RSS Campaigns allow you to automatically send email newsletters based on new content published to your website or blog. Instead of manually creating a campaign every time you post something new, Delivra can pull content directly from your RSS feed and deliver it to your audience on a set schedule.

If you regularly publish blog posts, news updates, press releases, or other recurring content, an RSS campaign can help you stay consistent without adding extra steps to your workflow.

What Is RSS and When Should You Use It?

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. It is a standardized web feed format that allows content updates to be distributed automatically. Many blogs, news sites, and content platforms generate an RSS feed that includes structured data such as Title, Author, and Description.

An RSS campaign is a great fit when you:

• Publish blog posts on a regular basis

• Share news updates or announcements

• Maintain a resource library that updates frequently

• Want to automate recurring newsletters based on website content

Instead of copying and pasting content into each email, the campaign pulls the latest items directly from your RSS Feed URL.

Creating an RSS Campaign

When creating a new campaign, you will see RSS listed alongside other campaign types such as Regular, Triggered, and SMS.

1. Select RSS as your campaign type.

2. Enter your RSS Feed URL.

The RSS Feed URL is the source from which the campaign pulls its content. Delivra supports standard RSS 2.0 feeds.

After entering the URL, the remainder of the campaign setup process follows the same steps as other email campaigns. You will configure recipients, settings, and other standard options as usual.

Designing Your RSS Email

When you reach the Design step, you will notice that a layout row has already been inserted into your template. If you selected a pre built template, the row will be added automatically to the top of your design. This layout row comes pre-populated with a standard RSS layout, but you have the ability to fully define and modify the row to fit your needs.

These placeholders use industry standard terminology and match the item names found in your RSS feed, unless your feed contains custom items.

Customizing the RSS layout row

Selecting the RSS layout row opens the RSS options panel on the right side of the editor.

Post Display Limit

By default, the RSS Campaign will display all posts that have been published since the last newsletter was sent. You can choose to limit the number of posts in your newsletter to avoid overwhelming your readers. Clicking on the RSS layout row gives you the option to limit the newsletter to showing up to the 6 most recent posts.

Adding Placeholders

Next on the panel is the Information section, which contains a list of commonly-used RSS feed items displayed as placeholder merge tags. Clicking a merge tag inserts it at the cursor location in your design.

{{ rssitem.itemname }}

If a particular field does not exist in your feed, the merge tag will simply render blank in the email.

Images in RSS Campaigns

Images are commonly used in RSS campaigns to draw attention to a post. To include images from your RSS feed, first use the Image tool to add an image element to your RSS Layout row. Select the image element, then click on Select Image, then Insert URL. Finally, insert your RSS tag placeholder that will be the URL of your image.

The Single Row Requirement

The RSS Campaign is special in that the RSS layout row will automatically duplicate itself in order to display each of your posts. For that reason, only 1 layout row can contain RSS placeholder data. An RSS campaign cannot be sent if more than a single row contains RSS information, and warnings will be displayed on the Preview, Test, and Schedule steps of the campaign. 

Scheduling an RSS Campaign

Scheduling an RSS campaign is a bit different than scheduling other campaign types. The Schedule step of an RSS campaign is divided into 3 main parts: Frequency, Time, and End Date:

Frequency

Choose whether your RSS newsletter should be sent Daily or Weekly. Daily will attempt to send your newsletter every day at the same time for any posts that were published within the past 24 hours. 

Weekly gives the additional option of which days of the week you would like the newsletter to send. One or multiple days of the week can be chosen. For example, you might send every Tuesday, or send on each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

Send Time

Select the hour your newsletter should be sent. The send time follows your account time zone.

End Date