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New RSS Feature: Most recent articles

October 16th, 2008 | by Ben

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.

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Posted in MailChimp News, MailChimp Upgrade, Using MailChimp | 34 Comments »

34 Comments

    • Bob says:

      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!

      Reply to this comment
    • Amanda says:

      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.

      Reply to this comment
    • Brad says:

      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.

      Reply to this comment
    • Amanda says:

      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.

      Reply to this comment
    • megan says:

      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

      Reply to this comment
    • Deirdre Rusling says:

      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.

      Reply to this comment
    • Ben says:

      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.

      Reply to this comment
    • Jeremiah says:

      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.

      Reply to this comment
    • ascending says:

      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!

      Reply to this comment
    • Ben says:

      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.

      Reply to this comment
    • Ben says:

      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.

      Reply to this comment
      • Ben says:

        It would be great if I could schedule emails to go out at, say, 7 AM PST.

        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.

        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”?

        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.

        Reply to this comment
        • Shane says:

          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!

          Reply to this comment
        • Daniel says:

          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.

          Reply to this comment
    • Ben says:

      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.

      Reply to this comment
    • Derec says:

      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.

      Reply to this comment
      • Ben says:

        @ Derec – Why not just schedule it to go weekly or monthly?

        Reply to this comment
        • Brian says:

          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.

          Reply to this comment
    • Matthew says:

      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!

      Reply to this comment
      • Ben says:

        Thanks Matthew, duly noted. It’s something we know we gotta do, but after we settle a few bigger things.

        Reply to this comment
    • Karen says:

      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.

      Reply to this comment
    • Vadim says:

      Any updates with this feature? I dont want to bombard my subscribers with an email everyday. Can i set it to once a month?

      Reply to this comment
      • Ben says:

        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.

        Reply to this comment
    • Vadim says:

      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?

      Reply to this comment
    • Claudine says:

      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.

      Reply to this comment
    • Amy says:

      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

      Reply to this comment
    • Travis says:

      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.

      Reply to this comment
      • Travis says:

        Also :) , please add timestamps to comments. Would make reading through discussions much easier. Cheers!

        Reply to this comment
    • Jordan says:

      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.

      Reply to this comment
    • Dan says:

      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.

      Reply to this comment
    • Dan says:

      Awesome Ben:
      Thanks!
      You guys are awesome.. please keep us posted.

      Reply to this comment

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