If you’re using MailChimp’s new RSS-to-Email feature to send automatic emails to your list whenever you update your blog, we’ve got a new merge tag you might want to include in your content:
*|RSS:RECENT|*
This will tell MailChimp to insert links to your 5 most recently published articles from your blog.
If you want, you can hack that merge tag a little bit like this:
*|RSS:RECENT10|*
to insert links to the 10 most recent articles instead.
Can someone provide a hack that would pull a date range? I’m looking to pull posts on a weekly basis if possible.
Thanks in advance!
Hi Bob,
I spoke with one of our developers, and there doesn’t seem to be any type of date range hack at this point. It’s something that we’re working on though.
Is there any way to exclude certain content? We run a college newspaper and would love to be able to not send our classifieds section out in the e-mails.
You would need a separate feed for all the items, excluding classifieds. Alternately, you could use Yahoo Pipes pipes.yahoo.com to filter the feed, assuming that all of your classifieds items have the same author or something unique in the title.
I’ve got a little hack that might be useful for folks.
We wanted to send a weekly RSS email with the all the posts from that week (not one email every day as is default)
*|RSS:RECENT|* is soo close – but we wanted to style the titles and show a summary of the article, so here is a little workaround using Yahoo Pipes and Automatic CSS-inliner
First I created a new RSS feed in Yahoo Pipes that pulled all posts from one week from our blog.
Then I filtered it to changed the y:published date (not item:published ) to the date I am sending the RSSemail – - tricking mailchimp into thinking that all the emails had been sent with the last 24 hours. I used this filter http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=3kFlGUhd3RGrNJJB1L3fcQ for the date change part.
BUT ! – then all the articles in my email displayed with the same publish date under each Title – so I used Firebug in the Email Preview Pop-Up to see that .rssSubTitle, .subTitle was styling the dates in the emails – so I styled .rssSubTitle, .subTitle {visibility: hidden;} – and then readers can’t see the date. make sure you have Automatic CSS-inliner checked
I have to manually pause and restart the email campaign the night before we send and change the yahoo pipes filter to the right dates, so it is a little bit tedious – BUT a decent fix until you implement scheduled RSS emails :)
btw – Jennifer at mail chimp was super responsive to ques. Very much appreciated
-best
Megan
We would also prefer to be able to schedule emails weekly, Megan that looks like an amazing workaround but possibly for me more complicated than just copy-pasting blog items into a weekly newsletter. Please Mailchimp keep working on a date-range cheduling feature.
Yep, we are working on more scheduling options for sure. I forget the specifics on how it’ll work, but the team just had a meeting where they discussed how they were going to do it. In the works!
Buuuuuut, just to be absolutely sure you understand how it works (most people, including myself, need to hear this at least twice before they “get it”)…
The MailChimp RSS-to-email tool doesn’t send emails every single day. It merely checks for updates to your blog every single day (at about 3am ET). If you posted 5 new items earlier that day, we’ll send an email with those 5 new items. Note that your recipients won’t get 5 separate emails. Just one email with all new items.
And if you haven’t posted anything new that day, the system won’t send any emails at all. It’ll just wait until you have posted something new.
Just wanted to make sure everyone got that. Like I said, the “check for updates daily” concept was hard for me to understand when we first launched the tool. I’m a blogger, but not an RSS expert.
That being said, we do see a need for more scheduling options, and are working on it. We’re just trying to avoid launching anything major and new during the holiday season. Gotta keep the servers and the app nice and stable through December and early January.
Thanks so much for all the input! Please keep ‘em coming.
Not sure this is helpful, but I’d like to reiterate the need for at least a weekly scheduling feature. We have increased our posting within our blog network and are finding increased traffic but declining RSS subscription rates. Seems some of our readers just want us packaged up differently, and we’re seeking a way to retain them. We’re already Mailchimp users for a monthly email newsletter, and using your company instead of looking closely at competitors (aweber) would be our preference.
We use email to ‘tease’ our subscribers to come VISIT our blog every day. Right now, because the RSS feed to email tool pulls by ‘yesterday’s’ date – the email app basically sends ‘yesterday’s’ news.
As you’re looking at scheduling options, it would be great if the tool had an option to identify the date range, including the current date, for the feed to pull into email. That way we can not only recap recent posts, but engage readers to come and read about new content on the blog everyday.
Thanks!
