Offering an email subscription for your blog is a smart idea. I talk about why in my article: Use a newsletter to get more traffic to your blog! A great email subscription service for bloggers is MailChimp. You can use MailChimp to collect and send emails to your readers. I have seen a lot of questions on the web lately about setting up an RSS newsletter. (Hi Breanna, Hi Adina!)
This tutorial is going to show you how set up an automatic RSS newsletter through MailChimp.
When you are done with this tutorial, your email subscribers will get an automatic email notifying them there is a new article on your blog. You can include the whole article in the email, or just a short teaser. The choice is yours.
Alright, let’s get started.
Directions for setting up an RSS newsletter in Mailchimp
Step 1: Log in to your MailChimp account
Step 2: In the left column (the main navigation section of your dashboard) click Campaigns
Step 3: Click Create Campaign
Step 4: Select RSS-Driven Campaign
Step 5: Type in your RSS feed URL. If your blog is located on your home page it is yourdomain.com. If your blog is located on a different page, put that URL. For example, my blog is located at kristiehill.com/blog
Step 6: Select which days you would like MailChimp to check for new updates on your blog.
Step 7: Complete the necessary steps for sections Recipients, Setup, and Template.
Step 8: The Design section is where you decide what is displayed in the email. Drag and drop RSS header if you want the title of the new article to be in the email. Next, drag and drop RSS items. Click on the RSS Merge Tags Cheatsheet to help you determine which information you would like to be in your email.
Step 9: Confirm your newsletter and click Start RSS!
Perfect! I’ve had a few people ask about this and I was afraid to even look into it! You made it so easy!
Hi Kristie!! I’m hoping you can help! We’ve set up the newsletter like you have described and it’s working well …using the RSS feed to send an email update weekly.
However we cannot figure out how to get the post featured image to also be included in the newsletters. Do you have any input on that? It would be very appreciated… Google is coming up short 🙂
Hi Kristie,
I always find your posts so helpful. I had my site built by someone else and so I’m kind of need “mailchimp for dummies” advice here.
I already have Mailchimp set up and an email goes out to subscribers with my latest email post that will either included a snippet from the post that reads to where ever I insert the “read more….” tool in the article before I post. Or, as is mostly the case, if I forget to insert that, the entire article is posted in the email. This of course means less blog traffic because they don’t have to click over. ;-(
I subscribe to other blogs whose new post emails come to me with a custom message that’s not anywhere in their post. For instance it might say what they are doing that day and what you’ll find if you click on the link.
I can’t figure out how to do that. Can you talk me through it? Or have a missed this in this article?
Thanks in advance,
Paula
http://www.dimplesonmywhat.com
Hi Kristie! Thank you for this post. I’m using Mailer Lite right now but they seem very similar. My question is – once you have the email set up, how do you offer the option for people to subscribe to the RSS email on your blog? Is there a WordPress widget? Thank you for any help you can give!
Mailer lite should have options for you to embed their sign ups in your blog. I use the Genesis E-news extended plugin for my sign ups.
I searched forever on information on how to do this. Your post was exactly what I was looking for. I’m a visual learner so appreciated all the screen snip it’s! Thank you!
This was so INCREDIBLY helpful!! Thank you so so much!
You’re welcome!
This is awesome and so easy! Thank you so much. Glad to have found your blog & sent off my first campaign from my RSS feed 🙂
Sarah
Yay! Good job Sarah!
Sooo, wish this would work for me, but I constantly get a message saying my RSS url feed isn’t a valid RSS feed.
That’s frustrating A.D. What blogging platform are you on? Are you using the RSS url http://www.adellisauthor.com/feed ?
Thank you for this! It helped me so much! So, question: now that I’ve set up my posts to be delivered to my subscribers everytime I post, how do my new subscribers get added? Does mailchip automatically do that? Or do I manually do it?
Mailchimp does it for you, if your using that list for new subscribers!
This has been a problem for me for a while now!! So thank you fr this tutorial. Happy!!
Glad it worked out for you! It took me forever to figure out too!
Hi Kristie, just tweeted you that I replaced Jetpack for Mailchimp and I´ve even created special thank you pages on my blog. The pages replaces the “ugly” Mailchimp thank you pages. I am so happy that I can finally use one system to save e-mailaddresses. Before it was Jetpack and Mailchimp.
Oh by the way, I saw a link to your blogpost on Pinterest. Don’t you just love Pinterest! 🙂 Thanks again for giving me a push with your blogpost to finally sit and fix this “problem”.
Friendly greetings from Holland, Archana
I love the custom thank you pages, plus it helps you track newsletters sign ups with Google analytics!
I had mine set up so that it would be a teaser and a featured image. I cannot remember how I did this and I need to do it for several clients. Do you know how to?
Leslie- Did you ever figure out ho to do this? I have been trying for weeks.!
Kristie,
Thank you so much for this post! I was struggling with this…perfect timing! As always you save the day!
It took me a while to figure out too! I would get to the part where you put content on the page and give up! Glad you found it helpful!
Great post! I’ve been trying to set up an RSS newsletter with MailChimp but the body section is always noticeably wider than the header section (I think, in part, because of the photos). 🙁 Do you have any tips on how to fix that?
Hmm… I think it probably is only because of the images. Not %100 sure though, I’ll look into it and get back to you!
Gold! Pure Gold! Thanks!
You’re welcome!