Add Images to Your RSS Feed for Your MailChimp Campaign

If you don’t already have a subscription option for your posts to get emailed out, you should.  I use Mailchimp because it’s free for my number of subscribers and has great features. Speaking of which, if you haven’t already signed up for my newsletter, you should!   I have Mailchimp set up with automation so every time I post, my subscribers automatically get an email with a link.  The automation is done through WordPress’ RSS feed.

Yesterday I was setting up the same automation for a client, and realized that the RSS feed didn’t have images in it by default.  Images aren’t super important to my tips, but they were important to her blog.  And after all, she’d taken the time to find them, so why not include them.  Images make a big difference in your willingness to read a blog.

Anyway, I started researching the problem and found this plugin: Featured Images in RSS for Mailchimp & Other Email I installed it and chose the image size I wanted to use in the settings, and viola!  I had images for my Mailchimp newsletters!  I love plugins that just work without a lot of settings to figure out.

Be sure to update your Mailchimp campaign so it uses the RSS merge tag

*|RSSITEM:IMAGE|*

It’s not included when you’re using the automatic setup, so you’ll need to use the custom code.

Here’s the full RSS code I used if you want to use the same:
*|RSSITEMS:|*
*|RSSITEM:IMAGE|*

*|RSSITEM:TITLE|*

By *|RSSITEM:AUTHOR|* on *|RSSITEM:DATE|* *|RSSITEM:CONTENT_FULL|* Read in browser » *|RSSITEM:TWITTER|* *|END:RSSITEMS|*

Recent Articles:

*|RSS:RECENT|*

Note, if your images don’t show up right away, be sure to check if you have a cache that needs to be refreshed, but mine worked right away.

And along these lines, if you’re not using Jetpack’s Publize or another way to automatically post to your social media, you should be!

Hope this article helps. If it does, I’d love to hear about it!