How to create an RSS newsletter

Do you have a blog on your website? Would you like to automatically send your subscribers a newsletter with the posts you publish, without having to do anything?

Since version 2, Mailrelay supports sending newsletters automatically from an RSS feed, such as the one generated by WordPress or some web services.

And now, with Mailrelay V3, we have added more features to this type of email marketing newsletter.

You can now even add a YouTube RSS feed.

Sounds interesting?

Let's review this functionality and look at the new features available.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• How to create an RSS newsletter
  • Free and automatic email marketing for your WordPress blog
  • Preparing an RSS newsletter to send an email marketing campaign
    • Inserting the link from RSS feeds
    • Inserting an image into RSS entries
  • Running a test and sending an RSS newsletter
  • Other feed types, e.g. YouTube

Free and automatic email marketing for your WordPress blog

First, let's look at the basic feature.

If you have a WordPress website, for example, you can get your RSS feed quite easily.

On our website or blog, we need to right-click and select: View page source.

If we click on this option, we will see the source code of our website or blog.

Don't worry, we just need to look for the text that indicates RSS:

When you click on the link, it will take you to another page, which is the RSS feed page; you can copy that URL, which is the one you will use in Mailrelay.

In the case of our blog, for example, it is this one:

https://blog.mailrelay.com/en/feed

NOTE: If your website is in maintenance mode, the feed will not be accessible. Also, some plugins cause problems with the feed, so open it manually to make sure everything is working correctly.

Normally, the feed will be updated with every new post you publish, and with Mailrelay you can set up the system to send an email with every new article you publish.

Newsletters - RSS Newsletters

The first thing to do is go to the menu Newsletters>>RSS Newsletters

In this option, we will add a new RSS newsletter by clicking +Add and then click on Create newsletter:

Now we will look at some of the main options for sending RSS newsletters. These are the parameters that will define the newsletter, so we need to be clear about them. Take a look at the following image:

Let's go through these parameters one by one:

1. Subject: the subject of the newsletter, which is what our contacts will see when the newsletter is sent.
2. Preview text: a preview text that contacts will see when they receive the newsletter.
3. Sender: the sender of the newsletter.
4. Groups or segments: who the newsletter will be sent to.
5. URL: the URL of the RSS feed.
6. Number of entries: the number of entries the system should include in each newsletter.
7. Frequency: how often the newsletter will be sent (daily, weekly, or even manually).

Let's see what a real example would look like:

With this, the configuration is done, but we still need to prepare the newsletter, which we will do now.

Important! Showing the post title in the subject

If you want to show the post title directly in the subject, just type this tag in the subject field:

{{ first_rss_entry.title }}

You can combine the tag with other text, for example:

Last entry: {{ first_rss_entry.title }}

This way, we can show the post title together with some text to personalize the subject even further.

Preparing an RSS newsletter to send an email marketing campaign

To start preparing the newsletter, you can create it using this design:

The highlighted text box is the one we will use to embed the tags required for the RSS newsletter.

We click on it and select all the text to delete it:

After deleting it, we will use the Variables drop-down menu:

These variables will allow us to add all the elements needed for our RSS newsletter to work correctly.

What we mainly need is a loop for the RSS entries (at least one is required):

This variable will insert the essential basic structure without which RSS emails cannot work.

It works more or less like this:

The opening part {% rss_loop %} and the closing part {% endrss_loop %} must never be deleted, although you can place them in different text boxes; what matters is that all the other tags are included between these two.

The other tag, {{ rss_entry.title }}, is the tag that will be replaced by the post title.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Check your RSS settings. The availability of RSS tags depends directly on the RSS settings of your blog or website. So, if your website's RSS feed doesn't have the summary tag, it won't be displayed. Or, if your feed's summary includes the full article, the article will be shown instead of the summary.

Check your feed settings first to find out what is available.

Inserting the link from RSS feeds

We can see that if we insert the post URL like this:

Using this variable, what we will end up with is a plain URL, not a link.

So what should we do to create the link correctly?

First, copy or cut the following tag {{ rss_entry.url }}:

Then, type whatever you want, for example "read more" or something similar, and use the link icon:

This will open a pop-up window like the following:

In it, we need to enter two values:

1. Protocol: we will choose the "other" option.

2. URL: we will type or paste the tag {{ rss_entry.url }}

With that, the text box will look something like this:

Basically, there are three tags.

Although we still have a few things to do, the newsletter is already taking shape.

Inserting an image into RSS entries

Inserting an image into the RSS newsletter is a very similar process to inserting the link.

In the editor's variables drop-down list, we will choose the URL variable inside the Image block.

This will insert the variable {{ rss_entry.image.url }} into the text editor.

As before, cut or copy this tag.

Then, click on the insert image icon:

In the pop-up window that appears next, we need to insert the tag {{ rss_entry.image.url }} as follows:

IMPORTANT: at this point, the image will not be displayed in the editor, but we will be able to see it when the newsletter is sent. Also remember that your blog's RSS feed must have images available; if there are no images, the system will not be able to display them. Sometimes there are no images available in the feed, even though there are images in the article.

Running a test and sending an RSS newsletter

We now have the basic tags ready; before sending the newsletter, we can send a test to see whether everything works as expected.

In the RSS newsletters list, we have the following options:

If you click on the magnifying glass icon (the blue icon), you will see a preview of the newsletter directly in your Mailrelay control panel.

And if we want to send a test, we can click on the green email icon.

This will take us to the following screen:

If we send a test of this newsletter to Gmail, for example, we can see the following result:

As you can see in this example, all the tags have been replaced with the values from the feed.

Always remember to send a test before sending a newsletter to a contact list, so you can see what the newsletter will look like.

Other feed types, e.g. YouTube

Instead of your WordPress website's feed, you can include other feeds, such as the YouTube feed, which uses a URL similar to the following:

https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=YOUR_CHANNEL_ID

You can see how to find your channel ID here.

However, keep in mind that this type of feed has some limitations; for example, it does not show the summary or the image.

But you can add the title and the link to your videos.

This way, you can easily share your videos with your subscribers.