I hate it when I subscribe to a blog via email, then I start getting excerpts in my inbox.
Excerpts to blog posts with a “read more” link. Or sometimes just a link saying, “I have a new post about x! Click here to read!”
I signed up so I could get your blog posts in my email. I did not sign up so you could make me click through to your whole blog EVERY SINGLE TIME.
I signed up so I could be lazy and not have to visit your blog every time.
People are lazy. Let us be lazy or we’ll leave you.
- I’m lazy.
- I don’t want to leave my inbox.
- I hate clicking through to blogs on my phone (which is where I often read emails). So many sites still aren’t properly optimized for phones or just load slow as fuck.
I’m lazy, other people are lazy, let us be lazy.
If you try to force me to click through to your blog every single time, then I’m just going to unsubscribe. Unless your content is THE BEST THING IN THE WORLD to me, it’s just not worth the extra effort. Sorry.
I find that I skip emails (or posts in Feedly) that only show excerpts. Once I do that like 3-5 times, I realize I’m skipping everything and that’s when I unsubscribe completely.
There’s no reason to force people to click through to your site.
Honestly, I can only think of one reason to do this: you want more page views.
The only reason you’d be so desperate for more page views is if you have ads on your site and you need those page views to make money. But if you have ads on your site, you just gave me one more reason to NOT visit your site. I hate ads. They’re slow as fuck (see my previous comment about “loading slow as fuck” on mobile).
Or, you’re not doing email marketing. Why the hell not?
The only other reason I can think of is that you want me to visit your site in hopes of visiting your shop/services page to buy something, and that has an easy solution. Instead of sending me excerpts to your blog posts in an attempt to lure me into buying, send me marketing emails.
I’m 100% serious.
If you send me excerpts because you want me to visit other pages, then you’re not utilising email marketing, and you should be.
- If you only send me an excerpt and a “read more” link to your blog post, I will unsubscribe.
- But I will stick around and stay subscribed if you send me the full blog post AND the occasional marketing email.
That doesn’t mean you constantly send me marketing/salesy emails. You mix value with pitches.
This post isn’t ultimately about email marketing, so I won’t go into a ton of depth. That’s your job to read up on it. But as long as you send me valuable, quality content, I won’t mind if marketing and pitches are mixed in now and then.
You already have my email address. That means you have my attention. Don’t waste it.
- Don’t push me away by only giving me snippets.
- I gave you my email, the least you can do is keep me interested by giving me all your content in a convenient, easy-to-read place.
- Since you have my email, convince me to sell through the place that converts the best: my inbox. Don’t push me to go somewhere else.
- Send me the occasional marketing email along with your valuable blog posts and I’ll stick around. I may even buy something.
I’m glad you said it! I hate that!
If I even subscribe to emails, it means I like you more than the other 300 blogs in Feedly. If I get the first one and it had excerpts, I unsubscribe.
When will everyone learn?
I’m exactly the same Dani. I subscribe to all my favourite blogs via email, then the others via Feedly.
And if we’re being honest, subscribing to something via email is kind of like a form of payment. I’m giving you my email address. THAT’S POWERFUL. You can use that to sell me stuff or whatever. The least you can do is let me be lazy by giving me your whole blog post. Don’t make me “pay” with my email and then send me excerpts.
I use (and love) a plugin called Postmatic for email delivery + commenting. There’s a free version in the WordPress plugin directory. The folks who developed it are wonderful as well. And yes, full posts in the emails!
I’ve heard great things about Postmatic. π
This is one of my biggest pet peeves!!! I know it’s a way to get more people to click on the email and actually go to their post, but really, it’s just annoying and I usually don’t click. I have also unsubscribed when this has happened. π
Yeah it’s definitely to get people to click more, but I don’t think people realize that there’s NO REASON to force people to click. I think they just want more page views because it’s cool to have a higher number. But in the end, those higher page views won’t actually give you anything. There’s no benefit to having higher page views (unless you have ads, which I covered in my post). People just don’t realize that.
