Set Up an RSS-Based Campaign for Drupal 7

MailChimp offers the ability to set up RSS-based email campaigns that automatically send daily, weekly, or monthly emails to your subscribers based on the content of an RSS feed. In this tutorial we'll look at creating an RSS feed of ice cream flavor updates in Drupal using Views, and then configuring a campaign in MailChimp to use the content of that RSS feed to send a daily email to anyone subscribed to our Flavor of the Day list.

I'm not going to cover creating an RSS feed in Views during this tutorial. Instead I assume that you've already created the necessary feed on your own site. If you’re not familiar with creating feeds with Views check out this video tutorial, Creating Views Attachments, which demonstrates how to create an RSS feed in Views.

In order for your RSS-based campaign to work, your Drupal site needs to accessible to the web, so that when MailChimp tries to read the content of your RSS feed, it can do so. If you're just testing this out, you can use a tool like ngrok.com, or just create a dev site on Pantheon or Acquia to play with.

By the end of this tutorial you should be able to create a campaign in MailChimp that pulls data from an RSS feed in Drupal and sends an email with that data to your mailing list on a regular basis.

Further your learning

• Give an example of a use case for RSS-based campaigns that would be useful for your users.
• What do you need to do on the Drupal side of things in order to create an RSS-based campaign?
• Can you send an RSS-based campaign to a segment of a MailChimp list?
• Can you test an RSS-based campaign with a Drupal site on your localhost?
• Further exploration: Can you add an RSS feed to a regular campaign template? Hint: *|RSSFEEDBLOCK|*

Additional resources

• Creating Views Attachments, covers how to make an RSS-feed in with Views
• MailChimp documentation for creating an RSS-driven mail campaign
• MailChimp's Merge Tags for RSS-driven campaigns
• MailChimp's RSS item tags