Fully automating your email marketing with RSS feeds can be a huge time saver. Good in itself, but with FlipRSS you can go one step further.
The tool’s advanced features allow you to personalise the experience for each individual subscriber, and this is rocket fuel for subscriber engagement. Give your subscribers what they want and you will be rewarded!
For example, subscribers to a recruitment company may want to receive the latest jobs, but only in the industry that interests them. Homeowners may want to see the latest houses for sale from a Real Estate site, but only in locations they are interested in. FlipRSS gives site owners, content creators and curators the opportunity of delivering automated newsletters with a high level of customisation.
This is a guide to setting up personalised email campaigns with Mailchimp and FlipRSS.
How to set up personalised email content
FlipRSS uses multiple RSS Feeds to provide the content for newsletters. By allowing subscribers to choose which content feeds they are interested in when they subscribe — you are able to provide them with a fully automated and personalised email experience.
In Mailchimp you’ll use Groups functionality to segment your audience and give subscribers the ability to specify their interests.
Using Groups for Personalised Email Marketing in Mailchimp
Within Mailchimp you’ll want to set up your account so it can record your subscriber preferences. To do this you’ll want to add Groups to your List. The Groups you set up can then be included in your sign up forms for subscribers to check as they sign up for your mailing list.
To set up groups in Mailchimp:
- Go to your Lists page and select the list you want to add subscriber options to
- Click on the ‘Manage contacts’ option and select ‘Groups’
- Click ‘Create Groups’ and add in your ‘Group category’ (ie Job Industry, Blog Category, Topic etc) then enter the options you want to give people to subscribe to in the ‘Groupnames’ section
- Save the group and you’re done
All you need to do now is include the group options on your sign up form. When people sign up they will now be able to tell you what you are interested in. If you use a standard Mailchimp sign up form you can edit this by going to your list and clicking on the ‘Signup forms’ option. It should have added the group options to your form automatically — you may just need to grab the new embed code if you already have this on your website.
Setting up your multi-RSS email campaign in FlipRSS
Now your subscribers are able to tell you exactly what they want to receive. This is hugely powerful and you can deliver on this with a fully automated newsletter campaign. There is no on-going time required to manage these campaigns beyond the initial set up. FlipRSS takes care of everything.
Setting feeds up based on subscriber preferences within FlipRSS
Go through the usual campaign set up as you would for a standard multi-RSS email campaign in FlipRSS. When you get to add RSS feeds, you can select for these to be shown conditionally based on your subscribers’ preferences.
- On the ‘Add RSS Feeds’ tab within the FlipRSS campaign set up give your feed a name and paste in the feed URL as normal.
- Uncheck the option that says “Include this feed for all subscribers?” This will reveal advanced options for showing the feed based on the conditions you set.
- Select the option “Specify a segment/group name” you will see a drop down box appear.
- Click on the drop down to reveal the Groups or Segments you have set up in your Mailchimp or Campaign Monitor account pre-populated.
- Select the option that relates to the feed you are adding.
- Save and add another feed
That’s it; just add a feed for each of your subscription options and set the conditions. You can now schedule this to send daily, weekly, monthly or send it manually on a specific date.
Further settings are available to customise the delivery of content to your email subscribers. You can change the number of posts appearing for each feed, whether you display images or not and whether you only display posts since the last newsletter or show the latest posts regardless of if they’ve been displayed before. This level of customisation and personalisation has proven itself to be extremely powerful.
Rocket Fuel for email marketing
Detailed analysis has shown the impact of delivering personalised content feeds for subscribers is not just on engagement and open rates but in on-site conversions. Working with a client in the recruitment sector, we analysed 12 months of data from their FlipRSS driven email campaigns. The impact of the solution was instant from the day it was introduced and produced a consistent increase in open rate and click through rate for their newsletter. Click through rate is consistently between 500% and 750% above industry average and directs email subscribers to relevant content on their site. As a result, email marketing has become one of their biggest refers of conversions on their website, ahead of all paid and organic social traffic.
And the best thing from the client’s perspective is they haven’t had to do anything beyond their initial set up.
How can FlipRSS help you?
FlipRSS saves content creators and publishers time by fully automating email newsletters whilst delivering content personalised to individual subscriber preferences. FlipRSS integrates with Mailchimp to automate multiple RSS feeds in email newsletters. Using advanced segmentation, FlipRSS enables your subscribers to select the content they wish to receive enabling the automated delivery of personalised content. FlipRSS clients are seeing big immediate increases in open rate, click-through-rate, and subscriber satisfaction.
Once set up, newsletters are created, customised and scheduled automatically. Sit back, watch your email stats outperform your competitors and focus on creating great content.
What sets us apart?
We’re a small team. Small enough to really care. We care about the quality of the product we produce, we care about the experience of every customer we have the privilege of working with and we care about our impact. We’re here to do a great job of supporting, delighting and connecting you and your subscribers. We’ll help you get set up, so get in touch.