Yes!! I hate excerpts about as much as you do, and I do unsubscribe often since I don’t read the posts anyway.
Yeah if I only get excerpts, I seriously do just unsubscribe.
I fucking hate it too! I only continue to read one blog that does that but even their most excellent travel blog does not get read every time because I have to click through. Everyone else I delete
Yep I unsubscribe from almost everyone that only sends me excerpts. It’s a BIG DEAL to hand over your email address to someone. The least they can do is send you the full content.
I actually don’t unsubscribe but I often delete the emails that don’t give me the whole post. I have so many emails that those are the lowest on my list. I prefer to just read in my email, if I plan on commenting I’ll click into the post.
That’s what I do at first. I start always deleting them. Then 5 emails later, I realize I only ever delete their emails and that’s when I unsubscribe!
Meh, doesn’t really bother me as much but it can get annoying. I only follow a handful of bloggers through email, mostly I use Bloglovin.
I use a combination of Feedly and email, and the excerpts annoy me regardless of the platform. π
OMG you have taken the words out of my mouth! It seems like you always see the world the way I do.
I hate it when I have to click out of my email. I used to view blog posts on email at work, so I never clicked the read more button because being on Safari was frowned upon, lol but being on my email no one knew what I was reading. So 99.99% of the time when there was an excerpt I would just not click it.
Although I will admit there have been a few times I did the “read more” button, but it was only because that post had like 10+ pictures in it and I don’t want to waste people data downloading them on their phones. (which by the way, I have no idea if it affects it or not).
I’m so glad you feel the same way Veronica!!
I think the idea of stopping people from downloading on their phone only works if you have a clear warning/notice before they click. It doesn’t make a difference if you have the read more button, but no warning as to what will happen when they click that button (so they click it anyway and then start downloading all the images). Does that make sense?
YES! Goodness, I agree with this so much. Like you, when I am reading emails on my phone, I am basically NOT going to click the link because it’s annoying and slow (and it takes me out of my email groove hah). The irony is, I star emails of posts that I want to go back to and/or comment on (like this one right here of yours, actually) and then visit them later on my laptop. But the “read more” ones just get deleted, so at least in my case, that blog is probably losing a pageview instead of gaining one.
That’s so funny Shannon! It would be really interesting to run a few experiments where people sent full posts then excerpts (maybe switching over a few times) and compared the pageviews/engagement levels of each.
Honestly most of the time I immediately click through to the blog anyway, excerpt or not. I subscribe via email to find out about the new posts, but I mostly read emails in Gmail and posts hardly ever look as good there as they do on an actual blog. Since I’d most likely have to click through anyway if I actually like the post (to either share or save), it just feels more natural to read it on the blog. \_(γ)_/
I do click through sometimes (mostly on blogs I know/love and have a great design) but oddly enough, only if I get the full post.
I think I like being able to take those 5 seconds to skim the full post in my email, confirm, “Yes this looks awesome” and THEN click through to keep reading. (On some posts.)
If I literally only see an excerpt, I bail.
I’m probably an oddball, but I am subscribed to exactly ZERO blogs by e-mail. I really do not want to be notified every single time someone posts. I add them to Feedly, then I can scroll through everybody at once and see what I want to read. Even then, I don’t actually read the post in Feedly, so I’d never know if it was just an excerpt. I click through to the actual blog and read the post.
I can understand that being a hassle on a phone, but….I’m old school and only use my phone for games. π
Yeah I use my phone for everything. π
I subscribe to my favourite CANNOT MISS blogs via email, and others via Feedly.
THIS. I subscribed to get all of your posts, don’t just give me some freaking excerpts. If you want me to click a link, then make your whole post so interesting that I have to comment. It’s frustrating otherwise. Nobody signs up for an email list looking for excerpts.
Exactly! I feel like handing over your email is a BIG DEAL. It’s basically a form of payment, given everything you can do with an email (send me email marketing stuff or whatever). You’re given DIRECT ACCESS to my inbox.
Don’t waste that by sending me crap. I see excerpts as crap.
