If you followed an older tutorial and went looking for “RSS campaign” under Create Campaign, it is not there any more. In Mailchimp today the feature is an automation: Automations, then Flow templates, then Share blog updates via RSS in the Nurture leads section. The setup takes about ten minutes. What usually goes wrong is the other end: a WordPress feed that sends no images, or sends the whole article when you wanted a summary.
We wrote the first version of this guide in 2018. This is the 2026 rewrite. It covers both ways to get blog posts into a Mailchimp email, the merge tags that control the layout, and the WordPress changes that make the feed worth sending.
Two ways to do it, and which one you need
| You want | Use | How it sends |
|---|---|---|
| An email that goes out by itself whenever you publish | The RSS automation | Daily, weekly or monthly, and only when there is something new |
| Your latest posts inside a newsletter you write and send yourself | Feedblock merge tags | Whenever you send. The posts are pulled in at send time |
Most people searching for “Mailchimp RSS” want the first. Most people who already send a monthly newsletter are better served by the second, because it adds a “latest from the blog” section without creating another email for subscribers to receive.
Set up the RSS automation
These are Mailchimp’s own steps, from its help article Share Your Blog Posts with Mailchimp:
- Click Automations, then Flow templates.
- In the Nurture leads section, click Share blog updates via RSS.
- Enter a campaign name, choose an audience, and click Begin.
- Enter your feed address. For a WordPress site that is your domain followed by
/feed/. - Choose when it sends: every day, every week or every month, and at what time.
- Tick Resize RSS feed images to fit template if your feed includes images.
- Design the email, then start the automation.
Two details from that page are easy to miss. Mailchimp asks you to publish a post at least three hours before the send time, or it may not be picked up until the next run. And the image resizing does not work in Outlook, so keep the images in your feed small to begin with.
The merge tags that build the email
Merge tags are placeholders Mailchimp replaces with content from your feed. If they are missing, Mailchimp says the email is delivered with no content, which is the most common “it sent a blank email” problem.
The simplest version is one tag that prints your recent posts with summaries:
*|RSS:POSTS_HTML|*For control over the layout, loop over the posts yourself:
*|RSSITEMS:|*
<h2><a href="*|RSSITEM:URL|*">*|RSSITEM:TITLE|*</a></h2>
*|RSSITEM:IMAGE|*
*|RSSITEM:CONTENT|*
<a href="*|RSSITEM:URL|*">Read the post</a>
*|END:RSSITEMS|**|RSSITEM:CONTENT|* is the summary. *|RSSITEM:CONTENT_FULL|* is the whole article. *|RSSITEM:IMAGE|* only shows something if your feed has an image in a media:content tag, which a standard WordPress feed does not. The full list is in Mailchimp’s RSS merge tags reference.
Latest posts inside a regular newsletter
To drop your recent posts into an email you are writing by hand, add a text or code block and use feedblock tags. They work in any email type, and Mailchimp fills them in when the email is sent:
*|FEEDBLOCK:https://www.example.com/feed/|*
*|FEEDITEMS:[$count=3]|*
<h3><a href="*|FEEDITEM:URL|*">*|FEEDITEM:TITLE|*</a></h3>
*|FEEDITEM:CONTENT_TEXT|*
*|END:FEEDITEMS|*
*|END:FEEDBLOCK|*Change the address to your own feed and $count to the number of posts you want. Leave the count out and you get five. Mailchimp documents these in Feedblock RSS Merge Tags.
Because the posts are pulled in at send time, send yourself a test first. A feed that is slow or broken at that moment leaves a gap in the email.
Fix the WordPress feed first
Mailchimp can only send what your feed contains. Open yoursite.com/feed/ in a browser and check four things before you design anything.
1. Images
WordPress does not put a post’s featured image in its feed. We checked our own feed while writing this and found no image tags in it at all. Without one, *|RSSITEM:IMAGE|* prints nothing.
This snippet adds the featured image to each feed item in the form Mailchimp reads. It goes in a small plugin or your child theme’s functions.php:
add_action( 'rss2_ns', function () {
echo 'xmlns:media="http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/" ';
} );
add_action( 'rss2_item', function () {
$id = get_post_thumbnail_id();
if ( ! $id ) {
return;
}
$img = wp_get_attachment_image_src( $id, 'medium' );
if ( $img ) {
printf(
'<media:content url="%s" width="%d" height="%d" medium="image" />' . "\n",
esc_url( $img[0] ),
(int) $img[1],
(int) $img[2]
);
}
} );It uses the medium image size on purpose. A full-size photo in an email is slow to load and, as noted above, Outlook will not shrink it for you.
2. Summary or full text
In WordPress, go to Settings, then Reading, and find “For each post in a feed, include”. Choose Excerpt if the email should tease the post and send people to your site. Choose Full text only if you want the whole article in the inbox. If your excerpts are cut off mid-sentence, write a manual excerpt on each post.
3. How many posts
The same screen has “Syndication feeds show the most recent”. The default is 10. A monthly email from a site that publishes daily needs a higher number here, or older posts fall out of the feed before they are sent.
4. One topic instead of everything
Every WordPress category and tag has its own feed. Add /feed/ to its address, for example yoursite.com/category/news/feed/. Use that address in Mailchimp to send only one kind of post, such as news without the job listings.
Then run the address through the W3C Feed Validation Service. Mailchimp’s own advice for a feed address it will not accept is to run it through a validator, and the validator names the line that is wrong.
When it does not work
- The email arrived empty. The merge tags are missing from the design. Add
*|RSS:POSTS_HTML|*or anRSSITEMSblock. - Nothing was sent. There was no new post since the last send, or the post was published less than three hours before the send time.
- No images. Your feed has no
media:contenttag. See the snippet above. - Images are huge in Outlook. Mailchimp’s resizing does not apply there. Send a smaller image size in the feed.
- Mailchimp will not accept the feed address. Validate it. A security plugin or a cache that blocks or alters
/feed/is a common cause.
What this guide does not cover
We have not tested every Mailchimp plan or the newest email builder against these tags, and Mailchimp moves its menus more often than it updates old screenshots. Where this guide and Mailchimp’s help pages disagree, trust the help pages; we have linked the ones we used. The WordPress side is the part we know best, because it is the part we work on every day.
Want the WordPress side done for you?
We set up the feed for a fixed $500: featured images in the right size, clean excerpts, the category feeds you need, and a test send against your own Mailchimp template so you can see it working before we finish. You keep control of your Mailchimp account and what you send.
Tell us about your site and we will reply with what it needs.
Frequently asked questions
Where did RSS campaigns go in Mailchimp?
They are under Automations now. Open Automations, then Flow templates, and choose “Share blog updates via RSS” in the Nurture leads section.
What is my WordPress RSS feed address?
Your domain followed by /feed/. A category feed is the category address followed by /feed/.
Why are there no images in my Mailchimp RSS email?
A standard WordPress feed does not include the featured image. Mailchimp’s image tag reads a media:content tag, which you have to add to the feed.
Can I send only some of my posts?
Yes. Use a category or tag feed address instead of the main one.
Can I add blog posts to a normal newsletter instead of an automatic one?
Yes. Use feedblock merge tags in a code block. Mailchimp fills in your latest posts when the email is sent.