RSS Syndication Feeds to Daily, Weekly or Monthly Email

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RSS Merge Tags and Scheduling

The RSS tool takes content from your blog (or any RSS feed) and sends it as a message to your subscribers automatically.  The RSS driven campaign will check daily to see if anything has been added to your RSS feed in the past 24 hours.  If there’s new content, the message will be automatically created and sent out.  If there is no new content a message will not be sent.  There are two main steps to utilize the eMail Networks RSS functionality.

The first is to update your email template with the RSS “Merge Tags” which places the RSS feed within your email template body.

The second step is to schedule the desired email with proper merge tags to appropriate list(s).  See how to create an RSS schedule below.

RSS Merge Tags

Create an RSS Template

You can customize your message template for the RSS Schedule using these RSS feed Merge Tags:

Merge Tag
Definition
<!– cirssstart –> Start the loop of the RSS feed
<!– cirsstitle –> Title of RSS feed, enclosed in a URL
<!– cirsscontent –> Content of RSS feed
<!– cirsstitleonly –> Title of feed only
<!– cirssdate –> Date of feed
<!– cirssend –> End the loop of the RSS feed
<!– dateformat1 –> Date in the form of: May 1, 2011 (can be used outside of the RSS feed’s start and end tags)

Example (This will loop through the RSS feed and display the articles)

RSS HTML Code Snipit
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<!-- cirssstart -->
 
<h1><spanstyle="font-size: 15pt; font-family:
'Georgia','serif'; color: black;
font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none;">
<!-- cirsstitle --></span></h1>
<p><!-- cirsscontent --><br/>
<atitle="<!-- cirsstitleonly -->"
href="<!-- cirsslinkonly -->">
<spanstyle="text-decoration: none;">
Read More &raquo;</span></a></p>
<br/>
<!-- cirssend -->

Create an RSS Schedule

After creating the RSS message template, you can select this message in the RSS Schedule setup screen.

  1. Open the Tools folder in the left menu, then click RSS Schedule (Note: if you do not see the RSS Schedule option and would like to use it, please contact your account administrator)
  2.  Click Create
  3. In the RSS schedule setup, select the RSS message you created with the RSS template code above
  4. Add the message details like subject and from address
  5. Select a list to send the RSS messages
  6. Enter the full URL for the RSS feed URL (including the http://)
  7. Select the max number of entries to include in each message sent out
  8. Click Preview to view the message that will be created from the RSS feed
  9. Select the send frequency (daily/weekly/monthly) and time of day to send the message
  10. Once everything is set up, change the status to Active.  This will make the RSS Schedule live
    .