How to automate blog post emails via SOAP APIs

[Anonymous]

We're wanting to automate the sending of new blog posts on our Wordpress site to our blog subscribers. We're just in the process of implementing a Marketo form on the blog to capture all blog subscribers from here on. The missing part is how to send out the new blog post out in the most efficient way. We're posting weekly right now but want to ramp that up and therefore don't want to have to build a new Marketo email and send each time we put out a new post...

I know Marketo are using SOAP APIs (Raj Rjamani from Marketo confirmed in this discussion: https://community.marketo.com/MarketoDiscussionDetail?id=90650000000PjvXAAS) to automate their daily blog emails, but we need the instructions for implementing this. Is anyone - from Marketo or from another company that has set up the same thing - able to please share details for getting this set up?

Thanks,
Tara

[Anonymous]

An alternative you might consider is creating a Marketo capture form for the blog subscription. Capture the leads in Marketo, and throw in a webhook to a third-party blog service. That way the heavy-lifting is done through the third-party feed, and you shrink the custom development time significantly.

Just a consideration!


Cheers,
Edward Unthank
Marketing Operations Manager
Yesler

[Anonymous]

Hey Edward,

Your reply caught my eye.  I would love to capture leads and send RSS emails through Mailchimp, but integrate subscriber data with Marketo to indicate the lead's subscription status as well as create new lead records in marketo when someone new signs up for the blog. 

Any more direction you can provide on that?

[Kenny_Elkington]

Hey Tara,

You could do this by running a daily cron job to check for updates on the feed, and then passing the data from it as a rich text token in a scheduleCampaign call(http://developers.marketo.com/documentation/soap/schedulecampaign/).  Set up a program with a rich text my.token to replace, and then a campaign with your blog subscriber smart list to send out the email with that content.

[Anonymous]

Hey Kenny, Do you know if there is any documentation on setting this up?

[Anonymous]

^ I'm pretty sure that's the same way Marketo does it, and Digesto actually offers the blog integration as a services engagement too: http://launchpoint.marketo.com/perkuto/1248-digesto-rss-to-email-for-marketo/. Also, Hoosh mentions blog automation on their LaunchPoint listing too: http://launchpoint.marketo.com/hoosh-marketing/1181-wordpress-integration-for-marketo.

This was described in detail on the Marketo Developers Blog too: http://developers.marketo.com/blog/sending-an-email-with-dynamic-content-from-marketo-using-the-api/

[Stijn_Heijthuij]

In the past I've used Perkuto and their product was a great help. It still lacks some features for advanced customization, but the hours of work saved make up for that.

[Fab_Capodicasa3]

Hi Tara,

You can take a look at the WordPress Integration from Hoosh Marketing. The solution allows you to send automate blog updates and digests, and also build newsletters by simply tagging the posts you want to add.