WordPress Posts to E-Newsletter

MailChimp lets you send daily, weekly or monthly e-newsletters containing your blog posts. It is all done using their ‘RSS to Email’ function (Translation: Blog Posts to Email Newsletter).

Email Newsletters with MailChimp

Once you have setup your free MailChimp account and customised an email template with your logo etc, just create an rss campaign. Enter your website’s feed address (if you use WordPress you have one), decide whether you want to show entire posts or just summaries of each, then select how often you want your newsletter to send. Any fresh content/blog posts you’ve published since the last newsletter will slot into your branded template and send automatically every day, week or month. If there is no new content, the newsletter wont send.

How to Create an RSS to Email Campaign

Unless you want to change the frequency of your newsletter or layout at some stage, this is the one and only time you will need to do the steps below. Everything after your rss campaign is scheduled is automatic.

1. Get a free MailChimp account.
2. Design/customise an email template – Before you create your campaign, you’ll want to customise one of MailChimp’s email templates with your colours, logo, links to your website, images etc. This is all done on site and is easy to use.
3. Add a Subscriber List - Add any email subscribers you already have by importing the entire list or adding them one at a time.
4. Create a new RSS Campaign – Choose your saved template and subscriber list. Edit the content section of your template and insert an rss merge tag (you’ll see the link to this) to display either post excerpts or full posts. You can also insert your Twitter feed, Flickr photo feed and all sorts of other info and links.
5. Send Yourself a Test – You can also pay to have your campaign checked on a variety of email clients.
6. Schedule Your Campaign – Select the date you want the first one to send. Eg. Mine is monthly and sends on the 2nd of every month.

MailChimp Campaign Reports

Once your campaign has sent, you can login to MailChimp to see detailed reports on each campaign sent at any stage. You’ll see how many emails were delivered (non valid addresses are taken off your list), how many were opened and how many people clicked on items in the email. You can see what people clicked on and which subscribers clicked on what. Pretty amazing stuff.

MailChimp List Management

MailChimp lets you decide what information you want your subscribers to submit and which bits are optional. I have my fields as first name, last name, email and country but only country is required. You can also setup groups within a list to categorise your subscribers by interest, country etc. By including a list of topics on your subscribe form, you can easily slot subscribers into appropriate groups for more targeted emails. You can login to MailChimp at anytime and see info on your new subscribers.

There are so many other MailChimp features which make it the best way forward for your email newsletter, I have several more posts planned to cover the main ones. In the meantime here are some links to see what my setup looks like:

• Direct link to my last newsletter
• My Subscribe Now page
• My Newsletter Archives page

If you have a blog or website with regular fresh content, an email newsletter is one of the best ways to get that content in front of your target audience. They read the first part of your posts, then click through to your website to read the rest.

If you would like to create an email newsletter using MailChimp instead of using the Post Notification Plugin to send one newsletter per post, just fill in my email form.