It used to be common to follow website feeds to receive updates and news about a website. Times have changed however, and follow.it wants to make it so following a website and being notified is easy, quick and fast for both the viewer and the website owner.
In our Follow.it Preview we will see how it wants to do that and check the website, deal and offer so that we can make up our mind.
Presenting Follow.it
Follow.it’s website is very clean and the onboarding sequence starts right away, which would normally get us directly using it. As we’re just visiting for now, however, let’s skip the onboarding and check the documentation: There is a detailed knowledge base, great!
As for roadmap, it’s covered as well.
There seems to be enough information available to check how it should work and know what should get there in the following months. That’s what we need to evaluate what Follow.it can do.
Follow.it Features
Let’s check how exactly Follow.it blends feeds with newsletter and how it wants to compete.
Step 1: Allow to Follow
As we delve into Follow.it, we begin with allowing our visitors to follow us:
- It can be done via the form builder we can design and embed on our website
- We can attach the action to existing forms
- We can add follow icons to link to our follow page
- We can add our website to the follow.it directory to allow others to organically find us and follow us
Compared to the normal newsletter sign up, we have a few more options available to us here, but it’s not too different.
Step 2: Follow!
Once people decide to Follow us, there are several ways they can join and have a few extra options
- input their email
- via social networks (so they don’t have to add anything)
After joining, people can:
- easily unfollow if they want to
- Decide which category, tag or author to follow
- Pick preferred delivery channels
The last two are big ones. With regular newsletters that’s the channel you have and you can’t decide anything else: you get everything. By merging the feed with email notification, you can tweak what notifications you have, and you can also decide where to get it. We know via their roadmap they have several in the works, which is awesome.
While follow.it is GDPR compliant and verified, GDPR has certain rules which are important for the privacy of the website visitor, but at the same time result in a lower percentage of confirmations, be it because it was forgotten, it goes to the spam folder or many other reasons. follow.it attempts to solve the issue with a blend of single opt-in and double opt-in, that should give the best of both worlds.
Also, by allowing for social sign-ups or for sign-ups of users already logged into follow.it, there is nothing the visitor has to input and following is much easier and faster.
Follow.it also allows for different kinds of emails to be received, and the visitor can decide which one they prefer:
- Newspaper is one email per day (if there are new articles), containing all the articles of the past 24 hours.
- You can also choose to receive one email per article as well
- You can choose between headlines and full story, depending on which one you prefer.
Ultimately, follow.it offers ample statistics regarding follows/unfollows and emails sent/open and so on, giving you as much comprehension as possible. It is also compatible with Google Analytics by having utms in email links.
From what I can see of Follow.it there’s more versatility than with normal email newsletters, and it is also completely automated while giving many options to the person that subscribes. Sounds great, in my mind, for websites creating content.
Integrations are not really part of Follow.it and while Zapier is being worked on, they will mostly be regarding new notification channels. You can manually import and export your list, and that’s about it.
Follow.it AppSumo deal
Let’s take a look at the normal pricing first, and understand how it works:
As we can see, follow.it’s normal pricing depends on plan and followers amount in the account (regardless of the number of feeds).
The Basic plan is always free no matter the followers, but it offers less features and it has ads. On the AppSumo deal we have access to the Super-cool plan, which is their most expensive plan.
Let’s see what we get in the AppSumo deal:
As we can see, we get all the Super-Cool features, we can have up to 7 stacks and we get the White-label from stack 1. all that changes is the amount of feeds (Unlimited at 7 stacks) and the amount of followers (50k at 7 stacks).
If we exceed the total number of followers, we pay for the extra at a 20% discounted rate than normal. Meaning if we have 7 stacks and 54k followers, we only pay the rate for 4k followers at a 20% discounted rate.
Considering the amount of followers and the discounted extra rate, it is one good deal to have if the use case fits.
Follow.it Preview in Conclusion
Follow.it seems aimed at content-driven websites. While it does not have much integration with any other tool, it does seem like it can do its job very well and is flexible enough to allow customization while being hassle-free for the website owner. Meaning they can focus on pushing out content rather than preparing their newsletter that talks about said content.
The pricing and AppSumo deal also seems quite convenient, so if the use case fits, I would say this is a great tool to try.
In fact, we will try it ourselves for MasterStack as it seems to be very relevant for what we do here. You can already join via Follow.it as we have a review in the works.
Do let me know if you try it out as well and if you like Follow.it! And check out our Follow.it Review for more.
Follow.it Preview Card
Name: Follow.It
Description: Follow.it makes it easy to follow a website and be notified about updates on different channels, via easy to subscribe forms and pages.
Offer price: 59+
Currency: USD
Operating System: SaaS
Application Category: Feed
Summary
Follow.it looks like a breath of fresh air by allowing subscription customization and plans for many notification channels. It does have great potential, however most of the potential is planned and not here yet.
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Features
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Presentation
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Price
Overall
User Review
( votes)Pros
- Customization Options
- Automated Feed
- Easy to Join and Follow
- Many Notifications Channel planned…
Cons
- … though if they are planned, it means most are not here yet.
- Not many integrations
