Connecting your blog's RSS feed to ConvertKit will allow your subscribers to be updated about every new post of yours.

You also have the option of setting up a weekly digest containing your most recent posts, with links back to your blog, instead of sending out an email for each and every post.

Here's how it works.

If you're setting up an RSS feed for the first time, this is what you'll see:

You'll be taken to the RSS feed configuration page, which looks like this:

The next few steps in this tutorial will go over each of these settings in turn!

Please note that your blog feed URL is not the same as your blog URL. Typically, it'll be your blog URL followed by /feed — for example, convertkit.com/feed.

If you visit your blog feed URL in your browser address bar and it just looks like a page of code — you probably have it right!

NOTE: Your RSS feed is generated by your blog. If your blog URL followed by /feed doesn't give you the results you were looking for, please check with your website service to find the correct link they use and/or change the format of your feed.

You can dynamically customize your subject line with the {{title}} liquid tag. In 'Single' mode, this tag is replaced with the title of your post. In 'Digest' mode, this tag is replaced with the title of your RSS feed (more on single vs. digest mode in the next step).

Don't forget to select your preferred sending address for this feed from the dropdown, if you have multiple in your account.

You'll see these two options in the right sidebar:

Single mode will send an email to your subscribers every time a new blog post is published. That is, if you post 2 blog posts per week, 2 emails will be sent per week (one for each post) from your RSS feed, and so on.

Digest mode allows you to select how often you want your RSS feed emails to go out. For example, if you publish 3 blog posts per week, but only want to send one weekly RSS feed email, then you can select digest mode and it will include all 3 of those posts in one single weekly broadcast.

When digest mode is selected you'll need to select which day(s) to send a broadcast each week:

On the selected days, a digest will be drafted containing all new posts from the last digest (if there are no new posts since then, a new digest will not be drafted).

NOTE: The sending days option is not available for single mode, because in single mode the email will be drafted based on when the post itself goes live.

Your RSS feed emails will always be created automatically; however, they won't necessarily be sent automatically unless you set them to be. That's where this checkbox comes in:

All RSS feed emails will initially be generated as a draft broadcast in your account. If you check the 'Send Automatically' box, the broadcast will be automatically sent out 30 minutes after it is created in your account. If you don't check this box, the broadcast will remain in draft mode indefinitely until you go in and manually send it.

In either case, you can go in and make manual changes to your RSS feed email while it is still in draft mode.

Select the email template you'd like your RSS feed emails to use from this dropdown:

This is the same process as filtering recipients for a regular broadcast!

Now for the fun part! ✨ Customize what your subscribers will receive in their inbox, using our RSS email editor:

This is very similar to our regular email editor, with a few extra additions specific to RSS feeds! In particular, you have a multitude of liquid tags available to add dynamic content that will automatically get replaced by the corresponding content in your feed.

Click the ? icon next to the right of 'Post template:' to reveal a reference table of the liquid tags you have available to work with, and what they correspond to:

At any point, click the Preview button at the top of the editor to see what your post template is looking like so far:

NOTE: If you receive the following error message when attempting to preview your feed, the feed URL you entered in step 3 is missing or invalid:

In the spaces where it says 'Write your email content...' above and below the post template, you can add whatever content you'd like to appear at the beginning & end of every RSS feed email, such as a greeting or sign-off.

In addition, you can use the {% categorymatch %} liquid tag to display only the posts whose post categories and tags match the names of your subscribers' tags. This is great for customizing the content of your broadcasts according to your subscribers' interests!

To do so, you will need to add the {% categorymatch %} liquid tag (and its corresponding {% endcategorymatch %} liquid tag) to your post template like this:

This will automatically add liquid tags to your broadcasts for showing conditional content to your subscribers based on their tags. You’ll be able to see this in action by clicking on the Preview button.

In this example, we’re pulling blog posts from the ConvertKit blog—and specifically, the blog post titled ‘​How to automate your coaching business in 5 easy ways.’ When you check out this blog post, you’ll see that its post categories are ‘Coaching’ and ‘Commerce.’

Accordingly, the snippet for the ‘How to automate your coaching business’ blog post will be shown in the broadcast to only subscribers who have been tagged with either ‘Coaching’ or ‘Commerce’, or both.

If a subscriber doesn’t have either tag, then the ‘How to automate your coaching business’ blog post snippet will not appear for them.

And one last thing! If you’re using the {% categorymatch %} liquid tag, it’s also a good idea to set a default category for the posts that should be displayed in the broadcast, even if none of your posts’ categories match your subscribers’ tags. After all, you don’t want your broadcasts to appear blank!

To set a default category, use this tag:

Like so:

In this case, all posts categorized with the default ‘Commerce’ category will be shown in the broadcast to all subscribers, even if these subscribers haven’t been tagged with ‘Commerce.’

Finally, when everything is ready, first click the red Save button near the top right side of the page.

After that, ensure you also click 'enable' to activate your new RSS feed! Disabled feeds will not send.

And there you have it! Now you've set up automated, customized RSS feed emails for your blog followers.