Douglas Karr at The Marketing Technology Blog has been using MailChimp’s RSS-to-Email feature in combination with FeedBurner to send out his email newsletter with ads included. Doug was gracious enough to share his hack with me, and now I’m passing it along to our readers.
Step 1. Sign up for Adsense for Feeds through Google Adsense. (Doug notes that in his case, this required him to work directly with Google to move his feed’s address and convert his account.)
Step 2. Set up a new list in MailChimp for your FeedBurner subscribers.
Step 3. Export your email list out of your FeedBurner account and import these into the “FeedBurner subscribers” list you set up in MailChimp.
Step 4. Create a new RSS-to-Email Campaign in MailChimp using the FeedBurner feed address rather than your blog’s regular RSS feed address.
Step 5. Design your email and then select the “FeedBurner subscribers” list as the one you want to send to.
Essentially, this pushes the feed, with ads, directly into your MailChimp email. It looks great and has relevant advertising!
My email list continues to grow – much better than it did with the plain ol’ FeedBurner email. I don’t make a fortune off of the ads since I have less than one-hundred subscribers – but it’s a few bucks a month that I wouldn’t have had before!
Even without a gigantic list of subscribers, this is one way you can start monetizing your RSS-to-Email campaigns with very little effort. Thanks again to Doug for the great tip!
Correct me if I’m wrong, but this violates Google’s program policies for Adsense. Have a look at https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=48182 under “Ad Placement”. It states:
“No Google ad or Google search box may be displayed in a pop-up, pop-under, or in an email.”
It’s a great idea, but it could lead to getting Adsense publishers’ accounts disabled, which then becomes incredibly difficult to get resolved. I personally wouldn’t suggest this.
I think they mean, literally, a “Google ad.” As in, a banner or text ad about Google. Or a Google search box. Not the “ads fed through google adsense.” Which people are sticking in Feedburner emails all the time. It’s pretty common to send ads from adsense out through feedburner’s rss-to-email, but those don’t come with any in-depth tracking of opens and clicks.
Are you using blogspot for your blog then?
Do you use a email sign-up box on the blog that is tied into your mailchimp account, also?
Hi Curt,
You can use any blog platform. Just give us the RSS feed to deliver. And yes, there’s a signup box you put on your blog, and it’s tied to a MailChimp account that you’d setup ahead of time. You’d also setup a nice, HTML email template with your branding.
By using this hack, do your subscribers signup through MailChimp or feedburner?
If I am reading right, they sign up through Mail Chimp but are DELIVERED content from Feedburner feed, correct?
@Derek – Yes, everything happens through MailChimp (signup, delivery, tracking) but content is fed to MailChimp via Feedburner.
Hello,
when are you going to integrate this option like aweber ?
http://www.aweber.com/new-features/blog-broadcast-feedburner-integration-click-tracking.htm
I would like to keep my feedburner reader counter…
Thanks a lot!
You’re not the 1st to ask us for this. IIRC, the devs plan to launch this (and other cool stuff) later this month.
I’m waiting for the response to Antonio and the confirmation of the RSS feed upgrade.
Keeping the RSS feed list in feedburner it´s an important step now to reveal activity to Google… The owner of feedburner…
I’m studing all the internet mail services and mail chimp is perfect but it misses this option…
Maybe Aweber will be my choice…
Next mon’t if they fix RSS I will decide…
Regards,,,
We made a tweak that would supposedly address this issue. I heard mixed results about whether or not feedburner updated their stats, and am honestly not sure where we stand on it. I’ll ask around, but in the meantime here’s the KB article on it:
http://blog.mailchimp.com/kb/article/can-my-list-count-be-reflected-in-my-rss-subscriber-count
Note that feedburner can be slow to update stats.
About “Step 3″, does it mean one should export/import the subscribers list each time you want to send a post by email.
Or can the list in MailChimp dinamically update from the Feedburner subscriptions?
I would like to know the answer to this too.
I’ll 2nd that; I would like to get an answer re: Step 3.
And also, if I setup up RSS-to-Email (for my Feedburner subscribers) will Feedburner still send out it’s daily feed on top – or does MailChimp override that from happening once you setup RSS-to-Email?
Because I (fairly) diligently create a monthly newsletter using MailChimp. The only reason I’m interested in trying RSS-to-Email for my Feedburner list is so those people get a nicely designed email feed, instead of the standard (ugly) Feedburner layout.
I have preparar a RSS Campaign.. but I’ve only a feed enter.. only a news.. I want put more that one.. Mailchimp seem use only the last news..
How i can use more that 1 news?
We created Chimpfeedr for exactly that reason. It will allow you to take many different RSS feeds and combine them into one. Then you can use that one feed for your RSS to email campaign.
Very interesting hack.. Will surely try it out after creating my account here.. ^_^
I have tried this and am only getting the excerpt, however, my blog is not set to the excerpt for feeds. I have a full feed for feedburner and my site, how can I correct this?
I am having troubles getting the Google Adsense feed banners to appear in my MailChimp RSS driven weekly enewsletter. The feed (http://feeds.feedburner.com/photoclique) shows the banners when viewed in a browser. But when I drop the enewsletter I get the spacing between each post for the banners, but no banners appear in OutLook, Gmail or in the MailChimp preview. Any advice on how to get the Adsense feed banners to appear thru a MailChimp driven eNL would be greatly appreciated. Thank you in advance for your help!
Are you sure that this is OK with Google Adsense?