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How to send a daily world news email campaign?

In this article, we will create a fully automated world news email campaign. This email campaign will be delivered to the target audience every morning at 9 AM and the contents of the email will be fetched from a remote world news RSS source.

RSS-to-email campaign fully automated execution schema

We will follow these steps:

Prepare the target audience
Create the repeating email campaign

Create the email layout
RSS-to-email setup
Daily Scheduling

ℹ️

In order to use RSS-to-email feature, this plugin must be installed and then enabled in the [Admin Area → User Group → Permissions] section. In order to enable the plugin, go to the [Admin Area → Settings → Plugins] section and click “Enable” next to RSS-to-email plug-in.

Step 1: Prepare the target audience

When a repeating campaign is created, it runs fully automated. For example, if you create a repeating campaign which gets delivered every Monday, Wednesday and Friday mornings, every time it gets triggered, the target audience will be prepared at that time.

Therefore, you can be very creative with audience targeting. For example;

You can target all subscribers of your list(s)
You can target specific subscribers who match a set of attribute criteria such as;

Subscriber’s country is Canada
Subscriber’s country is Canada, United States or United Kingdom, and the email address contains @gmail.com

You can target specific subscribers who match an activity such as;

Subscribers who have subscribed yesterday
Subscribers who have opened any email or autoresponder yesterday

You can combine both activity and attribute based criterias to include or exclude in your email campaign.

Once your target audience is ready, let’s proceed to the step #2.

Step 2: Create the repeating email campaign

Creating a repeating email campaign is quite similar to creating a regular email campaign. The only difference is schedule settings.

After you create your email campaign, simply schedule your campaign as repeating:

A typical repeating campaign setup. This campaign will be delivered every Monday, Wednesday and Friday mornings at 9 AM in Eastern timezone.

Once the repeating email campaign is created, it will be visible under “Scheduled” section on the left side of the campaign browse screen. Every time it gets triggered, the campaign will be cloned and delivered. Delivered clonsed campaigns will be visible under “Sent” folder.

Step 2.a.: Create the email layout

Octeth’s RSS-to-email feature doesn’t limit you when it comes to the email layout design. You can be very creative with it. Below, you can see a typical email layout design:

A typical email layout design. The middle of the email will be populated with remote fetched world news.

Step 2.b. RSS-to-email setup

Edit your email content and design your email. You can use Octeth’s Stripo powered drag-n-drop builder or HTML code editor.

When it comes to the email section where you would like to auto-insert remotely fetched world news, you will be writing some simple HTML code. Below, you can find an example:

Let’s go over this HTML code block line by line:

Line #3: This is the beginning of the RSS content fetch process. It will connect to Washington Post RSS source and fetch the last 10 world news
Line #5: This link will point to the news website URL and the title of the news will be inserted. Maximum character length of the news title can be 500 characters.
Line #7: This line will contain the news date and the author of the news.
Line #9: This line will be replaced with the content of the news, but it will be truncated to 500 characters.
Line #11: This is the end of the loop.

Available RSS merge tags:

Merge Tag	Description
`%RSS:[url]:[no. of items to fetch]%`	This is the RSS content opening tag. Place this merge tag to the beginning of the repeating block. [url] is the RSS source URL. [no. of items to fetch] is the number of items to fetch from the source.
`%RSS:TITLE:[length]%`	The title of each RSS entry. You can limit the title by setting a [length].
`%RSS:CONTENT:[length]%`	The RSS entry content. You can limit the content by setting a [length].
`%RSS:POST-LINK%`	This is the direct link to the RSS entry. Example: Blog post link.
`%RSS:COMMENTS-LINK%`	This is the direct link to the RSS entry comments area.
`%RSS:PUBLISH-DATE%`	RSS content publish date.
`%RSS:AUTHOR%`	The author of the RSS content.
`%RSS:END%`	This is the closing merge tag. It must be placed at the end of the repeating block.

You can place multiple RSS content sources into your email content. For example, you can embed the last 5 blog post entries into your email content, in the meantime, you can also embed the latest products added to your e-commerce website.

You have full control on the part of the email you would like to turn into remote RSS content source. For example, below, you can see a simple HTML email code:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
	<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
	<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0"/>
	<title>Your Message Subject or Title</title>
	<style type="text/css">
		/* ..... */
	</style>
</head>
<body>
	<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" border="5" id="backgroundTable">
	<tr>
		<td>
		<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" border="0" align="center">
			<tr>
				<td width="600" valign="top">
					<h1>This is the email headline</h1>
					<p>This is the email content</p>
					<h2>Latest Blog Posts:</h2>
					<ul>
						<!-- This is the beginning of the RSS repeating block -->
						<li>
							<a href="#" target="_blank">Blog Post #1</a><br>
							Written by ..... on ......<br>
							This is the post content<br>
							<a href="#" target="_blank">Read more</a>
						</li>
						<!-- This is the end of the RSS repeating block -->
					</ul>
				</td>
			</tr>
		</table>
		</td>
	</tr>
	</table>
</body>
</html>

As you can see in the above example, the blog post entries will be embedded into the list <li> block. Here’s the copy of this example with RSS tags placed:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
	<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
	<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0"/>
	<title>Your Message Subject or Title</title>
	<style type="text/css">
		/* ..... */
	</style>
</head>
<body>
	<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" border="5" id="backgroundTable">
	<tr>
		<td>
		<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" border="0" align="center">
			<tr>
				<td width="600" valign="top">
					<h1>This is the email headline</h1>
					<p>This is the email content</p>
					<h2>Latest Blog Posts:</h2>
					<ul>
						<!-- This is the beginning of the RSS repeating block -->
						%RSS:https://mytestblog.com/feed:3%
						<li>
							<a href="%RSS:POST-LINK%" target="_blank">%RSS:TITLE:250%</a><br>
							Written by %RSS:AUTHOR% on %RSS:PUBLISH-DATE%<br>
							%RSS:CONTENT:1000%<br>
							<a href="%RSS:POST-LINK%" target="_blank">Read more</a>
						</li>
						%RSS:END%
						<!-- This is the end of the RSS repeating block -->
					</ul>
				</td>
			</tr>
		</table>
		</td>
	</tr>
	</table>
</body>
</html>

Step 2.c. Daily scheduling

The last step is to schedule your campaign. Once you choose “Send repeatedly” option, Octeth will ask you how to schedule it. Simply choose repeating settings based on your needs and save your campaign.