RSS is not dead, it's more than alive - nowadays it's used to sync content across services and devices.
After finishing installing push notifications for my blog I decided to re-check my e-mail marketing strategy. Wow, it's hard to compare actually - I got about 200 push notifications subscribers in less than 3 days, while my attempts of collecting e-mails turned out to be more gloomy - about 60 subscribers in 3 months (after which I stopped to collect e-mail addresses at all). Not to speak about crafting and editing each newsletter.
I decided to make my e-mail marketing strategy more simple and more aggressive. By saying simple - I would like to be it fully automated, by saying aggressive - to send out more often . Let me explain - use to I sent a newsletter campaign once in a month and spent few hours crafting each campaign. Now, I want to send a newsletter once a week, and not spend much time crafting each campaign. I'm looking for set and forget setup.
I have changed my mindset a bit as well - if in the past I looked on e-mail marketing as on way to sell (I doubt I have sold anything yet via e-mail), then now I look on it as repeat visitors and loyal audience, which actually is much more than just selling something. I'm glad I have changed my mindset.
Sure thing, buddy, 60 subscribers won't give me much (as of now my site receives about 55,000 unique visitors a month, and 60 subscribers for such amount is ... humble, not to say more). This leads me to install back HelloBar for collecting e-mails and think of new ways to capture audience.
Now, back to the subject - How to Sync RSS feed to Mailchimp, and no matter is it a Drupal, Wordpress, Joomla or any other Content management system - as long as you have RSS feed, you can sycn it to Mailchimp.
RSS Campaigns are built in a series of steps. If you haven’t started building your RSS Campaign yet, start at the beginning of these instructions. If you already started and saved your progress, skip to the step you want to work on.
To create a new RSS Campaign, follow these steps on Mailchim: Create an RSS Campaign
The settings are pretty straightforward and wont take you even 5 minutes to complete.
The tricky part I found was at formatting the template, by default in the e-mail subject field it was something like that: Posts from ReinisFischer.com for date 27/09/2016, which didn't seems too much lovely, right? I decided to have a Quora digest style e-mail template, and to have as a subject line the title from latest post.
RSS campaign
To have a post title in e-mail subject field, paste following into Email Subject field:
*|RSSITEM:TITLE|*
Setting up RSS campaign on Mailchimp
When editing your template on Mailchimp, make sure you put RSS block into content area of your template:
Editing template on Mailchimp
Save your changes, give it a few tests - preview live on site and of course send a test e-mail to your self, before actually launching your campaign.
Hope it helps.
