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  • Welcome to FeedOtter
  • Automated Newsletters
    • Getting Started
      • Marketo Sending
      • Pardot Sending
      • Eloqua Sending
      • SFMC Sending
      • HubSpot Sending
      • MailChimp Sending
      • Active Campaign Sending
    • Scheduling Your Send
      • Require New Content to Send
      • Intervals
    • Features
      • Last Send Date
      • Send Now
      • Sending History
      • UTM Parameters
      • Custom Subject Lines
      • Notifications
      • Multiple Feeds
        • Merging Feeds
        • Pulling in External JSON/XML Data
  • Curated Newsletters
    • Getting Started
      • Newsletter Defaults
      • Adding Content Sources
      • Create your first curated issue
      • Test, Review, and Publish your curated email newsletter
    • Publishing
      • Publishing to Marketo
        • Create a New Email Program and Email
        • Create a New Email in Marketo
        • Schedule an Email Program Send From the FeedOtter Interface
      • Publishing to Pardot
      • Publishing to Eloqua
        • Create a New Email and Schedule a Send
        • Create a New Email
        • Update an Existing Email
        • Issue Naming
      • Publishing to HubSpot
      • Publishing to MailChimp
      • Publishing to HTML
    • Tags
    • Bookmarking Content
    • Content Sources
      • Google Sheets
      • YouTube
      • Algolia
      • WordPress API
      • UberFlip
      • JSON / XML API
        • Custom Data Fields
    • Troubleshooting
      • Marketo Duplicate Object Naming
      • Marketo Emoji Support
      • MailChimp From Address
      • Pardot emails are missing a required Unsubscribe or Preference Center tag
  • Integrations
    • Getting Started
    • Marketo
      • How to Set Up Your Marketo Integration
      • FAQ
        • Email Reporting
        • Sending in Recipient Time Zone
        • Marketo Data Access
        • Custom Marketo Program Naming
        • Branded Domain and IP Settings
      • Troubleshooting
        • How do I reset my Marketo Automated Campaign
        • Marketo Error: Program with the same name exists
        • Marketo error: Daily quota '50000'
        • Marketo Error: Invalid request. Please check and try again.
        • Curated Issue Fails to Publish
          • FeedOtter Can Not Approve Marketo Template
          • Marketo rejects Duplicate Name
      • Exporting a FeedOtter email into Marketo
    • Pardot / Account Engagement
      • How to Set Up Your Pardot Integration
      • FAQ
        • Salesforce IP Whitelisting
        • Where Can I Find My Pardot Business Unit ID?
        • Pardot Data Access
        • Advanced Settings
          • Set Up a User for Integration
      • Troubleshooting
    • Eloqua
      • How to Set Up Your Eloqua Integration
      • FAQ
        • Custom Email and Campaign Naming
        • Custom Field Setup
        • Updating Eloqua Canvas Email
        • Eloqua Data Access
        • VMTA and BBE
    • Salesforce Marketing Cloud
      • How to Set Up Your SFMC Integration
      • FAQ
        • SFMC Tracking Code
        • SFMC Resources and Links
      • Troubleshooting
    • HubSpot
      • How to Set Up Your HubSpot Integration
      • FAQ
      • Manually publish an email to HubSpot
    • MailChimp
      • How to Set Up Your MailChimp Integration
    • ActiveCampaign
      • How to Set Up Your ActiveCampaign Integration
    • Microsoft Dynamics Marketing
      • How to Set Up Your MS Dynamics Integration
  • Email Templates
    • Getting Started
      • Custom Template
        • HTML Email Guidelines
          • In-Depth HTML Email Guidelines
        • Custom Template Resources
          • ESP Template Use
            • Export a Marketo Template for Use in FeedOtter
            • Export a Pardot Template for Use in FeedOtter
            • Export a HubSpot Template for Use in FeedOtter
            • Export an ActiveCampaign Template for Use in FeedOtter
        • Where to Access Template Code
        • Getting Started with FeedOtter Templates
          • Creating a Basic Email Template
          • Advanced Email Templates
            • Slicing loops
            • Multiple Feed Emails
            • Email With Columns
            • Conditionals
            • Filters
              • Image Resize Filter
              • Date Formatting Filter
              • Text Manipulation Filters
              • Other Handy Filters
            • Non-RSS XML values
            • Custom fields
            • Display a Full Article in Your Email
          • Curated Email Setup Best Practices
            • Curated Newsletter Sections
      • Element Customization
        • About Email Images
    • FeedOtter Tokens
    • ESP-Specific Tokens
      • Marketo Tokens
        • Using Marketo Tokens in the From and Reply-To
      • Pardot Tokens
        • Pardot Merge Token Reference
      • Eloqua Tokens
      • SFMC Tokens
      • HubSpot Tokens
      • MailChimp Tokens
      • ActiveCampaign Tokens
  • Account Management
    • Account Information
    • Company Details
    • Manage Users
      • Adding Users
      • User Roles
      • Campaign Permissions
      • Transfer Ownership
      • Disabling Users
    • Security
      • Enable SSO in Your Account
        • Enable SSO With Okta as the Identity Provider
        • Enable SSO with a Generic Identity Provider
        • Enable SSO with Azure AD as the Identity Provider
        • Enable SSO with OneLogin as the Identity Provider
      • Account Level 2FA
    • Billing
      • Update Your Payment Card
      • View Account Usage
      • View Receipts
      • Change Your Subscription Plan
  • FAQ
    • How to manually publish a curated newsletter
    • WordPress RSS Feed Reference
    • How to find your RSS feed
    • Help with HTML encoding
    • My automated email did not send as expected
    • How do I hard refresh my browser?
    • How to Remove "This Post First Appeared" from Your Blog's RSS Feed in WordPress
    • Whitelisting FeedOtter
    • Whitelist FeedOtter on CloudFlare
    • How do I contact support?
    • Red Dot: Campaign Status
      • Confirm your RSS Feed is valid
      • Confirm your integration is still connected
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On this page
  • Create your campaign
  • Feeds
  • Schedule
  • Customize
  • Setup sender information
  • Setup and customize UTM code tracking
  • Integration & Activation
  • What happens next?
  1. Automated Newsletters

Getting Started

Step-by-step setup of your first fully automated blog newsletter.

