Empowering Blog Subscribers with Content Options and Schedule Control

Hopefully most people coming across this post have already read Infusionsoft’s 3 Part Series on their transition from Feedburner to Maven RSS to Email. This is a short series of video tutorials showing the step-by-step configuration inside Infusionsoft, as well as the Mavens Membership area for allowing your website visitors to select the blog categories they wish to subscribe to as well as controlling the frequency they receive blog updates.

Part 1 of 3 – Infusionsoft Setup (Webform Settings)

Part 2 – MM Setup (Frequency/Schedule Control)

Part 3 of 3 – MM Setup (Category Selection)

Part 1 of 3 – Infusionsoft Setup (Webform Settings) Video Transcript Hey guys, this is Jarrod Morris at Marketing Mavens. Wanted to do a quick tutorial for all of our RSS to email customers and potential customers. Many times I get asked two very common questions, and that is: is there any possible way to let subscribers subscribe only to a particular category as opposed to all of my blog posts and the answer is most definitely yes. I will show you how to do this today. And the other question is how do we control frequency… and out of the box, Maven RSS to email already allows you to do immediately, or to set a schedule whether that’s certain days a week, one day a week, one day of the month, a couple times a month. It’s really quite flexible. But what I want to do in the video today is show the configuration of allowing the subscriber to choose the frequency, for example: Joe may like the daily email because he’s just eating your blog alive, where as Mary may be pleased with a weekly email with a digest of what you wrote the previous seven days.

There are many options available and we’re gonna go through setting that up. This part one video is going to cover primarily just the Infusionsoft setup and then in a separate video we’ll cover what needs to be done over inside the Mavens membership. I am sitting inside the campaign builder here, I’m going to edit my campaign, and obviously right now you can see there’s really nothing to go out because this isn’t on automated sequence, it’s all triggered via the API at the time the post is published. So, nothing here more than just showing you the web form that you would build for subscribers to opt in.

So first of all, pretty straight forward… Where do you want to receive these updates, your first name and email, what are you interested in reading about, these are blog categories. And also how often you wish to receive updates, then go ahead and “follow blog” that’s out submit button. Real quick, you do not have to let people subscribe to categories, this is for people who already made that decision that they’d like that ability. Don’t feel like you absolutely need to, if you blog a lot then you wouldn’t want someone to subscribe to a category that you rarely post in. So this is going to depend on your blogging frequency, then you also don’t need to let subscribers choose. This is all an optional thing, we’re just trying to equip our users with the functionality and flexibility that Infusionsoft offers to give their company, customers and prospects the best user experience possible. So everything in this video is optional, not mandatory by any means when you’re setting up the plug-in.

So lets take a look at our options here, I’m going to start from the bottom and work upwards. So the first thing, I’ve created three options, you may choose two, you may not let them choose at all. But what I have here is set to immediately, which is basically when the posted is published, once a week, so they will receive a digest every Friday of posts that they haven’t been emailed about in the past. Or you can set this to once a month, for example you could do the last day in each month, it’s up to you to determine this. This right here is not a setting by any means, it’s just a label to give your blog subscribers a little more detail of what that looks like if they choose that option.

Now if you look at the actions, the only thing I’m doing is applying a tag and that’s all that needs to be done. So, RSS to email is set to immediate updates, this is set to RSS to email weekly updates, RSS to email monthly updates and you “save”. So if you want to give your subscribers the option to select frequency, that’s all that needs to be done here within Infusionsoft. With the next option here, we added a few check boxes and you can see if they only are interested in the category “web secrets” when they check this box they get that tag. And the same is true with Infusionsoft tips and tricks and so on, so regardless of how many categories you have you can do all of that.

So with this code – obviously everyone knows how to do this, you’re going to get the java script or HTML or HTML code un styled if you have a web guy who’s going to brand the form and make it look like your website. You can copy this code, and you’re probably going to put that on the sidebar of where your blogposts are read. So if you’ve got a post sidebar, if you’re in wordpress, you’re a blogger or whatever.. you’re going to want to give them the opportunity to subscribe via email, via webform, to your blog. So that’s pretty much it on the Infusionsoft end, I’ll see you here in a second in video part 2 where we jump over to the Mavens membership area and what needs to be built out there.

