How to deliver blog posts via email for your blog

As a follow up to last week’s guide to set up your email list, I wanted to specifically address delivering blog posts via email for your blog. People ask me about this a lot, particularly those making the move from Blogger to WordPress.

Blogger has a built in function for posts by email, and WordPress offers subscriptions through the Jetpack plugin. But I recommend using RSS to Email campaigns through an email list provider like MailChimp because you’ll have full control over the look, feel, and content of the emails sent.

Consider this: your blog is likely not the only blog your readers subscribe to via email. And if your email looks like everyone else’s, it’s that much easier for them to mistakenly unsubscribe from yours. Or let’s say you just launched a new product. With MailChimp, you have the flexibility to add a graphic in your email template linking to your new product.

So how do you set up an RSS to Email Campaign? First you’ll need to follow the guide to set up your email list. When you create your template, be sure to start with one of the RSS options. MailChimp uses special tags to pull in your post titles and other information from your feed, and the RSS templates have those tags in place.

RSS to Email Campaigns are a little different than regular campaigns in that you only have to set it up once, then it will continue to send automatically until you pause or cancel it.

When you set up your campaign, choose the RSS-driven campaign. It will ask you for your feed URL, but if you don’t know it, you can simply enter your home page URL and it will search for you.

The rest of the options are pretty straightforward, but as I mentioned before, MailChimp uses special tags for feed information, which can get confusing. You can see a full list of merge tags on MailChimp’s site. I recommend previewing the email to see what information the tags pull, then you can customize your template from there. When I customize it for clients, I typically remove the summary section at the top so the first thing readers see is the post content.

Once you confirm, you’re all set!

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