Setting Up RSS-to-Email Campaigns

What Is an RSS-to-Email Campaign?#

An RSS-to-email campaign automatically pulls content from your blog's RSS feed and sends it to your subscribers on a schedule you define — daily, weekly, or monthly. You set it up once, and every time new content is published, your subscribers hear about it without any manual work.

This is ideal for blogs, news sites, podcasts, and any content-driven business that publishes regularly.

Prerequisites#

Before setting up your campaign, confirm:

1. Your blog or website has a valid RSS 2.0 or Atom feed
2. The feed is publicly accessible (not behind authentication)
3. Each feed item includes at minimum: <title>, <link>, <description>, and <pubDate>

Finding your RSS feed URL:

• WordPress: https://yourdomain.com/feed/
• Ghost: https://yourdomain.com/rss/
• Medium: https://medium.com/feed/@yourusername

Validate your feed at validator.w3.org/feed/ before configuring it in AcelleMail.

Creating the Campaign in AcelleMail#

1. In your AcelleMail dashboard, go to Campaigns → Create Campaign
2. Select RSS Campaign as the campaign type
3. Enter your RSS Feed URL in the field provided
4. Choose your mailing list (or segment)
5. Set the sending schedule:
   • Daily: sends each morning with any new posts from the past 24 hours
   • Weekly: sends every Monday (or your chosen day) with posts from the past 7 days
   • Monthly: sends on the 1st of each month

Note: AcelleMail will only trigger a send if at least one new item has been published since the last send. If there are no new posts, no email goes out — so you never send empty campaigns.

Designing the RSS Email Template#

RSS templates use special merge tags that pull data from your feed items:

{{rss:title}}           → Post title
{{rss:link}}            → Full article URL
{{rss:description}}     → Excerpt or full content
{{rss:pubdate}}         → Publication date
{{rss:image}}           → Featured image (if in feed)
{{rss:author}}          → Post author name

Sample RSS item block (for a multi-post digest layout):

<table width="100%" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0">
  <tr>
    <td>
      <h2><a href="{{rss:link}}">{{rss:title}}</a></h2>
      <p style="color:#666; font-size:12px;">{{rss:pubdate}}</p>
      <p>{{rss:description}}</p>
      <a href="{{rss:link}}">Read more →</a>
    </td>
  </tr>
</table>

Configuring the Number of Posts Per Email#

In AcelleMail's RSS campaign settings, you can define:

If your feed publishes frequently, cap items at 3 to keep the email scannable.

From Name and Subject Line Merge Tags#

You can use RSS data in your campaign subject line too:

New Post: {{rss:title}}                  ← Works great for single-item sends
{{rss:count}} new articles from our blog ← Good for digest-style weekly sends

Monitoring Your RSS Campaign#

After your campaign goes live, check the following in AcelleMail's campaign reports:

• Send history: Dates when the campaign triggered automatically
• Open rate: Benchmark against your regular campaigns
• Click rate: The primary success metric — are readers visiting your posts?
• Unsubscribes per send: If high, reduce frequency or post quantity

RSS-to-email is one of the highest-ROI automations you can set up. It takes under 30 minutes to configure and keeps your audience engaged with fresh content indefinitely.