MailChimp’s RSS-to-email tool is an awesome feature that helps you automate your email marketing. Every time you post something to your blog (or anything that generates an RSS feed, like ecommerce stores), and MailChimp will automatically send an email to your subscribers.
We just made this feature even more awesome by adding more scheduling options…
Scheduling Daily RSS-to-email updates:
When you schedule a daily update, you can pick the time of day to send. The time zone uses your setting under Account –> My Defaults.
Note that with this setting, it’s possible to send multiple RSS-to-email campaigns per day.
Weekly RSS-to-Email
You can specify what day of the week, and what time of day to send your update:
Monthly RSS-to-Email
Specify the day of the month, and the time of day to send your update:
OK this is cool!
Just one tiny thing that could make it cooler :)
The Monthly option would be cool if we could specify a specific day of the week rather than date. So something like “Every 1st Tuesday at 15:00″ or “Every 2nd Thursday at 15:00″
This would allow us to ensure campaigns always went out on our best response days.
So excited for this (THANKS!) but agree, Andy makes a good point. Ideally we could send at our peak opening time, by the way, anyone have some reports/stats to share on what that tends to be?
Thanks for making this update! I just changed our daily delivery time for new blog post content from 3:00am to 9:00am. That should be much more friendly to our subscribers.
The RSS Campaigns are great. It takes a lot of the busy work out of email campaigns.
Is it possible that this most recent release would have broken my pending campaign which should have originally gone out early this morning? It looks like it tried to send, but to a list of zero. I also tried to reschedule it for later today (which I love), but it said that my next email would be sent Nov. 2nd?
Perhaps the notifications just need to be updated?
Keep up the great work!
Trent
@trentcarlyle
http://blog.servemanager.com
This is probably my favorite MailChimp feature…so thanks for giving us some extra flexibility with this!
Quick question – our regular email was not sent out last night…is this automatically saved for later…or do I manually need to re-send it?
Thanks again…
We had to do some last minute tweaking during our upgrade process, which meant that all previously scheduled RSS campaigns got put on hold. We’re reconfiguring some server settings right now, but when we finish, we’ll manually run the RSS checker again. So that means it’ll recheck for any new posts, and go out (hopefully) later today.
Hi Ben,
I have set the rss to email to be sent daily at 1pm pst … i did it on May 13, then the first email went out on May 13 and now it is May 14 and no emails went out. I checked everything and all is in tact, and i know for sure there was content posted before 1pm pst on May 14. Any ideas?
I love the new scheduling options too! Nice job Ben and gang.
Read through the FAQs about when RSS emails fire. Am I right that it will only send a campaign out if within the last 24 hrs a post was made? I wanted to send it weekly with the most recent 5 posts showing as links (using that special tag). But does this mean that if no one adds a new post on Sunday, then Monday morning, my (weekly) campaign will not fire?
David,
I have a weekly campaign and it fires provided there was a post within the last 7 days.
Any news about how we combine the mailchimp subscriber counter with feedburners?
Assuming that you’ve setup your campaign to pull from a Feedburner URL, this should start happening now or soon. Since it was requested, we made a change in this past weekend’s release to start reporting your list’s subscriber count when we make the calls to Feedburner (and everywhere else) – as soon as they start picking that up, you should see the counts combined in Feedburner
I’d love to know more about the combining with feedburner too.
Thanks MailChimp for delivering a much anticipated feature! There isn’t another email campaign service that’s even half as responsive to its customers.
Thank you Thank You Thank You! This was one of the features I have been hoping for to cover International audience (AKA: Europe/Asia). The added options will make things much nicer for users!
YIIIPPEEEEEE!!!!! We’ve been waiting for this, thank you, that is all!
Not good enough! Aweber allows you to schedule RSS emails to be sent right away. Every hour Aweber check your feed and sends out emails.
I promise my 40k strong list blog post notifications. I can’t do that with mailchimp. In every other way you guys kill Aweber I am waiting for you to catch up with RSS scheduling so I can migrate to MailChimp
Hi Nick, I can see how that would be valuable to you and your subscribers, but this is something that’s a bit too specialized and “edge case” for us to develop for. I think you would need to do this via our API, not through RSS-to-email. I also don’t think we have any plans to provide an option for hourly RSS emails, so Aweber might actually be your best bet there.
Out of curiosity could I set it up to send an email out at 9am every morning and 10am and 11am and so an and so forth. Wouldn’t that accomplish an hourly rss check?
Hmm, setup separate RSS-to-email campaigns that go out at different times of the day? Don’t see why that wouldn’t work. You might setup a list where you’re the sole subscriber, then test this on yourself. Just to be safe.
Is on-demand functionality, i.e. “pull recent feed articles and send them out” still in the works?
Hi,
Can I add my vote to having monthly scheduling based on a day of the week (e.g. second Tuesday). For most businesses this will make a huge difference to the open rate…delivering a newsletter on a Saturday or Sunday just doesn’t make sense!
We are definitely talking about more granularity and control in scheduling RSS campaigns (and autoresponders), but we have no ETA on that. These cron jobs and processes generate significant server load, and our priority right now is scaling big and speeding up the app. It’s like changing tires on a moving car, since we’re getting 3k new users signing up to MailChimp per day.
That being said, according to the data from our Email Genome Project, weekends kinda get a bad rap: http://www.slideshare.net/HubSpot/the-science-of-email-marketng?from=ss_embed
If I sent free beer and pizza would that encourage day of week selection on monthly RSS campaigns :)
Friggin’ sweet, this is just what I needed. Thanks guys.