Sending out an RSS driven campaign

To automate the job alerts sending process, you need to have an RSS feed of your site.

RSS, which stands for “Rich Site Summary” is a format of showing a site’s content that is changing regularly. This is most commonly used by news sites or sites having alerts such as job sites or frequently updating social media sites such as Twitter.

A typical job site would have a different RSS feeds for each job category. A good example of a job portal site using RSS is shown below – www.topjobs.lk 

Inside each category’s RSS Feed, you will find the job listings in that particular category.

For example, if you click in the RSS Link for HR/Training http://topjobs.lk/rss/hr_training.rss, you will see the job openings as a list.

Step 1: Creating a segmented list

The first thing you would need is to have a segmented email list ready for sending the alerts to.

This was discussed in our previous article “Creating a segmented list using Mailchimp”.

Step 2: Creating the RSS driven Job Alert email

One easy way to send an “Alert email” is to chose a RSS Driven campaign.

Upon selecting RSS-Driven campaigns in MailChimp, you will be asked to enter the RSS URL of a particular job category, along with other information about emailing, such as the mailing frequency, day and time etc.

Upon clicking “Next”, you will need to select the list, and from the list, a particular segment.

Thereon, after adding suitable subject lines, sender names etc. to the campaign, you can select a suitable RSS based template for your email. Mailchimp has RSS based templates in its templates list.

Thereon in the “Design” section, you can customize the email body with suitable header images and text.

The email when sent will appear as follows.

Step 3: Send and monitor the email send out

Though its scheduled to be sent out for those who subscribe at a particular date and time, its always best to test its actual functioning by adding yourself to a test list and performing an actual sendout.

Thereon, when you are satisfied you can progress to scheduling the email for delivery.

As is visible, this is a very efficient and 100% permission-based way of mailing. BQu can help you set up segmented mailing quickly and cost-effectively. Contact us on 0773 – 22 44 20 or via email on This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. to learn more.

Created: September 4th, 2014