It appears that there is no flexibility on when the emails based on RSS feeds go out. Why is this functionality missing? I believe a competitor, Nourish, has this function.
@benjiw – In terms of scheduling, you can set it to go out daily, weekly, or monthly. I’m not aware of Nourish, but I can tell you that since we come from an email marketing paradigm, a difference in feature-set is to be expected. For example, we offer some very good tracking: http://blog.mailchimp.com/features and some good email marketing power features: http://blog.mailchimp.com/features/power_features/
As for scheduling, is there a way to exclude weekends for daily update RSS emails? This would be so welcome. Is there a way to do that aside from manually pausing campaigns? Thanks in advance.
Let me know if perhaps Id be better off contacting support.
Right — I meant the time of day. It would be great if I could schedule emails to go out at, say, 7 AM PST. I think MailChimp’s user interface and overall feature set are superior, but that one feature is sorely lacking.
Also, is there a way to manually send emails based on RSS feeds? In other words, can I say “send an email right now with the last 10 items in the feed”?
Thanks.
It helps to first understand our “email marketing” paradigm. When we created the RSS-to-email tool, it was a way to simplify the email newsletter creation process. Basically, we found that a LOT of our customers were just copy-pasting content from their blogs right into their monthly newsletters. So we figured, “why not make that automatic?” Now, we’re seeing a lot of people using the RSS-to-email functionality not just for email newsletters, but event updates, product inventory updates, etc. It’s exciting, and it’s why we added daily/weekly/monthly options. We’ve heard from a couple users for “time of day” options, but honestly not that many. I’ll add your comment as one more request for it though. If we get enough requests for anything, we’ll definitely add it.
I think we’d consider that an “old fashioned email campaign,” in which case you’d create a campaign, and copy-paste your ten most recent items from the blog. Heh. The RSS-to-email tool is meant to be a set-it-and-forget-it process, not a “build it and send it now” process.
That being said, we are discussing ways to pull RSS-content into “non-rss” email campaigns.
Just wanted to add my opinion that we need an option to set the time of day as an option for RSS-to-email features. I love the concept and it saves me a lot of time and removes the opportunity for errors.
Keep up the great work!
I would like to echo the request for time-of-day scheduling of automatic RSS emails.
We send out a daily email roundup summarizing the top news of the day on specific issues. We would like to provide an RSS feed of this content as well, and in theory MailChimp’s RSS-to-Mail feature would let us build the RSS feed and have the email follow automatically. Two birds, one stone.
However, it needs to go out around 9am EST, not 3am. The day’s news is not yet published by that time, and none of our staff is awake to read it and add it to the feed.
Just that one simple feature would make a huge difference for us, and many others!
Or, even set a smarter default time… I can’t see how 8AM GMT makes sense for any North American users, except maybe early birds on the West Coast. The daily option is clearly targeted at people sending out frequent messages with fresh content… yesterday’s news is not exactly fresh.
Thanks for your responses Ben — much appreciated. I like the “set-it-and-forget-it” notion, but it would just be nice if I could say: “blast out the most recent 5 items from my RSS feed right now.”
Or say I have clients that want the most recent items right up until a certain time — e.g. right before stock market opens. In that case, items I posted on the blog between 3 AM and 9 AM would have to just wait until the next day.
Or maybe I just posted a great item to my blog that I want to go out. It would be awesome to be able to just click a button and have that one item go out.
Anyway, thanks again.
I’m not sure if this is what others are say but I’d like to see the ability to do this:
My blog have have 2-6 posts per week. I don’t want to bombard my list with a new message everyday a post comes out. It would be great to be able to set it to wait until 3-4 new posts are in and then send one email with those posts, which were written over several days.
@ Derec – Why not just schedule it to go weekly or monthly?
Love the RSS feature. I’m looking for something to automate our newsletters, but like Derec above, I don’t want a newsletter to go out unless it has 3 or more posts in it.
Is there any way to say “only send a newsletter if it has 3 posts or more”?
The nouri.sh service has this feature, although it looks like it lacks other features mailchimp has, so I don’t want to change!
Also the ability to set a maximum post count would be nice, that is, leave the remaining posts for next time.
I’ve already had a chat with your live support about this, but I figured I would get my request out in the public.
Being able to specify a time for my RSS-to-email campaigns would be the feature that seals the deal on me using MailChimp over AWeber. So, consider this comment as a request for the specific time scheduling feature!
