You'll notice the poll looks rather odd with numerous individual entries. Something to note when you run your own Facebook polls is that you have the option of allowing or not allowing people to add more options for folks to select. I left it open and what happened is people put their comments in the options section instead of selecting one of my three options and then posting a comment in the actual comment area.

This really skews things and makes it a bit tricky sometimes to decipher what people are voting for. In the future I will disable the "anyone can add options" option so they stick with my poll and add comments in the correct spot.
If you click through to the poll and read the comments, you'll find a theme with the email users: most don't read or forget to check RSS feeds so they prefer email because they ALWAYS read their email.
What's the take-away?
Make sure your blog has multiple subscribe options so your audience can consume it their preferred way. Just because you're a savvy web user, don't assume that your audience all uses Google reader (or other feed reader) to get their content. Make sure you have an email option (check out Feedblitz, Feedburner, Aweber, Mailchimp for email delivery).
If you have an email subscribe option on your blog, what service do you use and why do you like it?