I signed up for a trial with Constant Contact yesterday because of your RSS to Email help page that showed up when I checked to make sure you offered this feature. After signing up for this trial, I found that your help document didn't match anything in your system. I've now noticed that much of your published help content refers to earlier versions of your tool. After reading many many community posts asking about RSS to Email, I've learned this is no longer a supported feature in Constant Contact.
Why not? I run an RSS to Email weekly newsletter in mailchimp with a 40 to 50% open rate, so while some of your comment responses to others asking this same question state this is no longer considerd email best practice, my experience does not show this to be true. I don't want to stay with mailchimp as they're glitchy. But, I also don't want to have to build this email manually every month.
Couldn't your development team just create a block or element that can be inserted into the body of an email that uses info from RSS feeds - example: a block that pulls the "Title", "excerpt", "url" of each blog post out of the RSS feed (the exact info I'd be pulling manually to create a manual version of this newsletter every week) and then inserts these components into the email without any of whatever is causing RSS feeds to be problematic these days? RSS feeds might be a problem, but the content they contain is just basic stuff so just don't insert the RSS feed as a whole but instead code the element to pull the basic content that is available in the RSS feed. Your development team should be able to create something like this quite easily.
Here is your RSS to Email help document. You mentioned in one of your responses to someone else that there might be an option using custom code. Maybe get your support or development team to rewrite this help doc to show how to use your custom HTML code options to do something similar? Maybe they could even write the HTML code into this help document along with detailed instructions for creating an email using this code (step by step instructions for your new email editor please as currently I can't follow much in your help documentation as it shows a totally different interaface) and then just highlight the spot where people need to put their RSS Feed URL to make this custom code function. In addition to a spot where an RSS feed url can be placed, you'd just need a few formatting options.
I really don't want to go back to a manually created weekly email when it should be easy to code something that would autopopulate the new blog content and automatically distribute the email weekly on a set schedule. Based on the number of people asking about this, having an automated way to notify subscribers of new blog posts is something many are looking for.
This is actually a deal breaker for me, which is too bad as I've already spent a day setting up lists and segments only to find I can't use this account the way I had been led to believe was possible by your own documentation. If you can tell me a way, step by step, that I can automate my blog to email distribution, then I'll sign-up for a paid account, otherwise I'll be looking elsewhere.