Part 2 – MM Setup (Frequency/Schedule Control) Video Transcript Jarrod Morris with Marketing Mavens here to show you part 2 of tutorial here, this part here is going to cover the Mavens membership configuration in conjunction with Infusionsoft that you saw over in part one as far as letting subscribers choose their own frequency.

I’m going to jump into this and do a quick example. So, I’m going to say for the blog name: MM for Marketing Mavens, subscribers don’t see this, it really is for you’re internal labeling and identification. So I’m going to call this “immediate updates” example (MM – Immediate Updates). And then put in our feed url. And then the tag, if you remember from part one video is “immediate updates” when they subscribe if they chose that.

So I would go on after this step and create my email, and all the same steps as far as activating it and getting that all set up. Basically what you want to do is, click yes I want to send this out when the post is made and then choose “immediately” then save the work, but do not activate it just yet.

Then we’ll come back to RSS to email and you’ll see I have two accounts, where I had one before and you can see “auto email” is selected, it’s not active yet and has not sent anything yet. So I am going to do this again, “create new.” This one will be (MM – Weekly Updates) then copy the feed url then choose the weekly updates tag, then save. When I go over to “activate” now what I am going to do; when I told them on my webform in that previous video that I was going to send it to them every Friday, we’ll say 9am then we’ll save our work.

Then go back to our account level, and now you can see we have three and all we need now is our monthly digest. So we’ll name this (MM – Monthly Updates) put in the feed url, select my monthly updates tag and save the work. Then go to “activate” select yes, choose “day of month” then choose which day of the month. Then, save work.

Now taking a glance back at the account level, all three of these accounts are basically sending the exact feed url, however they basically have identified different tags that are going to determine the schedule that we determined. So the immediate gets the immediate schedule, the weekly tag gets the weekly schedule and the monthly tag gets the monthly schedule we set.

So that is how you configure within the Mavens membership area for the ability for subscribers to choose their own frequency at which they receive blog updates from you.

In our next video we’ll be going over how to configure Mavens membership to allow blog subscribers to choose a specific category and categories they’d like to subscribe to.

Part 3 of 3 – MM Setup (Category Selection) Video Transcript This is part three of the Maven RSS to email tutorial on how to allow blog subscribers to select both the frequency at which they receive blog updates from the plug-in as well as subscribing to a specific blog category. This video is on selecting a specific blog category and how to configure that in Maven RSS to email.

Hopefully you’ve already seen part 1 and part 2, so let’s go ahead and jump right in. I’m going to show you an example. Our website is build on wordpress, about 90% of our users are on wordpress right now so that’s what I am going to go ahead and show. So now I’ve gone to blog, I’m going to click on category, you can see our url structure and depending on your settings yours may be slightly different.. Then type in feed from there, you will be able to see the posts that have been written under the Infusionsoft category. Obviously Infusionsoft users are our audience, although they may not be yours ofcoarse.

So you would copy that feed url, then “create new”. This will be similar to the last video, I am going to preference this with “MM – Infusionsoft Category”, then we put in the feed url, we’ve selected these people who have shown interest in subscribing to Infusionsofts tips and tricks and then click save. Then on the activate schedule this is where you’ll determine however frequently you want to send, could be immediately, could be certain days of the week.

Now keep in mind, what we did earlier in part 2 was allowing them to choose how often they wanted their updates. Immediate updates, monthly updates, weekly updates. Now if you’re going to allow subscribers to choose both categories they subscribe to as well as how often they receive it, just if you’ve got four categories and 3 options for how often, you’re going to need to set up twelves of these things to account for every combination available. So you’re going to take the total options in each scenario, multiply them together and that’s how you’ll many you should have.

Hopefully you’ve enjoyed this tutorial, I think it empowers the subscriber, it will help you avoid spam complaints because people are getting what they want when they want it and that’s always a good thing.