I gave you something in return. Something PRIVATE. Something VALUABLE. People pay money for email addresses (they’re asshats, but I’m just saying). The least you can do is give me VALUABLE content… ALL your content.
Aw damn. I also hate it when the whole post isn’t in the email and I have to click on a “read the whole post here” kind of button, but then I realized my Mailchimp RSS to email feed only shows excerpts as well. Gah gotta fix that. LOL.
Oh no! Check your settings (Settings > Reading) and make sure the feed one is set to “Full text” and not “Summary”.
Thanks! π
Oh man, glad you said something. I just realized even though the Mailchimp coding said to pull the full content, the WP reading settings overrode and only showed an excerpt to my subscribers. Thanks for clearing that up!
YES! I love this post! This drives me crazy, yet I do tolerate it for one food blogger. I need the post’s html address to upload the recipe into my recipe app, but I’d prefer to only click through from the email to the blog if I loved it, instead of that being the only way to see the recipe. I delete any other blogs that do this, but I have a huge weak spot for any path that will lead me to yummy cupcakes, brownies and cookies. ?
Haha I totally understand Jen. There might be one person I let slide now and then if their content is SERIOUSLY AMAZEBALLS but for 99% of people, I will literally unsubscribe if I’m only given an excerpt.
I hate it! If I subscribe by e-mail, it means I really want to make sure I read all the blog-posts, but I want to be able to read them when I feel like it, and from my inbox, too!
Exactly! People subscribe for CONVENIENCE. Don’t fake convenience by emailing them, then make it inconvenient to actually read the whole thing.
I was thinking that I should do it…now you made me think..again…I love it:):)
I loved to read your view because i totally saw and do it differently. I unsubscribe if i get the whole post in the mail, because i expect to get different things in the mail than just the blog content which i can read on the blog. I like to get extra stuff. So i make a totally different content for every mail i send and provide links to the content on my blog.
I think that’s a different topic. I’m mostly talking about people who subscribe to get blog posts, rather than different content all together. π
Hahaha, YES LET US BE LAZY. Even clicking a button and waiting for the page to load makes me want to scream. And YES, a lot of sites that I’ve subscribed to don’t do well on my phone, which is really sad, because they have GREAT content.
I see this often with food bloggers. Their recipes are SO GREAT but they’re all so riddled with adverts.
Loading on a phone typically goes like this:
* Click link
* Wait wait wait wait
* Page loads, cool!
* Start scrolling down
* Pop up appears
* FML
* If I try to close the pop up and accidentally CLICK on it instead (happens a lot) I literally rage quit the whole site right here. If I do manage to close the pop up, I keep rollin’.
* Scroll scroll
* Fuck, all the adverts are making this sooo laggy.
* Oh look, another pop up has slid out from the bottom, cutting my reading view in half. But I’m afraid to close it in case I accidentally click on the ad instead of the little “x”.
* Oh damn, my whole internet app has now crashed because of all the effing adverts.
SERIOUSLY. That is what my mobile browsing experience is like with 99% of the food bloggers I encounter.
Oh my goodness, hahaha that was hilarious. I mean, the process is sucky, I AGREE, and I usually face ALL of those annoying tropes when I’m about to download something – I ESPECIALLY hate the ads that one out of BLOODY EFFING NOWEHERE, you know? And the phone screen being so small, I FEEL you, I’ve clicked on ads so many times too, instead of the exit cross thing. It’s just made me stray away from using my phone for browsing for a lot of sites, and that’s sad for them, because their traffic is drastically decreasing.
This is one of the most annoying things that can happen when I subscribe. The funny thing is, I usually click trough to go to original website to leave comments etc), but I am annoyed when they force me to do it.
Yes! I quite often do click through to leave a comment, or sometimes even to read it directly on the blog. But I hate being FORCED into that. I like to do it on my own accord.
I didn’t even know I had it set as excerpt. xD I changed it to full content now. I’m not all that familiar with Mailchimp, so π Good thing you made this post.
