Email newsletters can be a big time suck for not a lot of return on investment (ROI). This hack will teach you how to automate topical newsletters using your firm’s website content in an “opt-in” friendly manner.
In other words, set up topical email newsletters that run on their own. Think of them as alert notifications for when your firm adds a new post to the newsroom, only they’re more targeted. When I was in-house, I’d align these newsletters to niche areas of our firm: labor and employment, nonprofits, immigration law, etc.
We had links for a newsletter sign-up on our website and in our email signatures. Folks would sign up and get emails when a new post was published on our site. It worked great–the list grew organically, and people stayed opted-in because it was content they wanted.
What you need:
- An RSS feed for a blog or category
- An email marketing platform that handles RSS feeds, like MailChimp (RSS Automation is only available for older accounts, unfortunately)
- A content strategy
Content Strategy Planning
Before executing the newsletter, you’ll want to consider how to set it up first.
Your blog stream will likely include multiple types of content – firm news, new hires, practice area content, etc. If I were you, I would NOT create a single newsletter containing all of your firm content. Higher likelihood of unsubscribes when you send out content that is too broad.
What I’d suggest is breaking out your content into categories – labor and employment, immigration, nonprofits, etc., and aiming them at those audiences.
It’s important you think this through at the beginning because once you start tweaking the content, you’ll start to lose your audience.
Finding the RSS Feed URL
Honestly, this is the hardest part of the whole process. ?
Here’s the thing: not all sites have this capability. Most modern sites should have RSS capability already built in, so chances are you won’t need to get your developer involved.
- First step is to head to your site. Navigate to the page where your content lives. In this example, I’ll be using my blog, so I’m grabbing one of my blog categories, let’s say Automation is one of the categories. Navigate to that page.
- You should be sitting on a category page now.
- Hit F12 on your keyboard. This will bring up your site’s code…but do not panic! You’ll need to search – Ctrl + F on your keyboard – for “RSS.”
I highlighted where the search bar is (the “rss” field”) and where the category RSS feed is.
Email Setup
- Once you’ve got the URL, head to MailChimp, log in.
- Before you start on setting up the actual email portion, head to your Audience dashboard to create category-specific audiences. I like to set them up as Groups, as they allow end users to sign up via a form. (Audience > Manage Contacts > Groups.
- Now navigate to Automations.
- When you landi on Automations, you’ll see this:
- Click on “Share blog updates” and another window will pop up. Name your campaign and select the audience (this is the overall audience; you should only have one or a few).
- Next, paste your category RSS URL in the appropriate box. You want to decide how often to send it – it’ll send on a daily basis at a specified time ONLY IF there’s NEW content. Once that’s done, hit next.
- Then choose your audience – this is where you’d select Group > Automation
- Next, fill out the campaign info – title and such. Note that the default email subject is pulling from the RSS feed URL.
- Then you’ll select a template…they used to have ones specifically for RSS feeds, but no more!
- Everything in this email will be static information except for the RSS fields. You want to look for the RSS blocks on the right sidebar.
- I pulled over the RSS Header and Items blocks to my newsletter.
- At this point, I always test, so try an email preview.
- Now, you don’t need to know merge tags to know the RSS Heading block is your blog title. I don’t need that in this newsletter, so I’m taking it out. The RSS Items block is what I want – the blog post title, teaser content, and read more.
- Once I’ve got the newsletter how I like it, I can save and schedule.
This automation will run until you turn it off. Again, it will only send once a day (or however often you specify that doesn’t exceed once a day) IF there’s new content.
If you have posted multiple pieces of content in the span of 24 hours, they will ALL appear in the newsletter.
