How to Setup an Automated RSS-to-Email Feed in Marketo

I bet one of the things you were looking forward to with Marketo (or any marketing automation platform (MAP)), is automating your blog newsletter. You built a huge list with near daily content updates and yet – it is entirely manual process. You hired a marketer to help manage this process, but it still takes her 4 hours to format the email, test it, process the list, and make sure everything is agency level perfect.

Now you can go from 4 hours to automatic with Digesto – the latest Launchpoint app for Marketo. This is a very new service launched at the Marketo Summit in April and is saving hundreds of hours of productivity across the marketing world. Before we go into how to setup your Digesto system, I will disclose that I work at Perkuto would love to see all Marketo users with RSS feeds buy this tool. That being said, I do not get a special bonus for this post.

Most marketing and social gurus suggest setting up a corporate blog and asking people to provide an email address to receive updates whenever the blog is updated. Building your house email list is a critical part of successful content marketing, especially B2B nurturing. When I work with clients, I always recommend using the blog email list as the foundation for a newsletter and for further nurturing.

Ultimately, automating your blog feed is part of your revenue marketing strategy because it keeps your list active and it saves you time for other activities.

How to Setup Digesto to Save Time and Money

Setting up your first Digesto feed could take as little as 30 minutes or as long as two hours, depending how much you need to test. For this small investment of time, you get a lifetime of hours back.

Here is a diagram of what happens in the system.

What You Need to Start:

• Digesto Account – get one here.

• RSS Feed URL

The RSS feed is simply a URL. Digesto supports standard RSS and Atom protocols, so I doubt you will encounter any issues.

If you do not know your RSS feed URL, hover over your RSS icon, Right Click, press Copy Link.

Marketing Rockstar Guides’ RSS feed is:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/MarketingRockstarGuides

If you cannot find the RSS link or icon, ask your IT person or whoever runs the blog to look for you. They can help you turn it on.

In Digesto, a single RSS-to-Email system is known as a “Digest.” That is one RSS feed sent to a specific list of members at a specific schedule. You can have up to 5 Digests per account. If you need separate Digests by language, region, or time, you can do that too.

• Marketo SOAP API – how do you get this?

You will need to find the SOAP endpoint and encryption key. The Digesto tool has a video explaining how to find this, but I’ll just tell you:

Go to Admin > Integration > SOAP API

Note: do not share your Endpoint and Encryption Key in public!

If you have Marketo Spark, you do not have access to the API, so you will have to upgrade to use Digesto.

• Your Blog/Newsletter List

This can be a smart list, static, or whatever as long as you have one. You do have blog subscribers, right?

If not, start now by adding a simple Marketo Form with two fields:

Note that I disabled pre-fill on the hidden fields, lest my intention be overridden.

• Marketo Program

You will need one Program for each RSS feed you want to automate. Standard Digesto accounts allow up to 5 “Digests”.

• Email Template

I recommend using the most basic template you have, just 1 column with any standard header and footer you desire. If you have a special Newsletter/Blog Template, you can use that too.

Ok, let’s set this up.

Step 1: Program Setup

Digesto is driven by a combination of Program and Tokens. This program can be an Email Blast or an Email Send program, it is up to you.

Remember to add the items under Setup, especially Period Costs.

Step 2: Tokens

In the Program, go to My Tokens and create the following three tokens:

Rich Text:

{{my.DigestoEmailContent}}

= this brings in the body of your Post as HTML.

Rich Text: {{myDIgestoEmailContentText}} = this brings in the body of your Post as text for the Text version.

Text: {{my.DigestoEmailSubject}} = this places your Posts’s Title into the email’s subject line. You can control what appears here in your Digesto Account.

Each Token should simply say, “Default” in the editor.

I would avoid using Campaign Folder Tokens because these may conflict if you are using multiple RSS feeds (Digests).

Step 3: The Email

Of course, you need an email to be able to send anything. So create an email within the Program. I recommend keeping the Template choice simple, as there are limited formatting options with Digesto. A nice template with your logo, colors, footer, etc. is good. I recommend keeping it to one column if you can.

• You can modify the email’s CSS in line, but this needs testing.
• You cannot change the DIVs now

There’s not much else to do for the email. Remember to approve it after you tested the basic format. You will get a chance to Test the RSS feed later.

Step 4: The Send Campaign

At this point you will have something that looks a bit like this:

Remember, this is a Batch campaign. Set it to let Leads run through every time. Do not schedule it – it is not necessary.

Step 5: Digesto Account Setup

Login to your Digest account. You can do this with a free trial or with a paid account. Each Digesto account can handle up to 5 separate RSS feeds (you will need 5 separate Marketo Programs).

1. Login to Digesto

2. Click on an existing Digest or Press New

3. Program Name: enter the exact Program Name you created in Marketo.

4. Campaign Name: enter the exact name for the campaign you created to send the email.

5. Test Campaign Name: if you created a Test Campaign and List, enter it here. You can go back to Marketo anytime to add this.

6. Digest Name: what name do you want to see in Digesto?

7. RSS Feed: any RSS feed URL you want.

8. Max number of Posts: how many posts do you want to appear in each email? Normally I recommend 1 per email, but some firms prefer a newsletter approach with 3-5 per email. I only recommend that if you are sending once a week.

9. Schedule

10. Notification – do you want to receive an email each time the Digest goes out? (this will also notify you if a Digest runs without any new content – but it won’t send out an email).

A Word About Schedules

Displayed below is a schedule for a feed that will trigger an email whenever a new post hits your blog. The email can only go out Monday-Friday at any of the three times.

If you prefer to send this newsletter each week at 7:00AM, then change to Weekly and the day(s) you wish to send on.

For a schedule closer to real time, you can add up to 12 hourly sends on every day of the week. There is a great deal of flexibility in this scheduler, so try it out.

Step 6: Digesto Test System

What about testing the feed?

Digesto thought of that too! There is a test system. If you entered the Test Campaign Name in Step 5, you are ready to use the Test button.

In Marketo, clone your Send Campaign and add “TEST” to it so you know it is different.

Now this TEST list displayed should only be a list of internal staff or seeds, so it is a good idea to either use a Static List like I did here, or to use

Email Address = [List of Emails]

To ensure the test works, be sure to take the test campaign name and add it to the Digest as shown above.

Go back to Digesto and press Test:

Here are examples of what the emails could look like:

Step 7: Launch, go have a Strawberry Daiquiri

Once you have finalized your list and are happy with the test results, go into Digesto’s main screen.

Press ON.

Add content to your blog and watch the results fly in!

Here’s a completed system in Marketo:

And that’s it! Now you have automated your blog emails via Marketo. You have achieved end-to-end reporting on new Known Leads through to Opportunities. You can also see how blog emails are influencing Opportunities using smart lists and the Opportunity Analyzer.

Perkuto is offering free, 14-day trials. Let us know what you think in the comments below: