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During a recent update, we added the ability to include RSS feeds inside of both regular and A/B split campaign types. This is great if you want to add a feed of your most recent blog posts to the side column of your newsletter, for example.

In order to create the campaign shown above, I started out by selecting Create Campaign ==> Regular Ol’ Campaign in my MailChimp dashboard. In step 3 I chose the 3:1 Start From Scratch template because I knew I’d be showcasing meaty, longer form content in the body of my email before pulling in my RSS feeds below.

There are a plethora of options for formatting the RSS content you want to include in your campaign, but for this example I simply wanted to include the 5 most recent posts from three different feeds. In order to do that, I used the following syntax:

|FEEDBLOCK:URL| and |END:FEEDBLOCK|

We developed the |FEEDBLOCK| merge tag to give you explicit, fine grained control over which elements of your feed you want to include in your campaign.

First you’ll need to create the beginning and ending flags for each RSS feed. The stuff between gets replicated for each post in the feed. So if you want to use individual FEED:ITEM merge tags, use

*|FEEDBLOCK:URL| * *|FEEDITEMS:| * and *|END:FEEDITEMS| * *|END:FEEDBLOCK| *
as your open and close tags surrounding the following items you want to include.

For a full list of available tags and how to use ‘em, check out this handy article from our Knowledge Base!

*|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.