What to do with unverified RSS subscribers?

I just checked my Feedburner account again and looked at the email addresses of those people who subscribed to my feed via the Feedburner Email Subscription. While I only have 421 active subscribers for that part, I discovered there are actually 1,147 total subscribers and 99% of them are unverified.

That’s 726 more people who subscribed but did not confirm their subscription. That means only 37% of those who inputted their email address actually did the final step of approving their subscriptions. So now, what do we do with these 726 pending subscriptions? Here’s some really obvious ideas:

• Just click cancel, at least for the really old ones. The list shows the email account and the date when it first subscribed. If it was more than a month, maybe it’s time to purge them from the data base.
• Wait a little bit longer. At least you know there are people actually trying to subscribe.
• Email them personally. You can send them a personalized follow up email telling them that their RSS email subscription was not completed and they may re-subscribe again if the confirmation email is already lost or deleted.

You might want to check your Feedburner or Feedblitz subscriber details too and see if there are pending subscriptions to your blog as well. The email list is also good for checking out who have been subscribing to your feeds (hint: corporate email domains).