Trigger an "RSS-style" email for updated blog via XML?

[Anonymous]

Alright team... I'm hoping this is a super easy thing that I just haven't tackled yet, but will be an easy response from you that starts with: "Hey Dummy (in a Dennis Duffy voice) - this is how you do it" I feel like it's a stretch, but it may just be because I haven't done it and can't envision how it would work. In which case, share with me, and I'll be in the know!

Goal: People go to our blog and "subscribe" (short form>added to list in MKTO). Then, whenever I update our blog... (this is where I need your help) Marketo sees the update to the XML file of the blog, and an email is triggered and sent to the list of people who have subscribed. The email itself would need to be dynamic, and feature tokens that would auto-fill based on the XML update (title of blog, etc.).

Go forth and school me! 🙂

[Anonymous]

Jen,

It's not super easy or it would have been done already...also, if it were easy, Marketo would have done it instead of relying on Feedburner (an orphaned Google product) for themselves 🙂

Marketo is lead centric, so the data for the blog post (presuming you could populate things like HTML into a token via a custom XML feed and the API) would need to be written to every lead in the database (or at the very least every lead that subscribed). You would have to do some sort of data change trigger to initiate the send if you wanted it to be sent upon publication.

I wish Marketo had a "skunkworks" team that could work on things like this for those of us who were interested...

[Josh_Hill13]

You can do this with Aweber or Mailchimp or even feedblitz. Not sure if you can setup the API to sync your sub preferences between the systems, so you might have to do it manually and direct people to the marketo unsub page.

[Anonymous]

Hi Jen,

Unfortunately it's not as easy as you're probably hoping for...and not knowing who Dennis Duffy is...I can't respond in his voice 🙂

That being said, it is possible if you're willing to roll up your sleeves and put in some work. Here is where it gets fun. Your blog subscription form will post the data submitted to Marketo, and you'll add the leads to a program.

If you're using a platform such as WordPress, you can use their API hooks to call an action every time you publish a new post. In that action, you can grab the post details (Title, URL, Excerpt, etc) and push them to Marketo in a SOAP call that would update your program's tokens. For example {{my.blog title}}. Upon successful update of the tokens, you would then use a second API call to request a campaign that would actually send the email with the token values to the program members.

For unsubscribes you could direct them to a Marketo landing page with an option to no longer receive blog posts and use this logic in your send campaign. Hope this helps!

[Alexandre_Pelle]

Hi Jen, 

We currently work with a Marketo client to build an application to pull RSS feeds and push the information to a Marketo program and therefore send automatically an email with any blog content in any given period.

We would like to hear from you as we work on this and would be happy to help you if you still need that functionality. 

Please reach out to me (alex@perkuto.com) if you are interested.

[Josh_Hill13]

This is now a dream come true with Digesto - completely integrated with Marketo.
http://perkuto.com/blog/marketing-automation/marketo-rss-to-email-tool-launches-at-marketo-summit-2014

[Michelle_Tizian]

Yup I'm also using Digesto and it works for us.  Our web developers couldn't come up with a solution that equals Digesto, plus it's affordable.