I highly suggest you subscribe to your own list! That way you can always be immediately informed if things don’t look right or if your email doesn’t get sent out at all for some reason.
It’s better to be able to find out on your own straight away than rely on people to inform you of errors. π
I did that just now π
I hate clicking too. I never subscribe to blogs. I come to blog’s home page and read posts. I don’t mind scrolling but I don’t like that I have to click to see full post – that I get excerpt or in some instances just an image and title od post and not the full post (It is the same principle as when you subscribe, isn’t it?). I like to be able to scroll down and see if there is something interesting in post- I hate that I have to click to see full post and then I have to go back to continue with older posts. That for me is a huge factor that makes blog readable and enjoyable. After one or two unsuccessful clicks there and back I simply don’t bother any more…
This has never bothered me. I usually want to go to the site to comment anyways, so I usually just go there to begin with. I just use emails and Bloglovin to tell me when there are new posts so that I remember to go to the site. I do get frustrated if I’m on Goodreads trying to decide if I want to read a book and people make me go to their site to read the review (especially if they aren’t linking to the post, but the homepage).
See, I’m completely opposite. I don’t want to read it in my email, 97% of the time I’ll click over to the website to read the post there. Now this has me questioning my own newsletter as I have always done excerpts.
Going to ask my readers what they prefer and see what happens!
I personally think there are no downsides to including the whole post.
As long as you make the title clickable (link to the actual post) then everyone at least has the option to click through if they want or they can keep reading if they want.
But with only excerpts, you don’t give them the option!
I’m the same way – if a blog’s posts are truncated in my RSS reader, I unsubscribe. It’s one of my pet peeves and drives me absolutely nuts. And you nailed it – they’re doing it for clicks. Another thing that drives me nuts (and I don’t see this on personal blogs; more on websites) are the list posts where you have to click ‘next’ to see the next item on the list. I click away so fast from those. I ain’t got time to click 10 times to read a list of 10 ____ that should be on one page.
Oh god I DESPISE those. And those are so obviously just for extra clicks for the sake of adverts. Terrible. (Otherwise they’d at least be in a JavaScript gallery, rather than a NEW PAGE LOAD gallery.)
Hi, Ashley! I’ve only been blogging for about two years now, so I was kind of surprised to hear your suggestion about removing ads and sending marketing emails. It always seemed to me that if someone subscribed to my blog, they’d rather have posts in their email than marketing emails (even if it was just a snippet). But like I said, I haven’t been doing this for a super long time so there are a lot of nuances I don’t know about yet. Right now I have two kinds of ads (one pays advertiser fees and the other is for affiliate programs). I only get around 50 views/day right now, so I’m concerned I don’t have enough readers yet for marketing emails to be a viable option. I’ve noticed you don’t have ads at all, so I was wondering how you make money from your blog. Thanks!
Hi Alison!
Ads aren’t a good way to make money. A few dollars for pocket money, maybe, but not significant income.
Ads are incredibly cheap so you need MILLIONS of page views per month to make a decent income from them.
The best way to make money (and how I do it) is through creating products/services and selling those instead. π
Just imagine:
1) You place someone else’s ad in your sidebar and you get like $0.20 cents any time someone clicks it.
OR
2) You place an advert for one of your own products and get $50 every time someone clicks it and makes a purchase.
That’s a huge difference in potential money! In order to make $1000 from each, you’d need either 5,000 clicks from Option #1, or 20 sales from Option #2.
To be honest, I’ve been thinking of leaving behind the pay-per-click ads entirely for a long while now and just sticking to my affiliate ads. However, I hadn’t considered nixing affiliate ads too and just sticking with links. Right now my pay-per-clicks make me the most money (I’m part of a special ad program through a food website that pays higher rates per click, so with my small readership, the clicks outweigh the affiliate buys right now). However, I’m planning some changes to my site next year that will could very well change all that.
