With CakeMail it’s easy to send automatic blog updates to a subscriber list via email. To add this capability to your CakeMail account, you’ll need to make the Recurring Email Campaign add-on available through the CakeMail marketplace.
A Recurring Email Campaign is one that you can send over and over and happens automatically based on criteria or timelines that you set. Often email marketers or organizations will use these to send reminders, birthday announcements (and special offers) or in this case, you can use recurring emails to send links to new blog posts to your subscribers.
Once the Recurring Campaign add-on has been installed you’ll be able to choose a new ‘campaign type’ when you’re creating a new email from scratch.
Follow the Campaign Wizard step by step. Just like every other campaign, you’ll have a chance to select a contact list, edit campaign settings, and test your email to make sure it will go through without a glitch. When it comes to content however, we’ve got a few new tricks you can use to include your latest blog content.
To include RSS updates in your email, you’ll want to design and layout your content as usual, but add in a special tag that lets you include RSS information. Do to this, you’ll want to go into the HTML source view for your campaign to make these additions.
Here is how you define the block of content that will include your RSS/blog post info:
[RSS={your url}]
…
[ENDRSS]
Everything in the … (we’ll show you how to define that, next) can be formatted and displayed just like regular content, but relies on merge fields to know what content to display. The merge tag looks like this:
[RSS-{your post index}-{your post field}]
Note that the post index 0 refers to the latest post, 1 to the second latest and so on.
Here is an example:
[RSS=”>http://www.cakemail.com/post/rss.xml]
<strong>Check out the latest 3 posts from our blog</strong><br />
<br />
<strong><a href=”[RSS-0-link]”>[RSS-0-title]</a></strong><br />
[RSS-0-description]<br />
<br />
<strong><a href=”[RSS-1-link]”>[RSS-1-title]</a></strong><br />
[RSS-1-description]<br />
<br />
<strong><a href=”[RSS-2-link]”>[RSS-2-title]</a></strong><br />
[RSS-2-description]
[ENDRSS]
You can also insert RSS feeds by using the following tag:
[RSS=YourURL]
You can also insert content from a script:
[INCLUDE=YourScript]
In addition to what we mentioned above, there is a whole host of other RSS fields and attributes you can call upon. You’ll find them here.
Once your content is complete, you’ll need to schedule your recurring campaign. You can schedule the days, times it will be repeated, as well as the date you want your campaign to begin. You will also be able to select when it ends: Never, On (a specific date), or No more than (how many days the campaign will run for.)
It’s worth noting that you should pay special attention to scheduling here. If you update your blog once a week, you’ll likely want to set your email to go out according to that schedule, not every single day.
As always, if you have questions, don’t hesitate to get in touch with our support team by submitting a ticket.
