June 26, 2017 / in Blogging, Content Marketing, How To / by Jason Terry
Author: Jason Terry
Hello friends! It’s Jason with another thought provoking story from Blue Gurus. (I hope I don’t fail you!)
The majority of our clients are telling stories on a weekly basis. Updates are pushed out to their social media sites that link back to the stories on their website. Through this process they’re staying top of mind with their most trusted relationships. It’s an effective way to market.
The answer is to send them an email newsletter. But that takes time and resources to create and deliver each month, right? If you’re coming up with stories every week and then have to create a monthly or quarterly email newsletter, it can become time consuming. Even worse, it can feel like a tedious chore.
What if I told you that you could have a weekly, monthly or quarterly email newsletter that pulls in your blog posts and is sent automatically?
Our clients have already spent time and energy creating stories about their people, their customers and the community… why not leverage that content for their email newsletter? We’ve been doing this for years and it works really well.
We leverage an excellent feature provided by MailChimp to make this happen. It’s called an RSS-to-Email Campaign.
Your first question might be, “what is RSS?” This stands for Really Simple Syndication and it’s a technology that’s been around for a long time. Most websites have an RSS feed built into them. Usually, this feed is a list of recent blog posts.
To see an example, the Blue Gurus RSS feed is https://www.bluegurus.com/feed.
If you click on the link, your results may vary. Depending on the browser you use, it might look like a bunch of weird code (Chrome, if you haven’t installed a feed reader) or you might see a cleanly formatted list of the 10 most recent blog posts that we’ve written (Firefox, Opera.)
If you have an RSS feed set up on your website, you’re telling the world what your most recent stories are any time someone checks your feed.
MailChimp can be set up to automatically pull your most recent posts from your RSS feed into a pre-formatted email template. It can then send the email out to your list of subscribers. This can be scheduled to happen any time a new story is found or on some other time based schedule like weekly or monthly.
If you sign up for the Blue Gurus email newsletter, you will see exactly how this works. Our newsletter is set up to deliver daily if a new story is found… and since we do a blog post every week, the email newsletter goes out weekly.
Some of our clients don’t want to send too many emails, so they’ve opted to send a monthly digest instead. Their campaigns are set up to pull new posts since the last time a newsletter was sent. Then an excerpt of the story is included with a Read More link that goes directly to their website. (Yes, this helps with SEO.) Usually their monthly email newsletter has 4-5 stories in it and it looks great.
The best thing about this solution is that you can focus your time and energy on weekly stories knowing that your email newsletter will happen automatically. Sure, you have to do some initial setup to make it all work, but once it’s up and running, it just happens!
So was I successful? Was this story thought provoking? If not, shoot me a question that you would like me to answer and you may end up highlighted in a future blog post with my answer. Have a great week!
Me? A blogger?
Honestly, I was skeptical. My first few posts were dry, hard to write and not very interesting, even to me. Then I had a breakthrough. I wrote about my passion for Bruce Springsteen. Very personal, very “non-banky.” The response was overwhelmingly positive.
Pam Berneking
Former President and CEO of Alterra Bank
