Fix: Mailchimp RSS Feed Not Working for Blogger.

A few years ago, I released a WordPress tutorial aimed at helping individuals, and small businesses automate emailing their latest blog post to their Mailchimp email distribution list.

If you’re like most individuals or small businesses, especially mom-and-pop shops, then IT is likely to be perceived as a luxury rather than a necessity.

Most people launching into their dream of a business — side hustles, part-time, full-time, and all things in between — are solely focused on doing the actions to bring value and serve their customers while making cash register ring! Ka-ching!

Nevertheless, one of the hidden secrets to growing a business or project is harnessing the power of automation to reach, connect, and serve more people with a value-add experience.

While my aforementioned tutorial provides instructional steps integrating WordPress and Mailchimp, this tutorial really applies to any blog platform with RSS capability.

It was brought to my attention that Mailchimp could not send emails using excerpts or short descriptions from Blogger, a popular blogging platform used as a starter for several bloggers and influencers, and its RSS feed.

The good news is that this is not true, and you must ensure that your Blogger account settings are set correctly.

It took all of about 10 minutes to figure out. I made sure that Mailchimp’s merge tag for RSS content was inserted (see image below), and I also reviewed the Blogger RSS feed (e.g., http://yourdomain.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default) to ensure the description tag was present and contained content.

In this case, I identified that the given Blogger RSS feed contained blog posts with description XML tags and full blog posts.

That’s when it dawned on me that it could be a Blogger setting that was causing all content to be emailed, which made for a very long email, especially considering this blogger has 2-3 posts being emailed each time.

Nevertheless, I stumbled and bumbled my way around Blogger until I found Blogger > Settings > Other > Site feed.

In short, Blogger allows for content to be viewed via RSS using the following settings:

• Full – The entire content of a page or blog post.
• Until Jump Break – The content prior to the ‘jump break’ or ‘read more.’
• Short – Approximately the first 400 characters of content.
• None – Of course, nothing!
• Custom – Allows for selecting blogs as the full option, comment feed, and per-post comment feed.

The two settings you’re likely after, especially if you write multiple posts in a day or week to email, are ‘Until Jump Break’ and ‘Short.’

I personally prefer the ‘Short’ option because I often forget to add a ‘jump break’ or ‘read more’ tag to my content.

Nevertheless, I’m happy to report that Blogger can and does allow for emailing blog content — full, read more or jump break, short, none, or custom — using Mailchimp.

If you have questions or comments or need additional technical assistance, please do not hesitate to contact us.