As for making my own products, that’s part of the long term plan, but I’m not quite there yet. Right now I design custom teas through Adagio and have affiliate links on my site. Eventually I’d like to sell my very own teas that I blend and ship myself, but the startup cost for that is a bit prohibitive (and I have access to more and better tea through Adagio than I could get on my own right now).
Still, you’ve given me a lot to think about. Setting a goal of completely doing away with sidebar ads is looking really attractive right now! Thanks for the insight! π
I also donβt like reading excerpts on my RSS reader; for me it kinda defeats the purpose of me having a reader if I need to check the blog to read the entire post/s. In addition, if the content interests me, I would visit your blog/site regardless (I would even comment if I have something to say/add). π
Exactly! If the post is good and inspires something in me, I will click through to leave a comment.
Or if your blog design is amazeballs, I may even click through on my own to read the post there.
I think the important thing is giving your reader OPTIONS. If you provide the full post, your reader can decide to click through or not.
If you only provide the excerpt, you’re forcing them down a certain path. That’s not cool.
Reaxing excerpts on my emaila nd actually clicking the “read more” button didn’t bother me anymore. But now that I’ve subscribed to a ton of blogs, I’m being lazy to to do it. I gotta change my Mailchimp RSS to email settings to change my own since I find that metbod not cool anymore so I probably shouldn’t do it on my own blog. π
Oh my I got so many typos this is embarrassing hahaha. I meant “Reading excerpts on my email didn’t actually bother me before
” π
No worries, it happens. π
And yes, definitely change it! As I just wrote above to Mitchii, I think it’s important to give your readers the choice.
If you provide the full blog post, people can decide for themselves to click through or not click through. If you only provide an excerpt, you’re forcing everyone to click through.
Choices are good!
I’ve not had the problem of being subscribed and not getting a whole post, I find it odd that people wouldn’t want to give a whole post, and pfft, what do I know? I love getting your posts completely to my email because laaaaaaaazy, but then I forget to comment, which is bad, I’m sorry. I loved this though! π
Haha I’m the same as you—I often don’t comment. Thanks for commenting on this one! π
This doesn’t bother me too much – but is eye brow raising based on comments. I am pretty sure that my email does that because i use an RSS template with mailchimp. π
It’s totally possible to show the full post in MailChimp! Check your feed settings in Settings > Reading. Make sure it’s set to “full post” and not “summary”.
You can do that with a RSS driven campaign??
Absolutely! You just change your RSS feed to show full posts.
Awesome, I will try and figure that out. hahaa
Call me the Queen of Wishy Washy, but it really depends on the niche/topic of the blog for me. For example, I read a fair amount of “natural DIY health” blogs, the kind with essential oil or herb recipes and the like. The problem is that some of these lovely people also wear the mommy blogger-home-schooler hat and I don’t have freaking kids, nor do I have plans for them. So it is nice to have just an excerpt or digest of posts sent via email so that I can skip having the kid stuff fill up feedly or waste my time. Maybe I just need to be more discerning because feedly is still completely out of control for me.
Pretty much everybody else…give me the whole post!
I don’t really follow a lot of blog with e-mail, I usually prefer to follow blogs through social media or bloglovin, but there are some blogs I follow by e-mail. Usually if I am interested in the post I will go over and visit their actual post. Although I’ve had a few posts that I read in my e-mail, so I can see how showing the whole post would be handy. Those who want to read it in their e-mail can and thsoe who will visit anyway probably don’t care if they get an excerpt or whole post.
I subscribed to my own blog to see how my posts got delivered as I wasn’t sure. It was set on excerpts instead, so I changed it to whole posts now. Thanks for adressing this topic! I never really thought about it much as I don’t have many e-mail followers, so it’s good to give it some thought now.
Yes…this is the most frustrating thing!
I agree. I do like reading the whole post in an email. The less clicks the better. I’m a lazy subscriber. However, I wonder if the “read more” option appears if that’s the way it is on the person’s blog? I don’t do email newsletters so I’m unsure of the process. I think most of us have “read more” option on our actual blogs b/c the blog would be never ending and hard to navigate.
