How to setup email newsletter with mailchimp – RSS to Email, mailchimp is a popular email newsletter provider with more than 6 million people using their services. If you are a starter then you can use their services for free. If you have fewer than 2,000 subscribers, you can send up to 12,000 emails per month absolutely for free. And if you cross this you upgrade it any time.

Previous I’ve written an article to add email subscription box to your website using Google’s feedburner services -> How to add free email subscription box to your website.

To setup email newsletter with mailchimp, create an account at mailchimp.com. After that login into mailchimp account.

After logging into mailchimp you need to understand two things one is lists and the other one is campaigns.

Lists in mailchimp

List are used to store different set of users (subscribers). If you have different websites you can store site1 users in a list and site2 users in another list. And maintain difference between both subscribers and send different email for the subscribers.

Before proceeding further, create a list to store the users. For creating a list follow below steps.

• Login to your mailchimp account.
• On left side bar, click on lists link.
  

  Creating list in mailchimp step one

• On main content area, click on create list link you will see some slide down content, again click on create list link.
  

  Creating list in mailchimp step two

• On create list screen you will see two sections List details and notifications
• In List details, enter the list name. Default from email address, and default from name (Email sent from this name and email to subscribers). If you want you can enter office address below that you will find those fields.
  

  Creating list in mailchimp step three

• In Notifications, you will three options to get notification of user activity. I’ll prefer daily report of user activity (subscribe or unsubscribe activity ).
  

  Creating list in mailchimp step four

Campaigns in mailchimp

Creating campaign is the important step, here you will create a campaign and setup a rss to email newsletter subscription campaign. To create an rss to email newsletter in mailchimp follow these steps.

• Login to your mailchimp account.
• On left sidebar, click on campaigns.
  

  Create campaigns in mailchimp step one

• Click on down arrow right after Create Campaign, and then click on RSS driven campaign.
  

  Create campaigns in mailchimp step two

• From here onwards campaign creating starts and the steps are :
  

  Create campaigns in mailchimp all steps

  1. RSS Feed
  2. Recipients
  3. Setup
  4. Template
  5. Design
  6. Confirm

And I’ll explain each of these steps separately. You can follow these step after doing above.

1. RSS Feed

Here you can enter rss feed url and timings to send email. If you don’t know your feed url then enter your website url, it will takes feed url automatically. And specify the timing when you want to send the email’s to your subscribers.

Create campaigns in mailchimp rss feed step

2. Recipients

In this step you need to select the subscriber list for delivering emails. Here you will see all the lists, select one list and click on Next at bottom right side.

Create campaigns in mailchimp Recipients step

3. Setup

In setup step, you need to enter campaign information, like campaign name & from name and from email address. And you will see lot of other options. After entering all the details, click on Next button.

Create campaigns in mailchimp setup step

4. Template

In Template step, select an email template to send emails. Here I’m using 1 Column layout, then click on Next button in bottom right corner.

Create campaigns in mailchimp Template step

5. Design

In Design step, you need to add RSS content items to email template. Just drag these two items (RSS Header, RSS Items) into email newsletter where you want to show them.

Create campaigns in mailchimp Design step

After setting up Design, you can test the preview by clicking on Preview and Test -> Enter Preview Mode which can be found in top right corner.
Then click on Next at bottom right corner.

create campaigns in mailchimp preview step

6. Confirm

It’s the final step, After reaching this step click on Start RSS button to send emails. Now you have done successful setup of RSS feed to email Newsletter in mailchimp.