A few months ago, the clever folks at The Do Lectures showed us how to add “Read Later” links to a newsletter. We loved the idea so much we couldn’t help but “just make it a button.”

The Instapaper merge tag lets you add automatic “Read Later” buttons to your RSS-to-email and normal newsletters. It’s handy if you tend to write lengthy articles in your newsletters, or if a high percentage of your subscribers read email on a mobile device and may want to save your content for later (check out our mobile study for some research on that).

There are two ways to use the Instapaper merge tag: the first saves your entire newsletter to Instapaper, and the second saves content outside your newsletter. To create a Read Later button that saves your newsletter content, use the merge tag in its simplest form:

*|INSTAPAPER:|*

Just place that tag wherever you’d like the button in your template.
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Our customers are always coming up with interesting ways to make email newsletters even better. That’s one of the many reasons we love what we do, and why we weren’t surprised when we saw The Do Lectures doing something especially clever in their newsletter.

You may remember The Do Lectures from our Customer Love series a few months ago. They host an annual gathering in Cardigan, Wales, where interesting people share stories about the work they’re doing and inspire others to act on their passions. They also publish Kindling, a weekly newsletter with links to the most inspiring articles, videos, ideas, and talks from the past week.

Take a look at a recent issue of Kindling. You’ll notice Read Later buttons alongside selected articles, so users can easily send the links to Instapaper. If you’re not familiar with Instapaper, it’s a service that lets you bookmark content on the Internet and save it for later. It’s handy when you don’t have time to read something at the moment, but don’t want to forget about it. Read Later buttons make content more accessible, so your readers can digest it whenever and however they want.

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A while back we introduced an RSS button on the Campaign Archive Toolbar.

It might seem kind of weird at first to include an entire email campaign in an RSS feed, but it’s actually pretty useful. I’ll explain why in just a moment.

First, for those of you who aren’t familiar with Campaign Archives, every campaign you send in MailChimp gets a hosted archive version. There’s a default page, which you can see by clicking the View Past Issues button on the Campaign Archive Toolbar, or you can create a custom archives page, like ours at campaigns.mailchimp.com. Either way, your content is still hosted on MailChimp’s servers, which means your website doesn’t get the SEO benefit.

Now, let’s say you wanted to create a custom campaign archives page and take advantage of all that SEO-friendly content. The only way search engines can index your content in a way that gives you the credit is for you to host the content on your server.

There are two ways to access your archive campaign content in order to host it yourself.

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