No, the settings for the RSS feed (which is how the email subscriptions work) are totally different from the blog itself. π
So you can have full posts in the RSS feed (email) but excerpts on the blog.
I don’t mind the “Read more of this post…” buttons. It’s my choice if I want to click it and continue reading or just delete the email because it didn’t sound interesting to begin with, but unsubscribing completely is a little extreme.
I do use the “Read more” link but only because if I didn’t, any visitor to my blog would have to scroll through the content of each post instead of just scrolling through the titles with a short excerpt to see if they want to read more. I’m not blog code savvy enough to figure out how to show excerpts on my blog but have the automatically generated emails sent to subscribers show the whole post.
I think the problem is that you’re not giving your readers a choice at all if you send excerpts.
With excerpts, the only way to read the post is to click on the link and read it on the blog. You’re forcing them into that.
But if you provide the whole post in the email, people have the choice. They can either read the post in their inbox, or they can click over to the blog to read it there.
People can decide if they’re interested in reading it based on the title. If the title isn’t interesting, I don’t have to read the rest of the post.
But at least by providing me with the full post, you give me OPTIONS and you give me the ability to skim through the post to decide if it’s interesting to me.
Ashley, your points are all valid, especially for sites that are HEAVY on adverts and other confusions (I LOATHE these!). But as a personal blogger, I have nightmares of typos. If I send just an excerpt and then discover a typo later, I feel horrible, but I can correct it and minimize the spread. But if the entire post was sent to a subscriber, oh the horror! This typo has the potential to live on forever and spread. (However, I did try it your way for one post, but it was just too traumatizing!) I know; you can say it: anal!
I have this same problem but with RSS feeds and I’ve actually been meaning to ask you if there is a solution to this for RSS feeds. There are some blogs where I grab their feed and stick it in my reader and just get the first paragraph and no feature image or anything and it is so annoying! I doubt the site owner realizes this though, is this something you can change easily on a wordpress site for example?
In WordPress, the owner of the blog can easily change this in Settings > Reading. There’s a setting called:
“For each article in a feed, show {full text} {summary}”
So it’s literally a simple radio button to show the full text or an excerpt.
I feel like going around and pointing this out to some blogs…. That might not be taken well, haha! I did go and check to make sure my emails sent the full article though, I feel like I do that a lot after reading your blog π
In general it’s a very good idea to subscribe to all your own stuff so you know exactly what’s going on at all times. π
Completely agreed! I’m just so forgetful that I don’t remember what the last email said some nights haha
It’s totally the worst. >.< I hate it! I automatically unsubscribe. I love your point about focusing on email marketing versus using the email list to recap posts.
Oh man… I never thought about this, but it’s probably because I hate going through emails.
I subscribe to a few blogs through email, but to be honest, I don’t even read them. If I’m really interested, I’ll just click the link and read it on a blog/site instead of through email because I usually comment on every post that I read. It’s just easier that way for me.
The good thing about full posts is that you give the reader OPTIONS.
They can either read the whole thing in their email, or they can click on the title to go over to the actual blog and read it there.
Options are good. π
Hi, I enjoyed this article and found it interesting that you had such a strong opinion about not using excerpts in emails. Clearly from the comments a lot of people are on your side. My one question is, does this only apply when you have specifically subscribed to the blog via email (either because it was offered that way on the site or through RSS) or do you apply these feelings regardless of the email marketing offer that you opted into on the site? I can see how one should definitely be full length posts and the other I think can go either way. The real reason for my asking is that a lot of people use excerpts because they do affiliate marketing links which can not often be sent via email per their affiliate agreements. Although there are other ways to remove affiliate links from going out via email, sending excerpts that fall above any affiliate links in posts is an effective way for people to always comply. I think this is an important topic so I just wanted to get your feedback on the above. Thanks, great blog btw. Keep up the great work. Love other people that are into coding and website nuances to the nth degree!
If the purpose of the newsletter is to send blog post updates, then I want to see the whole thing.