Last updated 3 months ago

Automating a blog or content newsletter can be a great asset to your email marketing tactics. In just a few clicks, you can automatically pull your blog content into a newsletter and send to your subscribers on a regular schedule.

Watch the step-by-step video or follow the instructions below to build your first automated newsletter campaign.

Create your campaign

Log in to your FeedOtter account, and navigate to the Automated module by clicking it on the top navigation bar.

Click New Automated Email to create a new automation.

Give your email campaign a memorable name, and click Next.

Feeds

Here, we also told FeedOtter to display 5 posts with each email send. This means FeedOtter will only send up to 5 new posts in your email.

At this point an email preview has likely appeared showing your content. We will talk about email templates and how you can use a custom email design in a moment, but we need to finish setting a few basic email details first.

Schedule

To edit schedule details, navigate to the Schedule tab in the left menu bar.

When scheduling your email, you can choose to send your content every time a new post is published to your feed, hourly, daily, weekly, or monthly.

Learn more about scheduling your automated newsletter campaign below.

Customize

FeedOtter allows you to quickly select an email template from our library or upload your own custom HTML email design for use with FeedOtter.

Use a FeedOtter Template

To browse the available templates, select the Customize tab and click Template Library.

Here you'll be able to customize with the following options:

Template Library: Browse and select from our pre-built templates.

Code View: View, edit, tweak the code of the template you are using. This is great for power users wanting to customize CSS stylings that are not editable in the user interface.

Visual View Customization: Here you can edit the colors, upload logos, and tweak our prebuilt templates fast by clicking element within the template displayed on the right of your screen.

If you are using one of the built-in email templates you can choose from any number of customization options. Just click an element on the template to customize it!

All our templates include customizations for:

  • Adjusting colors to match your brand

  • Uploading a logo or header file

  • Resizing logo width

  • Updating CTA text for each post blurb

  • Adjusting post body character limit

  • Customizing the footer

Use Your Own Custom Template

Your FeedOtter subscription includes free setup of your custom HTML template for use in FeedOtter. To use your custom HTML design, please following our guide:

Setup sender information

Click on the Customize tab in the left menu. Within the template, select this area:

On the left, enter the Subject and Sender information that you wish to use for your automated emails:

Since our emails will be automated, there are special features that allow us to more easily make our subject lines interesting.

To insert dynamic FeedOtter content into your subject line, select Insert Data. Choose the item you'd like incorporated in your subject line, and you can refresh the preview below to see an example of what your subject will look like.

Here we use the special FeedOtter tokens listed below the subject box to insert dynamic content data. The subject box also supports plain text and merge tokens from your ESP, as well as date tokens or any other FeedOtter merge tokens.

Setup and customize UTM code tracking

FeedOtter has a built-in feature that will automatically add the correct UTM parameters to your content links so every click on your content will be tracked in your Google Analytics. This feature is on by default but can be customized as need be.

To setup/view the UTM settings:

  1. Click on Settings on the left-side menu at the very bottom

  2. Select Configure UTM Codes within the UTM Reporting Box.

Here you can update the settings as need be or turn off the feature entirely. To turn the feature off, deselect "Auto-append UTM codes to all post links."

Integration & Activation

At this point you are ready to connect your ESP/marketing automation software and activate your automation. Please follow the link below for instructions for your specific ESP integration process:

What happens next?

Once you've added your integrated your ESP, configured the details within your campaign, and activated the the campaign, you can view, pause, and interact with your automated RSS email from the dashboard.

When the next scheduled send time is reached, FeedOtter will pull content from your RSS feed and compose a new email in your ESP.

This email will be scheduled to send. Sending will begin as fast as your ESP can process the email.

If you haven't already, and paste it into the appropriate box in the FeedOtter interface.

FeedOtter supports any valid RSS/Atom/XML data feed. In addition, FeedOtter supports adding which can be combined into 1 content stream or used to create complex multi-section newsletters automatically. If you’re not sure if your RSS feed will work with FeedOtter, we recommend using to ensure your feed is valid. Any valid feed will work with FeedOtter.

The RSS email we are creating will be sent by your ESP and will rely on their built-in campaign reporting to measure email engagement statistics such as opens and clicks but we also want to measure the increase in website traffic delivered by our content emails. To do this we can use .

find your RSS feed URL
multiple RSS feeds
https://validator.w3.org/feed/
Scheduling Your Send
HTML Email Guidelines
Custom Template Resources
UTM parameters
Marketo
Pardot / Account Engagement
Eloqua
Salesforce Marketing Cloud
HubSpot
MailChimp
ActiveCampaign
Microsoft Dynamics Marketing
Here we've added our RSS feed and FeedOtter automatically pulled your feed content into an email newsletter.
Customize or turn off UTM parameters for all post links.