RSS Feeds are boring

We all know the convenience of RSS feeds can’t be beat. They allow you to get the news you want sent to you, rather than visiting different sites. Using RSS feeds as part of an online marketing strategy to keep your audience connected – and returning to your website – has become pretty common.

Email service provider MailChimp provides a great tool to send your feed from a blog or news page to create an automatic email newsletter, but you can also use this RSS-to-email service to set up your own daily email of RSS feeds.

A few months ago I decided that Twitter just wasn’t working well enough as a content aggregator. I follow a number of design publications through Twitter to keep up with their latest articles. I also follow funny feeds like Kenny Powers, Funny or Die and about 300 others. So my design content gets lost. (Argue the case of custom lists all you want, they’re just not practical.)

The next tool I tried was a web app called NetNewsWire. I spent an hour or so subscribing to all the blogs I wanted to read and it worked out just fine. After about a week, I had stopped checking the app. I even set it up to open whenever I turned on my machine. Still never looked at it. I just couldn’t work it into my routine.

So my need to read relevant design articles festered for a while, until I came across MailChimp’s RSS tool. I already knew about the RSS-to-email campaigns. That concept was novel and works for a lot of people. But I don’t really want to get five emails every morning just to see what a couple pubs wrote about. That was what I thought until a brand new Vital Design email marketing project introduced me to this badass new feature called feed merge.

Feed Merge

The possibilities here are endless. Before, you could only subscribe to an email consisting of posts from one feed. Now, you can pepper one email template with as many feeds as you want. I will detail how to accomplish this below, but for now just think about the possible applications of this. Exciting, right?

Create a Design Digest

The first idea that popped into my head was to aggregate all of the publication feeds that I wanted to read each morning. So I sat down, plugged in the RSS feed URLs into the code that I detailed below and set up the email to send to me every morning.

I can now wake up each morning and have a brand new email sitting in my inbox – which I DO actually check everyday – containing the two most recent articles from each of my favorite publications.

No more running News Feeds every morning. Now everything I want is sitting in the one place I do check everyday: my inbox.

How It Works

With a simple short code users can drop entire entries from any blog they want into an email. Plus, the number of sources is unlimited. Just drop in this code wherever you want the RSS feed to appear:

*|FEED:Feed URL [$count=Number of Posts Included]|*

Feed Merge Individual Items

If the default layout of the basic feed merge isn’t looking as clean as you would like, you’re in luck. The shortcode below will allow you to break the feed up into individual elements. That way you can actually have some aesthetic control over what you’re displaying.

*|FEEDBLOCK:URL|* *|FEEDITEMS:|*
INSERT INDIVIDUAL ITEMS HERE
 *|END:FEEDITEMS|* *|END:FEEDBLOCK|*

For a full list of individual items available in shortcode form – plus a much more in-depth tutorial on how to use this feature, head to the MailChimp support page.

Get Clever

Creating a simple and customized digest is just the tip of the iceberg with field merge. I took a real world problem and used this feature to fix it. To me, it’s a game changer. We now have the ability to:

1. Build a custom designed eblast with infinite dynamic content sources.
2. Aggregate relevant content the way YOU want it to be display and delivered.
3. Give your readers a wider range of related content during your outreach.
4. Build a daily relationship with your readers that adds value beyond your content.

If you’re curious about this feature or would like your clients to see a digest like this come from your company, contact us here. Questions or ideas? Please comment below.

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