Share Your Blog Posts with Mailchimp
Learn how to create an RSS campaign with Mailchimp's Campaign Builder.
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Mailchimp offers two ways to share blog and website content in your campaigns using RSS (Really Simple Syndication). RSS Campaigns can be set up to go out daily, weekly, or monthly, and automatically populate your campaign layout with the last batch of items from your RSS feed. If you want to mix in RSS posts with other content, you can drop a feed into other campaign types.
You may encounter some errors with your RSS feed, content, or merge tags. Check out the following list for common problems.
Check how many feedblocks you have in your campaign. If you have more than five feedblocks, you may not be able to preview your campaign in Mailchimp. To preview your campaign, we recommend you send a test email to yourself, or cut down on the number of feedblocks in your campaign instead.
When Mailchimp pulls the feed to add content to your campaign, it pulls in content as it appears in the feed. If large images are included, your template width may stretch to the width of the widest image. To have Mailchimp resize the images when we pull in the feed, check the Resize RSS feed images to fit template box on the RSS Feed step.
Currently, this option can't resize images in feeds that are viewed in Outlook. It also doesn't resize videos.
Are the timestamps set up correctly?
Make sure your <pubDate>
tags are set up and populating correctly. If a <pubDate>
is set in another time zone or a day off, Mailchimp may not recognize that the items were posted before the next campaign is triggered.
Here is an example of the correct setup for your RSS feed. The <pubDate>
is in English.
<channel>
<title>Mailchimp Blog</title>
<link>http://www.mailchimp.com/blog</link>
<description>Mailchimp, email marketing, and monkeys!</description>
<pubDate>Tue, 16 Sep 2010 15:55:58 +0000</pubDate>
<generator>http://wordpress.org/?v=2.3.1</generator>
<language>en</language>
<item>
<title>osCommerce and Joomla Plugins for Mailchimp</title>
<link>http://www.mailchimp.com/blog/plugins-for-mailchimp/</link>
<comments>http://www.mailchimp.com/blog/plugins-for-mailchimp/#comments</comments>
<pubDate>Tue, 16 Sep 2010 15:55:58 +0000</pubDate>
<dc:creator>Ben</dc:creator><br />
We pull in the date for any of these tags, in this order: 'pubDate', 'pubdate', 'published', 'created', 'updated', 'date.' If you set your campaign to daily, it will send posts from the last 24 hours before it was triggered; from the last seven days for weekly; and for the last 30 days for monthly.
When you first set up an RSS Campaign, we'll show the last post as a preview example if you haven't added an article in a few days.
It's possible sending delays can happen while our system puts together the campaign, or based on other factors from the recipients mail server. This can occur when we've run into an issue with retrieving your feed. If the feed is not available on the first try, we will retry sending your campaign for an hour.
You will likely experience a few minutes lag after hitting send on your campaign.
If you encounter any of these problems, you may need to edit the original RSS "parent" campaign. To do this, you need to pause the campaign.
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Learn how to create an RSS campaign with Mailchimp's Campaign Builder.