Here is how you can use RSVPMaker’s built-in email utilities to send a weekly newsletter built around your upcoming events and recent blog posts. You can send to a MailChimp mailing list or to the members of your own website (if you provide user accounts).
I’ll be hosting a webinar on these techniques Weds. July 20, 2016 at 4 pm EDT.
The newsletters will look something like this when they arrive in the recipient’s inbox:
In a separate tutorial, I showed how to create an email broadcast built around an individual event or blog post. Here the idea is to set up a template for a broadcast that will go out on a regular schedule, including some standard elements.
The RSVPMaker events post that serves as the basis for this newsletter consists of a couple of WordPress shortcodes, placeholders for the dynamic content to be included. In the WordPress visual editor, the rsvpmaker_upcoming shortcode is represented as rounded blue box that you can click on for a popup menu of options. Here, I’ve set it up to pull only the webinar events off the RSVPMaker site (since most of the other events are demos).
The other shortcode displays headlines and excerpts from recent blog posts.
If I were to preview the email with just those settings, here is what I would see. The subject line would be the title of my post, RSVPMaker Roundup.
To send this out on a schedule, I need to set the options in the Scheduled Email section.
Here I have specified that this newsletter should go out every week to the RSVPMaker email list, on Wednesday at 10 am. Also, I want a preview sent to me 2 hours prior to the scheduled broadcast (a reminder of any last-minute changes I might need to make).
The “Test for” option allows me to set a condition, such as that the email newsletter should not be sent if there are no upcoming events on the calendar.
This gives me an email newsletter that can go out week after week, always with fresh content. However, I might also want to highlight specific items or add some particular customization to a specific week’s broadcast. The Editor’s Note section allows me to either enter a note or specify a blog post to be featured in the next scheduled email broadcast.
This also modifies the subject line, with either the title of the featured post or the headline of the editor’s note appended to the email subject line.
Example: RSVPMaker Roundup – Wednesday Webinar on RSVPMaker + MailChimp
The settings shown above would give me an email newsletter that looks like this. This note and headline would only be applied to the one specified week’s email.
Here is an example of a newsletter with a featured blog post included up top (note that the featured post is not repeated in the “From the Blog” section generated by the recent posts shortcode.
This combination has served me well, and I hope you can also put it to good use.