Create your First RSS Campaign using MailChimp

Now I am back. To tell you something new this week. This is the second part of my how-to blog post. In my earlier one, I told you how to add MailChimp to your WordPress blog. If you have missed it out, you can read it here. Reading the first part is necessary as this MailChimp tutorial is linked to the earlier one. Now let us brace ourselves to learn how to create your first RSS campaign. You may think this one is going to be tough but it is not so. If you are focused and follow the steps carefully, this should be a cake-walk for you.

The next step in our MailChimp tutorial is to start an RSS campaign. RSS campaign is a great tool to inform your subscribers about an upcoming event or a new blog post that has been published or simply send a welcome message to your new subscribers. And someone does this automatically for you. How cool is that! But we need to take a few steps to tell MailChimp that we need this be done. So how are we going to do that? Let us use the steps and start designing your first RSS campaign.

Your First RSS Campaign

Let us start by designing a welcome message and learn the steps.

Here are the steps to follow:

1. Log in to your MailChimp account.
2. On the top menu click on “Campaign”.
3. Now click on “Create Campaign”.
4. Let us choose “Create an email”.
5. Click on “Automated” and choose “Welcome new Subscribers”
   
6. Fill-in the day, time and other information related to your welcome mail. Do not worry if you do not get it right. You can always go back and edit the options.
7. On the right-hand side, choose “Design email”.
8. Now you come to “Email information”. Put in all the information in the respective fields.
9. Click on the Next button(at the bottom right-hand side)
10. In the next page, you are asked to choose a template. Here you get to choose from an array of awesome MailChimp templates. Choose the design your email will have. For a welcome message it is better to choose a simple template, but you can choose any one that suits your need.
    
11. Click “Next” to move over to the next page. It contains your chosen template on the left and on the right side you have “Content”, “Style” and “Setting”.
12. If your blog has a logo, you can insert that by clicking on the “logo” on the left panel.
13. Click on the left panel (your template) on the text area and you will get to write your body text on the right side. (Refer Screenshot)
    
14. The two blocks on the left panel that you will absolutely need are
    A. RSS Header
    B. RSS Items
    Do not mess with these two. Leave these as they are.
15. Write your message and click on the “Style” to choose the font, background colour and other features.
16. Once that is done, Click on save and close.
17. Click on the preview mode and check if everything is alright. If not, go back and make changes as you want.
18. Send a test mail and see for yourself if you have received a welcome message you have designed.

And now you have designed your welcome mail. Start sending these to your new subscribers. I have shown the steps for integration of MailChimp with WordPress and starting an RSS campaign in the two Mailchimp tutorials. In the future, I will be sharing some more tutorials. How do you use MailChimp to meet your needs?