Most everyone who uses RSS knows about the bandwagon effect. The bandwagon effect is as simple as this: the more people subscribed to a blog, the more likely a person is to click and subscribe as well. Simple logic would lead you from there to believe that you want as many RSS subscribers as possible in order to influence as many more people as possible to become RSS subscribers; it creates a sort of snowball effect.

This is all very true. So then, why are those who subscribe to your feed via email likely to be more valuable than those who subscribe through any of the other feedburner avenues?

The “secret” is that for all of the feed-readers, feedburner only counts people who read your content that day to go towards that day’s subscription count. On the other hand, those who signed up for your website through email are always counted towards your total unless they unsubscribe or close their email account. By encouraging your readers to sign up for your feed via email, there is a very good chance that your feed subscription count will stay consistently higher than it would otherwise.