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Transcript of Set up an RSS Email in MailChimp – Basic

Hey there, everybody. So we are in what’s basically day two of our MailChimp set-up, or the big segment. You may not be doing this one day at a time, if you’re just blowing through, that’s cool. But we’re in the next significant chunk of setting up our MailChimp account. In the last, you know, chunk of work, we basically opened up your MailChimp account, we imported a list and we integrated Google Analytics and Facebook and we set up a Facebook tab.

So the next thing to do is to create a campaign that – campaigns are email messages. And basically what I want to do is automate my email marketing. So I’m going to hook up this little Start A Bakery site so that every week, when there’s a new blog post, MailChimp automatically takes that blog post, packages it up into a nice format and then mails it to my subscribers.

So let’s go over here. So there you go, that’s exactly what I need to do and it will default to “Regular Ol”. That’s basically just an HTML campaign and it will send also HTML or text. But what we want here is this. That is my RSS feed. Of course, I don’t own Example.com. What I want it StartABakery.com. And there’s my feed.

When do we want this sent? We want it sent every week. And let’s send it Sundays at, say, 2pm. Mountain Time, which is fine. And so that’s good to go. We’re going to click “Next” down here. Great. And so let’s see if it remembers. “Send to a saved segment”. It did not remember. Let’s see if I can get an even smaller segment. I don’t want to mail to the whole list. And we’ll do “Refresh Count”. Nobody’s using Hotmail anymore. Poor Hotmail. Ah, see. “Contains”. And I wonder if, because I screwed that up, if – and it’s not “Hotmali”, it’s “Hotmail”. Hopefully all my mistakes are giving you guys confidence that you can do it too.

So I’ve got fifty, and I’m just doing that to show you because I don’t want to mail to the whole test list right now. I’m going to click “Next”. And “Start A Bakery”. See, “Internal Use Only” is really important because that way I know that people won’t see it. That’s pretty good. I do not, again, want to personalize the “To” field. Tracking. Google Analytics. Lovely. And so we get to – that’ll do.

Gold Tracking’s not available. I don’t want to auto-tweet. I do want to authenticate the campaign. And so this is all good to go and we’ll click “Next”. And if we scroll down – thank you very much. There are my RSS templates. So we’ll click “Start”. And this is actually all set up for you, it’s really easy. Let’s click “Browse” to find an image. And these are some of my bakery files, which we’ll do. Let’s do this. And that’s the same file I’m actually using on my Facebook page so the consistency is nice.

The next thing to do here – if you wanted to change “Recent Articles”, let me show you how to do that. There you go. So “RSS Full Content”. You have to go “Custom”. I can never find the “Custom” pull-down. And that’s when you can edit this, so it doesn’t say “Recent Articles”, it says “Recent Posts”. And that’s the only change I want to make to this right now, so I’m going to click “Save & Close”. And it’s basically good to go, I’ve got no problem. All of this will be automatically fed in, which is really nice. So the whole thing is dynamic. And we’re just going to click “Next”. And it’s going to kind of review. That works, it knows which list to send to, it’s got a subject line.

All replies will go to me, which I want. Tracking is good, HTML is good. And I always forget this, every time. It’s “Default Header Content”, which is great. So we’re going to go back and edit. Right there, that’s the “Default Header Content”. That’s all we have to say, it’s just fine. “Save & Close”. And then we go to “Next”.

And MonkeyRewards will automatically show because is a free account and the only way to get MonkeyRewards removed is if we had a paid account. Let me go to one other thing I want to talk to you about. And we’re not going to make any changes here, I just want to show you this image. When this image comes through into your inbox, when you send a test or when your subscribers get it, it will not automatically be resized so it looks nice in the email. WordPress does that but these emails are not smart enough to do that. So if this email, if you uploaded this email to your WordPress site and it would say two thousand pixels wide, which is huge, you wouldn’t know it looking at your WordPress site because WordPress will automatically scrunch it down to the size to fit the template. RSS emails will not.

So if you had a huge like three thousand pixel wide image on your RSS feed you would see, you know, the image would go all the way out to here and it would completely throw off your email clients and your RSS feed would be super tiny underneath it. Let me see if I can dredge up an example of what those look like for you, just so you can further benefit from all my mistakes. So this is one of my other mistakes, this is for another site that you’ve seen. And, as you can see, it looks lovely there and it would have been okay until I put in a huge image, huge, huge image. I need to be more aware when I upload images to my WordPress site that my images are not going to be so huge that they blast out my RSS emails.

So let’s go back to this and, having made our point, we’ll go back to the final page. And this is basically good to go. What happens here is, once you’ve got all this done, you can do “Start RSS” and you have a choice. “Send Now & start RSS campaign”. This is a little confusing because even if you click “Start RSS”, it will start sending new posts on the day that I asked it to go out. So that would be – actually, today is Saturday, so it would be tomorrow at 2pm. This is fine.

If I want to make edits to this in the future, like you realize something’s wrong when you see the test email, you’re going to have to come back in here and click “Stop RSS” and then you can go in and make your edits. You cannot make edits while the RSS module on MailChimp is set up to deliver. And so while that automation is turned on, you can’t make any changes. It’s real easy, you just turn it off, make your change and then start the campaign over.

And so I’m going to click “Start Campaign”. And great. It will go out Sunday, tomorrow, at 2pm Mountain Time. That’s all we have to do. I will circle back in tomorrow and let you say what the actual RSS email looked like.

Take care, have fun, and so that’s day two of the thirty day set-up, if you’re doing that. Of course, some of you are just going to blast through and, you know, do like six days in one day and that’s great. Once the RSS feed is done, tomorrow we’re going to move onto getting an opt-in form teed up so you can actually start getting new subscribers, which was the whole point. So I’ll talk to you later. Bye.