Using external content in e-mailings

In general, marketers create e-mailings by adding articles using a template and content blocks. Although there's nothing wrong with this, there are less time-consuming ways of making a document. In order to get you as effective as possible in the e-mailmarketing process, This article consists of two ready-to-use tips to let Copernica Marketing Software connect with, for example, your content management system (CMS) by using RSS and external HTML code.

Let's fire off with RSS.

What is RSS

RSS (as explained on Wikipedia) is a convenient tool to streamline the enormous growth of content published on the internet every day. RSS enables you to stay up-to-date, you receive a notification when new updates are published in the field of general news or sports (if these are your fields of interest of course) or when another company publishes news items.

A feed reader, which is necessary to read the feeds, works a lot like an e-mail client. In stead of displaying e-mails, the feed reader shows you articles from the feeds you've registered for.

Speaking of e-mails: RSS can be of a lot of help in composing e-mailings!

RSS in e-mailings

RSS is a great way to publish content from your website directly in an HTML document. If you publish an article using RSS (in your CMS or in Copernica using the Content feature) you can easily integrate this article in an HTML document, using this code example: {loadfeed feed='http://beta.copernica.nl/index.php?pxc=1135&current=atomfeed&pxd=.p.atomfeed&feed=30&account=1&field=id&order=asc&display=rss'}

In your newsletters you can have a column for news from your website or industry news. To name just a few of the advantages:

• Time gain
• No more cut and paste from your CMS
• No strange characters because of pasting from Word (this doesn't apply to you of course, because you always use the 'pasting from Word'-button in the rich text editor)

And, last but not least,

• Your marketing software integrates seamlessly with your CMS.
   

And, just for fun, you can even add a little bit of style by using a stylesheet (yes, you CAN use stylesheets in e-mailings as explained in this article). All you have to do is add the code style='nameofstyleseet' between the { } and all your style elements are converted to inline style elements at the moment of sending.

External HTML code in e-mailings

If you really want to integrate the process of sending out e-mailing into your CMS, you can also load the complete HTML code of your mailings directly to Copernica Marketing Software. This way you can compose your newsletters externally, in your CMS, or have a third party do this for you. At the moment of sending, the code is loaded into Copernica. The only thing you have to do is add the following code to your e-mail template: {fetch url='https://www.mailingURL.com/july2009.html style="stylesheet"}

That sounds easy, doesn't it?' Curious on how this looks in the software? Here's an example:

That's all for now. If using RSS or external content in an e-mailing could also be of value for you, don't hesitate to contact our support team on our number +31-23 7510500 or through the support tool in the software.

Walter van der Scheer