Thanks Matthew, duly noted. It’s something we know we gotta do, but after we settle a few bigger things.
I echo Ben, Shane and Matthew – a “blast out the most recent 5 items from my RSS feed right now” is definitely lacking – even my previous, nemesis email newsletter provides that functionality. Please put it up on the priority list!
Also, would be great to be able to limit the number of characters in the summary… but maybe I’m asking too much.
Thanks MC, you guys are fantastic.
Any updates with this feature? I dont want to bombard my subscribers with an email everyday. Can i set it to once a month?
Yep, since this launched, we’ve added monthly and weekly options. And some people don’t get this so I thought i’d mention again— it only sends an email If you have updates.
So if i set it to monthly, it will send emails to my subscribers at the end of each month if i have updates on my blog?
@Vadim – on the first day of each month at about 3am ET.
I need to choose the day for weekly campaigns. Our experience with campaigns is that Mondays are bad days to send a campaign as most readers are swamped with emails on Monday morning.
Could we also get an option for a campaign to be scheduled every two weeks? If it is easy to do, please provide this option. I blog enough that once per week is o.k. but once a month is way-too-much. Once every two weeks is just perfect for customers to keep your brand in their heads and remain in touch but not upset at getting too many emails from us.
Please. please set up a time of day option. The default time period is one of the worst times to send emails and it’s effecting our open rates
Not sure if the option to choose a custom time of day to send rss-email newsletters is still being considered, but I just wanted to add my vote to the list for this much needed feature.
Also :), please add timestamps to comments. Would make reading through discussions much easier. Cheers!
I agree on the time/date option. I am evaluating the free version right now, but that would seal the deal for me. I need to pick the day of the week and time for a weekly RSS to email campaign.
We also would like to schedule the time of our daily email.
3AM is not ideal.
This will effect open rates can reduce click throughs as our readers will not be on their computers when the message is sent.
Please advise.
Yep, this is in the roadmap for our next release, late October (this month).
Awesome Ben:
Thanks!
You guys are awesome.. please keep us posted.
Is it possible to edit the RSS send date once the campaign is scheduled? I had to duplicated the campaign, then change it.
Thanks! This is my first email, so I’m stoked!
My RSS-to-email worked up to Saturday. I didn’t post anything for Sunday, so it didn’t go out on Sunday, as expected. But today, Monday, it didn’t go out either even though I have new posting. (BTW, I also have my RSS set with TwitterFeed.com to go out to Twitter and Facebook, and they all went out, so it tells me that my RSS feed wasn’t the problem.)
Is it possible that it has a bug that if it doesn’t find the feed for one day and it stops forever?
When did the new post go live? If you just posted today (Monday), it’ll go out tomorrow. If you posted on Sunday, and something didn’t go out, then you might want to bring this up with the support team: http://blog.mailchimp.com/support/ They can help troubleshoot.
The article was scheduled to appear on my blog at 4a.m and the MailChimp RSS-to-email was set to 5a.m. Is one hour enough?
Thanks!
Sam
I have a different issue. For most of my RSS to email needs, scheduling daily or weekly is ideal. However, there’s one feed that I want to have go out as soon as I post. I use twitterfeed to send that RSS to facebook and Twitter, and it checks hourly. I’d like the mailchimp campaign to go out in the same timeframe. Is there any chance of an hourly setting?
Hmm, I’d normally say that’s a case where twitter/facebook (web pages) are better than email. Especially because email can take a while to deliver in some cases, so you could have some messages overlapping each other. Any way you can post an example of the content, so we can understand better?
Here’s the situation. People can sign up on our web page to receive a few different types of emails from us. One is for a particular type of announcement that is time-sensitive. Those sign ups are what create our mailchimp lists. Right now, after an event is posted on our web page it becomes part of an RSS feed that gets posted to both Twitter and Facebook. I want that RSS feed to also generate the Mailchimp campaign instead of having me go in and create that campaign manually each time. Because it’s time-sensitive, that email does need to go out pretty quickly after the info is posted. And yes, people could go to Facebook and Twitter, long story but in this case it needs to be email. Mailchimp would make my day if my RSS to email campaign checked for updates hourly.
I’d have to agree with Amy. It’s of most interest to me to have rock-solid emailing to people as soon after each RSS post as possible. This would give MailChimp the edge over Feedburner for emailing.
