Getting Full RSS Blog Posts to Newsletters (Mailchimp)

Hi all,

So I’m trying to send my blog posts as emails when they’re posted. You can do this with Mailchimp. However, it seems like Mailchimp only has access to the blog post’s description, not the full post like I want to send.

The reason for this is that Mailchimp’s *|FEEDITEM:CONTENT_FULL|* tag takes the content from the RSS feed’s content:encoded tag. Webflow CMS’s RSS feed doesn’t have a content:encoded tag, and therefore Mailchimp takes the description tag instead.

I was wondering if there was any workaround to this? All I want is my blog posts in email format.

Here is the Mailchimp documentation on tags: LINK
Here is my RSS feed: LINK

What the emails look like right now:


Here is my site Read-Only: LINK

I’m attempting to do the exact same thing. Send a new blog post (entire post, not summary) as an email via Mailchimp. I’m experiencing the same issue and haven’t found a good workaround yet. Looking forward to potential solutions to resolve this.

@JBlog and @Sidhant_Mathur if you’re okay with sending the email manually (ie it’s created in mailchimp and you then go in and click send), you can do this with mailchimp and zapier. If you want to send the email automatically as well and use zapier, you’ll need to use another mail provider like mailgun since mailchimp doesn’t have the ‘send email’ response. There could be other ways but this is the one I’ve used in the past.

@sarahfrison I had a similar idea; I would write the email in Buttondown and then when I sent it, Zapier would add the body of the email to the Webflow CMS drafts. Then I’d post it from Webflow.

I think your suggestion to use Mailchimp might be the better option though as a big issue with Buttondown is lack of “fields” to input. With some work I can probably add authors/categories to the Mailchimp template.

Thanks!

@Sidhant_Mathur oh, so you’re saying you want to do it the other way around? You want to take a newsletter in mailchimp and publish it automatically to your website? That should be possible too with zapier. Just make sure to pick the ‘publish new item’ action, not ‘create new item’, the ‘create new item’ just adds it to your website for you to publish. The ‘publish’ action makes it live on the site.

@sarahfrison Not that I want to, just thought it would be more convenient to do it that way. After all, newsletters have more of a finality to clicking send than a blog, so you’d have to make it perfect before posting.

It’s a bit more roundabout than I’d like but it works!

@sarahfrison Can you elaborate on this more? I’m new, so more steps here would be very helpful. My goal is to send each new blog post via email using mailchimp. I’d like my subscribers to have the ability to read the full post in the body of the email and not have to go back to my site. Looking at webflow’s RSS I only see the blog post description as an RSS option.

I’ve love to know how I can use zapier to push the entire post to mailchimp.

Thanks

@JBlog thanks for the question! Unfortunately my plate is quite full at the moment so I can’t walk you through it. Have you looked on youtube? There are quite a few people who are sharing webflow + zapier tutorials now.

I use ConvertKit for newsletters. It would be ideal to have the RSS link to ConvertKit to send out the email notification. I know WordPress has this option (and I like it). How do we set this up? It seems like such a rudimentary service for a blog these days. If I am unable to push new CMS posts to subscriber email, I will go with another service that does. Any help?

@Derek_J_Fiedler If anybody still has this issue, I’ve now found a much better solution. Check out https://audienceful.com

Kind of like Ghost but for Webflow. Also has a much better writing interface for emails and publishing posts to Webflow collections.

The problem with duct-taping RSS and an old school ESP like mailchimp or convertkit is its a nightmare to configure (don’t get me started on what a pain it is to use Mailchimp), you basically have no control over what happens after setting it up, and it really limits the types of content you can put in your blog posts. And if you sometimes don’t want to send one of your site posts to the email list, tough luck.

Also, rarely did I want my headlines and email subject lines to be the same thing. Blog posts I’m usually concerned with SEO, and for email subject lines I’m usually concerned with open rates.

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