Mailchimp: How To Build A Table of Contents for Your RSS-To-Email Campaign

Adding a table of contents (TOC) in emails can be a good practice for several reasons:

1. Navigation and User Experience: In longer emails with multiple sections or topics, a table of contents giving users a quick overview of the email’s content. It allows recipients to navigate to specific sections of interest quickly, saving them time and enhancing their overall user experience.
2. Scannability: Emails with a lot of content can be overwhelming to read. A table of contents breaks down the email’s content into digestible sections, making it easier for recipients to scan and find what they want. This improves readability and increases the chances that recipients will engage with the email.
3. Highlighting Important Content: A well-structured table of contents can draw attention to important or key information within the email. By presenting the main topics at the beginning, recipients are more likely to notice and engage with the essential content.
4. Accessibility: A table of contents can benefit users with disabilities, such as screen reader users, by giving them an overview of the email’s structure and allowing them to jump directly to the sections they are interested in.
5. Content Organization: Using a table of contents encourages marketers and content creators to organize their emails logically. This practice helps maintain a clear flow of information, ensuring that recipients can follow the intended message or call-to-action (CTA) more easily.
6. Aesthetics and Design: A well-designed table of contents can enhance the visual appeal of the email and give it a professional and organized look. It can be an attractive element encouraging recipients to explore the email further.
7. Increase Engagement: By providing recipients with a clear roadmap of what’s inside the email, a table of contents can pique their interest and encourage them to explore the various sections, leading to higher engagement and click-through rates.

It’s important to note that while a table of contents can be beneficial, it might not be necessary for every email. It is most effective in longer emails, newsletters, or content-heavy marketing emails where navigation and scannability are crucial.

Mailchimp RSS-To-Email

Mailchimp’s RSS-to-Email feature is a tool that allows users to automatically send email campaigns based on the content of an RSS feed. With this feature, you can set up an email campaign to be sent out whenever new content is published on your website or blog’s RSS feed. We recently wrote about how to generate a specific feed just for Mailchimp. Here’s how Mailchimp’s RSS-to-Email feature works:

1. Integration: Mailchimp allows you to integrate your website’s RSS feed with your Mailchimp account. You can specify the URL of your RSS feed in Mailchimp, and Mailchimp will automatically fetch the content from that feed.
2. Template Creation: You can design an email template in Mailchimp that will be used to send the RSS-to-Email campaigns. This template will define the layout, design, and branding of the emails sent to your subscribers.
3. Automation Setup: Once the integration is complete and the email template is ready, you can set up the automation in Mailchimp. You’ll specify the campaign frequency (e.g., daily, weekly, or monthly), and Mailchimp will automatically check the RSS feed for new content at specified intervals.
4. Content Population: When Mailchimp detects new content in the RSS feed, it will generate an email using the pre-defined template and populate it with the content from the latest blog posts or articles.
5. Sending: The generated email will automatically be sent to your subscribers according to the schedule you set in the automation.

The RSS-to-Email feature streamlines keeping your subscribers updated with your latest content. It’s handy for bloggers, content creators, and publishers who want to share their new posts with their email subscribers without creating and sending individual email campaigns manually.

By automating the process, Mailchimp’s RSS-to-Email feature saves time. It ensures that your email list stays informed about your latest content, helping you maintain engagement with your audience and drive traffic to your website or blog.

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Mailchimp RSS Merge Tags

To create a section that reads your RSS feed, Mailchimp has a series of RSS-related merge tags. Below is a list of some commonly used RSS merge tags:

1. *|RSSITEM:CONTENT|*: This merge tag is used to display the content of each RSS item in your email campaign. When used in the email template, Mailchimp will replace this merge tag with the content of the corresponding RSS item.
2. *|RSSITEM:TITLE|*: Use this merge tag to display the title of each RSS item in your email campaign. It will be replaced with the title of the corresponding RSS item.
3. *|RSSITEM:DATE|*: This merge tag displays the date of each RSS item in your email campaign. When used in the email template, it will be replaced with the publication date of the corresponding RSS item.
4. *|RSSITEM:AUTHOR|*: Use this merge tag to display the author’s name of each RSS item in your email campaign. When used in the email template, it will be replaced with the author’s name of the corresponding RSS item.
5. *|RSSITEM:IMAGE|*: This merge tag displays the featured image of each RSS item in your email campaign. Mailchimp will replace this merge tag with the featured image of the corresponding RSS item when used in the email template.
6. *|RSSITEM:URL|*: Use this merge tag to create a link to the individual post in your email campaign. It will be replaced with the URL of the corresponding RSS item.
7. *|RSSFEED:URL|*: This merge tag is used to display the URL of your RSS feed in your email campaign. When used in the email template, Mailchimp will replace this merge tag with the URL of your RSS feed.
8. *|RSSFEED:TITLE|*: Use this merge tag to display the title of your RSS feed in your email campaign. It will be replaced with the title of your RSS feed.

These merge tags can be inserted directly into your email template to dynamically populate the content of your email campaigns with information from your RSS feed. Here’s how we display our latest posts in our Martech Zone newsletter:

*|RSSITEMS:|*
*|RSSITEM:TITLE|*

by *|RSSITEM:AUTHOR|* on *|RSSITEM:DATE|*
*|RSSITEM:IMAGE|*

 
*|RSSITEM:CONTENT|*

 *|END:RSSITEMS|*

Pay special attention to the id that we’ve included in the H2 title tag of our email. Mailchimp utilizes the same formatting that PHP does for displaying a date. Utilizing a timestamp of when the post was published, we can have a unique id appended to each of our articles published in our newsletter. By doing this, we can add another content block above our list of articles for a Table of Contents.

Mailchimp RSS-To-Email Table of Contents

Mailchimp has a nice engine that rates your email’s functionality for best practices… and one of the features that it looks for is the ability for users to scan through your email easily. A table of contents provides just that functionality. While Mailchimp has built-in TOC functionality for building an HTML email, it doesn’t automatically extend to an RSS-to-Email HTML email template. As a result, you need to script it utilizing the RSS merge tags and the timestamp I included for each article’s id above.

To add a table of contents, you can open your email with another section that utilizes the same timestamp merge tags with an anchor designated by #. In this case, my code is:

Here are this week's articles (click to jump to that excerpt): *|RSSITEMS:|*
• *|RSSITEM:TITLE|*
*|END:RSSITEMS|*

Typically, I would have used an unordered bulleted list for this; however, Mailchimp’s editor continued to fight me to put all the merge tags into a bulleted list. As a result, I just provided an inline-styled paragraph for each with the HTML entity for a bullet item.

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