I’ve reached out a couple of times to AC Support about the following, and they’ve told me it’s a known defect with no known resolution date. At a point where I’m working on growing my list, these problems are painful as they require me to babysit things daily to ensure things are working properly.
I’m posting here in case any other users can share a perspective or idea on how to work around this problem. Honestly, I’d be quicker to find a new provider if AC wasn’t’ so feature-rich … so, this is my one last-ditch effort to find work-arounds.
The biggest amount of traffic for me is sending out a daily newsletter, which is being triggered by my blog posts which come out every weekday. I’ve set things up to trigger automatically from my RSS feed.
The problems are:
Campaigns - work fine from Mon - Fri which is when a new post comes to AC through my RSS feed. On Sat, there is no post and AC gets stuck sitting there waiting for a new post. If I don’t go into AC over the weekend and manually re-schedule the campaign to start on Mon … it will never trigger by itself and so the campaign will not be sent out to my subscribers. I would expect when there is no post in the RSS feed on Sat, it will check again on Sun, then Mon.
Automation - I’ve been ‘testing’ a new newsletter coming out of automations (to replace the one in campaigns). The automation is set up to look every morning at 8am for a new item in the RSS feed (my post publishes weekdays at 6am, and I’ve confirmed it’s there by 8am). What happens is the automation runs once when I first create or change it, but never runs again. If you’re wondering … I’d prefer to use automations given the content functionality is more robust than campaigns. E.g. I can include multiple RSS content blocks in a single automation email … which increases the automation of the content so that I don’t have to touch it.
If anyone has any ideas on how to work around these things, your thoughts would be appreciated.
I have the same problem with the daily RSS. I create my post every day Monday through Friday and publish it around 11:00am.I have my rss campaign scheduled to send every day at 9. Tuesday through Friday it sends flawlessly. However the post that I created and published on Friday at 11 never goes out on Saturday or Sunday. It doesn’t go out on Monday either. The last couple weeks I’ve had to create a manual new campaign on Monday to send out the post from Friday. Very annoying.
I’ve been dealing with this for years. We published a blog Monday through Friday. Sometimes it correctly skipped Saturday and Sunday and then started again Monday, but it periodically didn’t. We’ve tried publishing something short Saturday and Sunday to keep it regular, but even that is not reliable.
I really like ActiveCampaign. But this is such basic functionality. It should not be an ongoing issue. We finally decided to stop using ActiveCampaign for RSS feeds. It’s easier (and some months cheaper in terms of my time) to pay for another service than to spend time making sure ActiveCampaign behaves.
I appreciate you all for sharing your experience with ActiveCampaign’s RSS capabilities. I’ve captured your feedback and passed it along to our internal teams.
As always, our Support team is here to help you troubleshoot. If you haven’t already, I’d recommend reaching out: https://bit.ly/34ijyXR
@notgrasshistory1, if you could, please share the service or integration that you use so that other folks who may be experiencing the same issue can find a potential workaround!
Good to know “it’s not just me” … not that I thought it was. Molly - I talked with your product people a couple of months ago, and I’m optimistic there’ll be a resolution before too much longer to this based on the conversation.
Hi Molly. I’ve reached out to support several times… They say they are opening a ticket but I never even get a reply from them. What has happened to Active Campaign support over the last year? It used to be quite good but now is awful!
RSS is basic functionality and to not even be able to get an update from support as to why it does not work is beyond frustrating. I’m at the point where I may have to find another service to send RSS messages. Can this please, please get some priority!!! And at least respond to your customer’s tickets with a status.
I got tired of waiting for ActiveCampaign to fix this issue as it does not seem to be a priority for them. I was able to get my RSS email working by integrating with Zapier.
Still can’t understand why Zapier is able to detect RSS feed updates but ActiveCampaign cannot??!?
I wrote up a blog post with detailed instructions for how to get this working in hopes that maybe it will help others…