What could be more frustrating than spending hours preparing a new blog post and seeing that it goes unvisited? Many bloggers know this feeling ...

While waiting for your content to rank high in search engines, it's important to leverage other channels to drive traffic to your blog.

By connecting the RSS feed of your blog or site to your newsletter, you can automatically notify your readers of your latest content.

To do this, you just need to follow our step by step guide!

Before you start

• Make sure to create your integration at least 1 hour before the scheduled time.
• To be sure that blog posts are pulled into an RSS campaign, publish them at least 1 hour before an RSS campaign is sent.
• If you're not already familiar with RSS feeds, please check our dedicated article What is a RSS feed?
• You'll need the URL for your RSS feed. If you want to include content from multiple feeds, you can use a feed aggregator like RSS Mix to combine multiple RSS feeds into a single feed. If you don't know how to get your RSS feed URL, check this article.

Good to know

• We don't send campaigns unless there are new articles to send. For example, if you set your campaign to send every week but haven't posted in more than a week, we won't send a campaign until you publish a new post.

Add the RSS campaign integration

The first step is to add the RSS integration to your account:

1. Click Add more apps on the top menu and click the Integrations tab.
2. Select the RSS Campaign integration from the Integrations page. If you have already created integrations before, click Browse integrations and then select RSS Campaign.
3. Enter an integration name.
4. Click Create Integration.

Your integration has been added, now it's time to configure it.

Configure your RSS feed

First we need to load your RSS feed and check if it's correct.

1. At the step Configure RSS Feed, enter your URL in the field RSS Feed URL.
2. Click Load RSS feed.
   • ✅ If the URL is valid, a preview of your RSS feed will load. Below the feed, you will also see that we pre-formatted key names from your RSS feed and were added to the default template. An "item" is an article from your blog.
   • ❗️ If you get the error message RSS feed can't be loaded. Please check the URL, it means that your RSS feed URL is not in the right format, make sure you add a RSS feed URL in this field.
3. Click Continue.

Design of your email

Time to design your campaign: add a logo, titles, colors, etc. To design the emails created by your RSS Campaigns Integration, you'll need to use an email template.

For that, select either:

• RSS Default Template (Recommended) or
• My email templates (Advanced) if you have already created your own template

Case 1: RSS Default Template (Recommended)

We recommend using this template because we've set everything for you to send your campaign quickly and easily: the repeatable block and the pre-formatted key names have been automatically added. If you want to understand the RSS structure, please check our article Understanding the format of the RSS default template.

1. At the step Email Design, click RSS Default Template.
2. Click Confirm email template.
3. Click Edit email content.
   The editor opens in a new window. To understand the format of the default template, check our article here.
4. Once you're done with the design, click Save and Quit.
5. Click Continue.

Case 2: My email Templates (Advanced)

If you choose this option, you will have to choose a custom template that you have created earlier from scratch for your RSS campaigns integration.

You will not be able to modify your template from this step but you can edit or create a new one from Campaigns > Templates.

1. You will have to create a repeatable block: Repeat a block of items in your emails.
2. You will have to insert the key names to call out for the RSS elements. You can use the following article to understand how to use key names: Understanding the format of the RSS default template.

Preview your campaign

Under the Email Design step, once you select your template you can preview it, by clicking the Preview button. The data will be rendered based on the tags you’ve added in the template. 

Using the Preview option, you can adjust your tags as per your feed inside your email template (for this example the {{item.DESCRIPTION | safe}} tag was replaced with {{item.CONTENT_ENCODED | safe}} tag. 

Use the Item tags only in for loop, in order to replace the value.

In {{ item.PUBDATE }}, please do not use any location time zone filter.

Select a list of recipients

Now it's time to choose the recipients of your email campaign!

1. At the step Recipients, select the list of recipients for your RSS campaign.
2. Click Continue.

Define your campaign settings

We recommend you to refer to our dedicated article [New design] Creating an email campaign to learn more about how to configure an email campaign on Brevo. You can preset in advance each email campaign that will be automatically created by your integration.

You can customize your email campaigns' name as well as your email campaigns' subject based on your RSS feed tags. For example, if you want to add the date of the first article of your campaign, you can use the key name {feed.DATE}. To make it easier, you can use the dynamic content you'll find in the fields Campaign Name and Subject Line.

Schedule your campaigns

Here you will select how frequently Brevo will check for new posts in your feed: every day, every week or every month. If there are no new posts in your RSS feed at the checking time, the campaign won't be sent.

You can also specify if you want your email campaigns to be sent:

• Automatically: This will send the campaign as soon as it is created.

• Manually: The campaign will sit as a draft in your account. You can modify it and send it later.

Daily and weekly campaigns

1. Choose Specific days of the week.
2. Pick Days when you want Brevo to check for new articles.
   If you would like a new email to be created each time new content is added to your RSS feed, you can select all days of the week.
3. Pick a Time when you want Brevo to check for new articles.

Monthly campaigns

1. Select Specific day of the month.
2. Pick Days when you want Brevo to check for new articles.
3. Pick a Time when you want Brevo to check for new articles.

Activate your integration

Your RSS campaign is all set! You can now either activate it right away (Save and activate) or keep it inactive (Save and keep inactive) to keep the integration as draft and activate it later.

You will be redirected to the Integrations page, where you can view the newly created integration.

You can check your campaigns reports at any time from Campaigns > Emails section.

🤔 Have a question?

If you have a question, feel free to contact our support team by creating a ticket from your account. If you don't have an account yet, you can contact us here.