Share Your Blog Posts with Mailchimp

If you have a blog or other web content with an RSS feed, send an RSS email campaign to automatically share new posts to your subscribed contacts. This type of campaign pulls in RSS (Real Simple Syndication) content and emails it to your audience based on a recurring schedule you choose.

In this article, you'll learn how to create an RSS email campaign.

Before you start

Here are some things to know before you begin this process.

• RSS Campaigns is a Classic Automations feature. Classic Automations are only available to accounts that have previously created a classic automation.
• You'll need the URL for your RSS feed. If you want to include content from multiple feeds, you can use our FEED merge tag to add multiple RSS feeds to one campaign. Or use a feed aggregator to combine multiple RSS feeds into a single feed.
• You can't control the RSS content via the campaign builder. If you want your content formatted a certain way, edit the RSS source directly.
• To be sure that blog posts are pulled into an RSS campaign, publish them at least 3 hours before an RSS campaign is set to send.

About RSS sends

RSS campaigns use merge tags to pull in content from your RSS feed. Mailchimp automatically emails this content to your subscribers according to a schedule you set—daily, weekly, whatever makes sense for your blog.

To set up an RSS campaign, you’ll create an email that Mailchimp will copy and populate with new blog feed content for each send. You can think of this as your 'parent' campaign, and each copy as a 'child' of the parent campaign.

We won't send RSS emails unless there's something new to share. For example, if you set your campaign to send weekly but haven't posted to your blog in more than a week, we won't send to your audience until there is a new post on the day your campaign is set to send.

The first time your RSS email sends, we'll only include posts from the last 24 hours for daily, from the last seven days for weekly, and the last 30 days for monthly. After that, each new send will pull all posts made to your blog feed since the last send.

Create an RSS campaign

To create a new RSS campaign, follow these steps.

1. On your account dashboard, click the Automations icon.
2. Click Classic Automations.
   
3. Click Share blog updates.
4. Enter a Campaign Name and choose an audience.
   
5. Click Begin.
   

RSS feed step

You'll choose the RSS feed, schedule, and other settings on the RSS Feed step.

1. Type your feed's URL in the RSS Feed URL field.
2. Choose your send time and other options.
   

• When should we send?
  Choose from Every day, Every week, or Every month. Use the drop-down menus and checkboxes to choose the day(s) and time you want your RSS campaign to send.
• Resize RSS feed images to fit template
  Check this box if you want Mailchimp to resize the images in your feed to fit. This will help prevent your campaign from stretching. This option only resizes images pulled in via the *|RSSITEM:CONTENT|* or *|RSSITEM:CONTENT_FULL|* merge tags. It won't work when the campaign is viewed in Outlook, and videos can't be resized.

If you see an error message when you enter your RSS feed address, run it through a feed validator.

Recipients step

Choose the audience or segment you want to send your campaign to. To send to a segment, configure a new segment on this screen, or choose a saved segment.

Setup step

The Setup step is where you'll type in the Email subject and From name that your subscribers will see when they receive your blog posts in their inbox.

1. Type in your campaign details in the fields provided.
2. Check the boxes next to any additional settings or tracking options that you want to include.

The *|RSSITEM:TITLE|* merge tag can be used in the subject line of your RSS email campaign to pull in the title of your most recent blog post, but you should thoroughly test your campaign before you send. A few factors contribute to whether the title of the most recent post will always display.

Template step

The Template step is where you'll choose the layout you want to use. You can create an RSS campaign from any of the available templates, and use our RSS content blocks to pull content from your feed.

Design step

The Design step is where you'll design your campaign. When you first design an RSS campaign, we show the last post that was added to your feed as an example.

Use RSS content blocks pre-populated with our RSS merge tags to customize the content that's pulled into your campaign.

RSS merge tags pull information from your feed into your campaigns and tell our system what to look for when checking your feed. If these tags are missing, your emails will deliver without content.

Confirm step

The Confirm step is where you'll review and start your campaign.

To review and start your campaign, follow these steps.

1. Review the Pre-Delivery Checklist, and preview and test your email campaign if you haven't already. Click Resolve or Edit to make changes to any section of the campaign.
2. Click Start RSS to send your RSS email based on the schedule you chose, or click the drop-down arrow and choose Send now and start RSS campaign to immediately send an email and start the schedule.
   

View RSS campaign reports

We generate a report for each child RSS email. To see an overview of the child campaign reports for a campaign, follow these steps.

1. Click Analytics, then click Reports.
2. If you have more than one audience, click the Current audience drop-down and choose the one associated with the campaign you want to work with.
3. Find the RSS campaign you want to see and click View Campaigns.

4. Click View Report.
   

   This will take you to a list of all the sent child campaigns for that RSS campaign.

5. Click View Report to view the report for a child campaign.
   

Troubleshoot your RSS campaign

If your campaign has errors, take a look at our troubleshooting resource to find out how to resolve common issues with RSS.

Troubleshooting RSS in Campaigns