We have been sending out a weekly email on Thursdays. Up to this point, I’ve been doing each email as its own campaign but I know there is a better way. The problem is, when I try to create a campaign for the weekly email using “date-based,” it only gives me the option to create the email based on subscription date or birthdays. When I try to create the campaign using “automate,” it only gives me the option to use email actions or conditions. The other options (RSS, Auto-responder, split testing, etc.) aren’t relevant to what I’m trying to accomplish. I don’t mind creating a new campaign each week but I know there is a better way to do it…can anyone point me in the right direction? Thank you!
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Would the RSS to Email feature work?
I did this a few times very successfully with MailChimp. The client would have a blog category called “newsletter”. Any posts with that category were not accessible through the main site, but they were able to be found in Google.
The RSS to Email would automatically send any new posts under the “newsletter” category every month on the same date (but it could be set to weekly for sure). The client never had to open MailChimp, they just kept adding to their blog and it happened all on it’s own.
I haven’t had a need to do this in ActiveCampaign yet, but I’m sure it would be very similar.
Kim
The terminology took a bit for me to make sense of too. AC uses the term “campaign” to mean an email message. I’m also used to campaign meaning a series of email or a newsletter. Here are a few tricks that I use in our account.
We use Labels to categorize messages. So basically labels to me are now what I used to consider “campaigns”. You can filter on them and it makes it easier to keep them organized.
Use a template with all your boiler plate and design. I started by duplicating the previous newsletter and deleting the content. but using the templates saves a step.
One thing that is missing is reporting. I have put in a development request to be able to pull reports based on the label. That way I could look at all campaigns labeled “Newsletter” at once and export the numbers to excel to create trend reports.
Hope this helps.
Hi Kim,
Yes, RSS to email would be one way to solve it. You would need to make sure you scheduled your posts in WordPress so that they were released at the time you wanted your email sent.
The other way I’ve solved it from within ActiveCampaign is to use an automation instead of a campaign.
Get your email template sorted out first. Then build the automation.
The automation starts with a Wait - set to wait until the time you want your first newsletter to go out. For example, Friday at 11am.
Then you have an email send - this week’s newsletter.
Then you have a wait 1 day - just to make sure it doesn’t send next week’s along with this week.
Then wait until Friday at 11am.
Then you have an email send - next week’s email.
Continue etc with as many newsletters as you’ve currently written.
After the last email send, instead of the wait, have a notifiation to send to you - “We’ve run out of newsletter content!” - reminding you to write some more.
This means you can write a few and get ahead of yourself, and you’ll be warned with a week’s notice if you run out of content. When you write a new one, just insert it in before the warning.
Hope that helps - you can make this more complex if you wanted to. For example, if you wanted to ensure that new people got the great old content you gave them, you could just leave this automation growing, and shove new people in the top. If you would prefer everyone to get the latest one at the same time, you could put a date validation in there, to skip an email if it’s in the past. Or just manually delete the ones in the past.
But if the newsletter is going out on your blog too, I think your RSS idea would probably be the simplest approach.
Cheers,
Jake.