Some campaigns would benefit from aggregated posts in a regularly scheduled email, but all in all, as-realtime-as-possible is essential.
For a while, Notifixious offered this functionality:
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/notifixious_superfeeder_realtime_web.php
but they’ve since closed it down, to focus on http://superfeedr.com
So you’d want hourly updates?
Hourly updates would be great.
What I’d most like is a “Real-time” option. This would send any new posts that have been created since MailChimp last checked.
You might even let publishers use PubSubHubbub, so that MailChimp gets *pushed* new feed updates, which you then forward by email, rather than you having to poll for new posts in the feed really frequently. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PubSubHubbub
But, before you get a chance to implement that, something like every 10 minutes would be fantastic.
My main use case for this is in offering users an option to “subscribe by email” to comments threads on blogs, or discussion threads on forums, for which I already have an RSS feed. This model would be useful for all kinds of alerts and notifications derived from a feed. I’m not really thinking of anything high volume, but just contexts where immediate notification is all important. Using MailChimp, it would be great to offer, say, daily digests of the posts, as well as “as it happens” notifications.
You might be able to push content to MailChimp with this:
http://blog.mailchimp.com/push-campaigns-to-mailchimp-via-bookmarklet/
Yes please!
yes, I would like hourly updates or instant updates as I post a new blog entry sent to my blog subscribers so they can stay updated. I am new to this…how is this possible?
When you setup an RSS to Email campaign you are given the choice of daily, weekly, or monthly delivery. People that subscribe directly to your RSS feed (not the email) would be able to see the content as soon as your feed updates, usually when you post a new article or update, but right now the RSS to Email campaign only allows for those 3 delivery intervals. Here is a good article and video that walks you through the process of setting up your first RSS to Email campaign: http://eepurl.com/oV03P
Ben,
Julien from Superfeedr here; we’re great fan of Mailchip and used it for some time.
I believe you guys shouldn’t have to do polling as it is a pain and you’ll always spend more and more resources, but always be late.
Superfeedr can do the polling (or find other techniques) on your behalf and then push you the content as soon as it’s there.
I’d be thrilled to have Mailchimp in our customer base!
I’m trying to get my RSS Feed campaign going but it seems to always just send 1 item of the feed in the test mails via the api and it doesn’t seem to send any scheduled campaigns. I’ve set the pubdate to the current time in the feed so it will send items that have been sent already too. I’m guessing mailchimp uses another way to check wether it is new content. Is this the case? And is there a way to bypass this?
Hi Steven,
Sounds like it could be a technical issue with your RSS feed. Unfortunately, it’s too complex to solve via the blog. You’ll need to talk to our support team: http://mailchimp.com/help
Hi Ben
In the mean time I figured out what my problem was. I just used a pubdate in my rss feed that was dutch instead of english. Thanks for your reply ;)
geweldig!
Is there any way of adjusting the RSS scheduling? We really want to send an email out on the 1st and 3rd Tuesday of a month, or at least on a Tuesday every two weeks, but there doesn’t see to me a way?
I have the same issue, I would like to post every other week, is there a way to do that?, right now I can select only weekly or monthly
Hi Sandrine, We’ve made some changes since this blog post was written to allow for some additional scheduling options. Our recent release even included the ability to schedule RSS campaigns to only go on certain days of the week. We don’t have a bi-weekly scheduling option at this point, but we always appreciate the feedback so I’ve passed this along to our team.
Thanks John :-)
I beg you, please implement the fortnightly option as soon as you can! It would be greatly appreciated.
Aloha from Hawaii!
I’d like to echo the desire for a “send now” feature. Although we love the convenience to schedule ahead, the past few weeks have been challenging. We try to publish our blog early Thursday mornings to give people time to plan for our Monday meetings, but when content comes in late on Thursday, we only have Friday to notify our members of upcoming events. Working on the blog this morning, the earliest MailChimp will let me post is Friday end of day or on Saturday. Is there any way to add a Send Now feature? Thank you!
Aloha Jo, We love to hear the feedback, but right now there’s not a way to immediately send an RSS to email campaign. One thing you could potentially consider is adding a group to your list for “alerts” or something similar. When your subscribers sign up they could choose to also receive alerts and in those rare cases when you absolutely had to get the notice out right away you could stick the content of the blog post into a campaign for those in the alerts group and email it. You’d want to use this approach sparingly and I’d mention that they might see the same information in a future email from the blog.