Feedburner recently improved their Free RSS-to-Email syndication service, and now offers simple customized subject lines.

In May, I spoke about why you shouldn’t use FeedBurner to syndicate content to email subscribers. Since then, FeedBurner has made an important step in the right direction that can bring a much more relevant experience to email subscibers—a change that if taken advantage of could greatly increase the number of subscribers who view your content.

Custom Headlines

Custom Subject lines are sort of the bread and butter for a successful email campaign. Up until Feedburners recent changes users were stuck with a static subject line, a flaw that lacks personalization and doesn’t communicate any valuable information to the user prior to opening an Email.

Now with FeedBurner you can include the ${latestItemTitle} variable to add the title of your latest item in the subject line. Additionally, if you have multiple posts in the same email, you can use the ${m} variable which shows how many additional items there are in the email or ${n} to show the total number of items in the email.

Feedburner now offers 3 dynamic variables in it’s Email Branding for Subject Lines.

It Can Make a Huge Difference

While Feedburner still offers a lot less than other services (ie: MailChimp, iContact, AWeber) this is a big step in the right direction, and the results of a simple customization can be amazing.

On a blog where Email is a common subscription option, it’s entirely possible that a customized subject will improve the number of times an email is read or clicked by 100%. With users already struggling to keep up with their inboxes, helping them know what’s inside the message before opening it can be a huge relief.

Consider other services

While FeedBurner has become a more viable option for some websites, it’s still not able to compete with the feature sets of other email campaign services. If resources allow, investing in such a service can bring a much more full experience to users outside of your website.

That said, we’re thrilled to see FeedBurner finally making some vital changes to their own free service. There is still a lack of personalization (ie: including a persons name in an email, or complete control over what content is sent to what user), and there remains to be very few design customizations… but we can always hope FeedBurner plans to make changes to those features in the future!

Have you integrated custom subjects into your RSS-to-Email Syndications yet? What sorts of improvements have you seen as a result?