RSS Plug-In
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What is RSS plug-in?
RSS plug-in (http://emailworks.eu/index.php/mailing-software/advanced-features) will enhance your email marketing capabilities and let you automatically fetch any RSS feed on the web and include them in your email contents.
What can be done with RSS plug-in?
A few real world examples:
- Sending blog updates every periodically (every day, week, etc.)
- Sending latest news from CNN (cnn.com)
- Including latest blog updates in monthly corporate email
- Sending new product info emails
- Sending new member announcements
These are only a few capabilities that RSS plug-in can do for you.
Benefits
- Easy installation and use
- Ability to control the layout design in emails
- Ability to set list item limit
- Ability to fetch and include unlimited amount of RSS feeds in email
Installation
Installation is easy and takes a minute. Once you downloaded RSS plug-in from your client area (http://emailworks.eu/support/), unzip the package and upload the contents of "Upload" directory to your Emailworks plug-ins directory. If your Emailworks is installed under yourdomain.com/Emailworks, plug-ins directory is located at yourdomain.com/Emailworks/plugins. Below, you can read the step-by-step installation instructions:
- Download RSS plug-in from your client area
- Unzip the package
- Upload contents of "upload" directory to Emailworks/plugins directory on your server
- Login to your administration area
- Click "Settings > Plug-In Manager" link
- Click"Enable" button of RSS Plug-In item
- Go to "User Groups" and edit user groups that you want to give permission for this plug-in
- Check "RSS plug-in" permission in Plug-In Permissions section
Quick Start Guide
Once RSS plug-in is installed and enabled, user group members that have access to RSS plug-in will be able to use special RSS tags in their email contents to fetch RSS feeds.
Below, an example creating an email campaign with RSS feeds inside is step-by-step described:
- Login to your Emailworks Maillist Manager user area
- Go to "Campaigns" section
- Click "Create Campaign" link
- Name your campaign and click "Create" button
- You will be redirected to "Campaign Settings" section
- Schedule your campaign
- Select a recipient subscriber list
- Click "Save" button to make your campaign ready for the email content.
- Click "Create a new email" link next to "Email" field:
- Email content window will be displayed
- Enter a descriptive name for your email content
- Select "Empty" layout for this example
- Click "Content" link and rich text editor will be displayed to you:
- Enter a subject for your email
- Click percentage icon on rich text editor tool bar. It will show you list of all available personalization tags. Move to "Campaign Links" and you will notice new tags in the list starting with "RSS..."
- In order to fetch and list of RSS items in your email, you need to start RSS fetching by clicking "RSS: RSS Fetching Start Tag" option. Once you click this option, a tag will be inserted into your rich text editor:
- Replace [url] with the URL of your RSS feed (Ex: http://feeds.feedburner.com/life_at_octeth) and replace [no. of items to fetch] with the number that you want to that number of RSS items. In our example, this tag will be similar to this one:
%RSS:http://feeds.feedburner.com/life_at_octeth:10%
- Now, it's time to publish the title of your RSS posts and descriptions. Click "RSS Post Title" and "RSS Post Description" and insert those tags into your email content. For each tag, you can set a max character length.
- To complete the RSS fetching, you need to close the process by clicking "RSS Fetching End Tag"
The final text in your email content will be similar to the following one:
%RSS:http://feeds.feedburner.com/life_at_octeth:10% %RSS:TITLE:100% %RSS:DESCRIPTION:200% %RSS:END%
You can add unlimited amount of RSS fetch codes inside your email content and provide a content-rich email to your subscribers.
An example HTML code for RSS fetching is provided below:
<ul> %RSS:http://feeds.feedburner.com/life_at_octeth:10% <li><strong>%RSS:TITLE:100%</strong><br /> %RSS:DESCRIPTION:200% </li> %RSS:END% </ul>
