How To Feed Your WordPress Blog Posts By Tag In Your ActiveCampaign Template

We’re working on optimizing some email journeys for a client that promotes multiple types of products on their WordPress site. Each of the ActiveCampaign email templates that we’re building is highly customized to the product it’s promoting and providing content on.

Rather than rewriting much of the content that’s already well-produced and formatted on the WordPress site, we integrated their blog into their email templates. However, their blog encompasses multiple products so we had to filter the feed for each of the templates by only integrating blog posts that are tagged by the product.

This points to the importance of tagging your articles! By tagging your articles, it’s much easier to query and integrate your content to other platforms like email.

Your WordPress Tag Feed

If you didn’t realize it already, WordPress has an incredibly robust feed system. You may think that your site is limited to just your single blog’s feed. It’s not… you can easily produce category-based or even tag-based feeds for your site. Our client in this example is Royal Spa, and the two templates created are for Hot Tubs and for Float Tanks.

Their blog posts are not categorized by product type, so we utilized tags instead. The permalink path for accessing your feed is your blog URL followed by the slug tag and your actual tag. So, for Royal Spa:

• Royal Spa Blog: https://www.royalspa.com/blog/
• Royal Spa Articles Tagged for Hot Tubs: https://www.royalspa.com/blog/tag/hot-tubs/
• Royal Spa Articles Tagged for Float Tanks: https://www.royalspa.com/blog/tag/float-tank/

In order to get the Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feed for each of those, you can just simply add /feed to the URL:

• Royal Spa Blog Feed: https://www.royalspa.com/blog/feed/
• Royal Spa Articles Tagged for Hot Tubs: https://www.royalspa.com/blog/tag/hot-tubs/feed/
• Royal Spa Articles Tagged for Float Tanks: https://www.royalspa.com/blog/tag/float-tank/feed/

You can also do this by querystring:

• Royal Spa Blog Feed: https://www.royalspa.com/blog/?feed=rss2
• Royal Spa Articles Tagged for Hot Tubs: https://www.royalspa.com/blog/?tag=hot-tubs&feed=rss2
• Royal Spa Articles Tagged for Float Tanks: https://www.royalspa.com/blog/?tag=float-tank&feed=rss2

You can even query multiple tags this way:

• Royal Spa Articles Tagged for Float Tanks and Hot Tubs: https://www.royalspa.com/blog/?tag=float-tank,hot-tub&feed=rss2

If you are using categories, you can utilize the category slugs (including subcategory) as well as tags… here’s an example:

http://yourdomain.com/category/subcategory/tag/tagname/feed

You can see why this is so useful as you repurpose content for other mediums. We encourage all of our clients to include their articles in their newsletters, promotional emails, and even their transactional emails. The additional content can enrich their email, having several benefits:

• Some mailbox providers’ inbox placement algorithms appreciate more textual content in emails.
• The additional articles are highly relevant to the topic, increasing engagement with your subscribers.
• While it may not direct your subscribers to the call-to-action and primary purpose of your email, it can provide additional value and reduce your subscriber churn.
• You invested in that content, so why not repurpose it to increase its return on investment?

Add RSS Feed To ActiveCampaign

In ActiveCampaign, it’s simple to add an RSS Feed:

1. Open ActiveCampaign and navigate to Campaigns > Manage Templates.
2. Open an existing template (by clicking on it), Import a Template, or click Create A Template.
3. One the right-hand menu, select Insert > Blocks > RSS Feed.
4. This opens the RSS Feed Builder window where you can enter your Feed address and preview the feed:

5. Customize your RSS Feed. In this case, I just want a simple linked title and short description:

6. You’ll now see the Feed in your Email Template, where you can modify the layout as you wish.

The best part of this methodology is that there’s now no need to repeatedly update content in emails and journeys as you continue to publish new content on your blog.

Disclosure: Martech Zone is an affiliate of ActiveCampaign and my firm assists clients with advanced WordPress development, integrations, and marketing automation strategy and execution. Contact us at Highbridge.