RSS campaigns are a great way to notify blog readers who are subscribed to email marketing that a new post is published on a site. The MailChimp RSS campaign will pull specified content from a blog’s feed (RSS feed) into a premade template, and send that email to subscribers on a regular basis with new content from new blog posts!
MailChimp is trying to hide RSS campaign functionality – odd, considering it is VERY popular.
But good news is that because Argyle has done this before, we have a secret link to enable these campaigns for ANY account our agency is added to.
To create an RSS campaign in MailChimip, log into the client’s account, then click this link to start creating an RSS campaign in MailChimp. This will open the classic automation builder for any existing and new (yes, brand spankin new) accounts!
After clicking this link, you’ll need to set up the following:
- RSS Feed
- Recipients
- Email Setup
- Email Template and Design
Setting up the Site’s RSS Feed in MailChimp #
All WordPress sites have an RSS feed, and they are typically under a “/feed/” url on the site. For example, Argyle’s site, argyleinteractive.com, has an rss feed here:
- https://argyleinteractive.com/feed/
We can get different feeds of specific content by going to an archive url, and adding “/feed/” to the end of it. In most cases, it will open that specific archive’s feed. This is useful for setting up specific content category RSS feeds. Below is Argyle’s RSS feed for help docs:
- https://argyleinteractive.com/docs/feed/
In MailChimp, you will use the feed url in the field when it asks for the RSS Feed URL.
Schedule for RSS Campaign #
When in the RSS Feed set up screen, you’ll be asked to set the schedule for the RSS feed to send out when there is new content published to the feed.
You can toggle to send an email to subscribers:
- Every day
- Every week
- Every month
You also need to specify the time of day the RSS campaign will send.
IMPORTANT: When the RSS campaign is sent depends on if there is a new post published in the feed since the date and time the campaign was activated or last sent. Ideally, posts should be published in the feed for up to 1hr prior to RSS campaigns from being sent.
The last option in setting up the RSS feed for MailChimp is to choose whether to resize images to fit in MailChimp option. We’ll typically check this off since it will tell MailChimp to resize images to fit within a template of 600px.
Recipients for the RSS Campaign #
The next part is to set up the recipients for the campaign. This is a fairly straightforward process and you can make use of MailChimp’s tags, groups, and other audience organization settings to send your RSS campaign to all subscribers, subscribers tagged accordingly, or subscribers in specific interest group(s).
You can also exclude contacts from receiving this campaign with the same parameters as above.
From Name, Subject, Preview and more Campaign Setup #
The next screen is where we set up the following:
- Campaign Name (internal purposes only)
- From Name
- From Sender address
- Email Subject
- Email Preview Text
For RSS campaigns, we can use RSS tags in the Email Subject such as the new post’s title (*|RSSITEM:TITLE|*). We can also use personalization tags, like first name or other audience field options.
Ensure any merge tags set up in the subject render properly by sending a test email.
Template and Design #
If there is a premade RSS campaign template available in the account, you can select this as the template to use for the campaign.
Typically, we will need to create the template in the design, based off of an approved design mockup. Since RSS campaign’s use dynamic content to pull in details from the target website, we need to set up the dynamic content portion of the campaign using design and HTML options instead of using image based email design practices. We’ll also need to make use of MailChimp’s RSS Campaign Merge Tags.
Designing the dynamic content portion of an RSS campaign will require you to fine tune MailChimp design options and even set up some HTML table elements to ensure the placement of RSS content matches to the approved mockup.
Test, Confirm, and Launch #
After the campaign recipients, campaign details, and content have been set up it’s time to test to make sure everything is working properly.
After testing internally, include another team member for the test email to make sure we haven’t missed anything or overlooked something in the design.
If everything is all set and the campaign schedule, recipients, details and design are good to launch, start the RSS campaign!