If I sign up for a newsletter expecting to get something else (like manual newsletter campaigns) and I just so happen to ALSO get a blog post now and then, then I’m less bothered.
Does that make sense?
I certainly wouldn’t expect people to violate their affiliate marketing agreements though. π
I have to say, I had no idea there were such strong feelings on this subject. I’ve just downloaded Postmatic and started using it to send my emails instead of Jetpack, which was sending excerpts. I have to say, I do like it better. I think the emails look a lot better. I don’t really mind clicking someone’s “read more” through to their blog, but I suspect I’m in the minority, so full posts it is. Thanks for the post! I’mm still new to blogging, and I love getting opinions and ideas on stuff I hadn’t even considered.
I hadn’t realized people felt this way. I didn’t get to read through all the comments but one reason I don’t do the full post is because as an amazon affiliate I put those links in my posts often and those links are not allowed to be used in email so to get around that I only send an email updating that there are new posts on the site. Is there a way to get around this and still send the entire post in an email without removing the affiliate links from the actual blog post?
I hate this…but I recently figured out that I’ve been doing it as well? I have a blog through wordpress.com, and I really like my theme and don’t want to change it, but I have to have a “read-more” thing so that they don’t all show up on the front page. :/ I’ll probably end up changing my theme soon anyways, but ah well…I totally get what you’re saying. I just do it for the aesthetics of the “blog” page, but I can see how it ticks people off.
Just to clarify, I’m only talking about full posts inside email subscriptions. π
On the actual blog itself, I think showing excerpts is better!
This makes sense. How does configure this in WordPress?
I meant to say: This makes sense. How does one configure this in WordPress? Thank you!
You can use the
<!-- more -->tag to make the post cut off where you want. I believe there’s a button for that in the visual editor. You just insert it where you want the excerpt to stop.Worth noting: If the blogger uses Amazon Associate links, they cannot include links in emails, which includes RSS feeds.
Amy Lynn Andrews wrote about this: https://amylynnandrews.com/do-not-put-amazon-associates-links-in-emails/
Of course, I think if someone manually schedules their blog posts to be emailed, there should be zero excerpts. But those who use Amazon Associates’ links in their blogs tend to have to use excerpts (unless they use the plugin to remove them in feeds).
There is this plugin that will strip out Amazon links: https://wordpress.org/plugins/remove-amazon-links-from-rss-feed/
Also it might be worth asking if those custom URL forwarders would be allowed instead. For example: nosegraze.com/amazon-affiliate-link/ I add that link into my post then that link redirects to the actual Amazon affiliate link. That way, the actual affiliate link is never inside the post/email/RSS feed and you’ll never be able to click on and be redirected to the affiliate link if you’re “offline”.
It’s a grey area though, for sure. π
Ah, it seems using things like that is also out. π https://amylynnandrews.com/do-not-put-amazon-associates-links-in-emails/#comment-29260
They seem to allow it if it’s actually hosted on your site (e.g. a link to an entry or something like what POY did with setting up a shop that is their affiliate links).
To be honest, I don’t like to read posts in my mailbox. I’m okay with excerpts since I only care about the notification when a new post is online.
Hi Ashley!
I know this is an old post but I’ve encountered a problem. Mailchimp is showing me the excerpts of my blog posts only instead of the full posts. I’ve already set it to FULL on their Design section but still it only shows the excerpts. It really irritates me. I’m thinking of just switching to Feedpress but it doesn’t integrate with a lot of other plugins. Maybe you can help me? Thanks Ashley!
This is actually something you need to fix in your WordPress site settings – not MailChimp. π Either in Settings > Reading or somewhere in your SEO plugin you have it set to show excerpts only in your RSS feed. You need to switch that to show full content.
I’ve already set it to Full in my Settings so maybe in one of the plugins?
Yes it could be in your SEO plugin.
In the blogging world, i think it is best to always send some excerpts to your visitors or they will leave your blog email list for good.
Atleast, whenever you are sending out an email update, try to always engage them first before asking the to click through a link to read the rest of the post content