Formatting RSS Campaign Designer Not Functioning

Ask a question Email Marketing
1

Hi,

I am trying to switch my automatic RSS campaigns from Mail Chimp and format it into Active Campaign and it isn’t going very smoothly.

  1. I am unable to format some of the text of the post’s DESCRIPTION to be the correct font. I can select different fonts but it remains the same - arial. The title, date and author fonts I can change successfully.

  2. I also want to format the DATE and AUTHOR so that they are on the same line (not two separate ones) and separated by the symbol “|”

  3. I would also like to add a “New Article” text right above the RSS fee TITLE, but cannot seem to do that without making an entirely separate text box, which creates too much space between “New Article” and the TITLE.

Please advise. I was told by Adil in Chat Support to post this question here. I appreciate your help as this is very frustrating having just started a paid account.

Best
Bailey

2

Hey @epigentek,

If you are reaching the limitations of the RSS feed in the designer, you can use an HTML block in the email to custom-format the RSS feed elements, that should give you the ability to achieve the specific details you want for the RSS feed block in your email.

Here are the details about the feed elements that are available to you, and how to loop over RSS feed content.

https://www.activecampaign.com/help/how-to-use-rss-in-your-email-messages-campaigns-activecampaign-ver-536/

3

Hi @jskole ,

Thanks for your suggestion, however, I’d like to let any other users reading this thread to know that I was just informed by help support:

The development team have assessed the RSS issues in your account. They have explained that even though it is possible to add RSS feeds into custom HTML blocks, we don’t technically support it.

With RSS based campaigns, we only allow for one feed per campaign which needs to be inserted through the RSS block.

Would be great to be able to truly customize RSS feeds without running into any errors. Perhaps something like this could be developed in the future.

2 Likes
4

Hi @jskole,

I’m really interested in using the HTML block to parse the RSS feed.
How does this work? I cannot find a guide about this.

Thanks!

1 Like
5

I found the answer somewhere in the community.
You need to add a HTML block, and you can use an example like this (it will show some Dutch news):

%RSS-FEED|URL:https://www.nu.nl/rss/Algemeen|SHOW:ALL%

<h3>%RSS:CHANNEL:TITLE%</h3>

%RSS-LOOP|LIMIT:10%

<p>
    %RSS:ITEM:DATE%
    <strong>%RSS:ITEM:TITLE%</strong><br/>
    %RSS:ITEM:SUMMARY%
    %RSS:ITEM:LINK%
</p>

%RSS-LOOP%

%RSS-FEED%
1 Like
6

Thanks a million for posting this, we were looking for exactly this information. Worked like a charm!