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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.

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One thing we do with our @mailchimp twitter account is we tag our favorite tweets from customers. For example, if someone tweets something like this:

You "fav a tweet" by clicking the little star in the corner

we click the little “favorite” star, and it gets saved in our list of favorites. It’s basically like bookmarking a web page, but for tweets. We then dynamically pull those favs into our MailChimp website (such as on our testimonials page). On the side, we’ll occasionally send those nice tweets around the office by email.

Then Amanda, our Chief Twitter Officer, realized something cool: all our favorites are available via RSS feed, so we can actually use MailChimp’s RSS-to-email tool to automatically send twittermonials to our entire team. Here’s how…

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Douglass Karr over at the Marketing Technology Blog has helped develop a mobile alert plugin for a crime alert website in Indiana.  Alerts are also available as a once-daily email, which is powered using MailChimp’s RSS-to-Email feature!

Started November 1, 2008 and currently serving the Terre Haute and Bloominton, Indiana metro areas, B-Aware sends out crime alerts compiled from local police blotters.  The organization’s goal is to facilitate greater crime awareness amongst local residents.

MailChimp is sponsoring BlogWell, a one-day conference organized by GasPedal and Blog Council, that is taking place October 28, 2008 in San Jose, California.  BlogWell is slated to provide unprecedented insight on social media from Cisco, Intel, Wells Fargo, Walmart, UPS, Kaiser Permanente, Graco, and Home Depot.  This is a great opportunity for anyone looking to get started or improve their corporate social media efforts.

One way you can improve your own social media efforts, corporate or otherwise, is by using MailChimp’s RSS to email tool.  You blog it, we mail it.  It’s brilliantly simple!  And when used in conjunction with Chimpfeedr– our very own “stupid simple” RSS feed masher– we guarantee it’ll meet or exceed your daily fiber requirements.

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.