Rather read than watch?
Below is a transcript of the Chatbot Marketing Training Course by Customers.ai and Isaac Rudansky, of Adventure Media. Get the full course here and become a messenger marketing master.
Howdy chatbot fans and welcome back.
In this section, we’re going to briefly talk about RSS feeds in Customers.ai, how to master them, how to use them.
This is going to be a one lecture section because it’s really simple, as RSS indicates.
So first of all, what is RSS? RSS stands for either Rich Site Summary; Really Simple Syndication.
Many you are familiar with that. If you use a service like Feedly, or you use one of these news aggregators, and you’re constantly getting updates from the blogs that you want to read about, they’re typically using RSS format.
It’s a data markup, which allows users to access updates, and update is the operant word here to online content in a standardized computer readable format.
That’s what RSS feeds do. Your most typical example of that is if you have a blog on your website that gets updated periodically, whether it’s every day or a few days, whenever you upload a blog post, you’re able to grab your RSS feed.
And if you have a WordPress site or a Shopify site or any typical back-end CMS platform, you have an RSS feed to tap into, you grab the URL of that feed.
It’s not a URL you would ever share with other people because it’s not what displays the actual content, it’s just a structured data that tells the engines what data is there, what posts are there, what pages are there, and what has been updated.
So let me go on to Customers.ai. And let me show you how to make an RSS feed.
And the reason you would use them, obviously, is because if you have a blog that’s updated, you want to always push a notification to your subscribers when there’s a new piece of content.
Up until Customers.ai and chatbots, you would do this as a marketer over email.
If you update a new blog post, you would have it either automatically or you would manually send out to all your contacts.
‘There’s a new blog post for you to read. Here’s the — here’s a snippet and here’s a link to read the rest of the story.’
Well, that’s fine, but the problem is email doesn’t really work that well anymore to do this, because there’s such aggressive spam filters, people have a whole different attitude about emails from companies than they used to.
And when you do this through Customers.ai, when you send these updates through Facebook Messenger, it’s so much more engaging and you’re reaching your audience where they, where they are spending their time, where they want to get the content, and again, on their own schedule.
So let’s jump into Customers.ai and let’s set up an RSS feed.
So we go into our marketing and automation section of Customers.ai, and we choose the RSS blaster.
And of course, like — at the end of the day, the number one goal of your online journal is to get traffic to your site, that’s what every single marketer wants, that’s what we’re trying to do.
The RSS blaster ensures that happens ten times more effectively if not more than email.
Go into your RSS blaster and you click ‘New RSS blaste’r.
Before toggling our RSS blaster to active, I’m going to name this and I’m going to call this, let’s say, ‘CNN’s feed RSS’. And under RSS feed, you need to go and get a URL.
So getting the URL for an RSS feed is really easy.
So I’m just going to Google ‘CNN RSS feed’, and I could really just copy this URL right here.
This is the RSS feed, but I want to show you that you can get some different types of RSS feeds. When I click on the top link, there’s a bunch of different RSS feeds that I can get.
So I could either get just the top stories, world news, US news, business.
So let’s say I want to get CNN’s business RSS feed, so I’m just going to copy that link, okay?
And copy the link, go back to Customers.ai, paste the link — paste the link in the RSS feed — field and I have to attach an audience.
So I’m going to send this out to all contacts.
Once again, think about segmentation. In most cases, you’re going to want to send your blog updates to all your contacts.
I don’t see a reason why you would want to leave anybody out unless you have a big blog and you’re pushing lots and lots of updates.
And you might only want to send updates to people who are more engaged with your brand using, let’s say, some Net Promoter Score metrics you’ve built through previous chatbot campaigns.
But I’m going to send it out to all audiences. Once I’m ready to do that, I’m going to go ahead and click active. And that’s all you need to do, right? Now it’s saved, it’s done.
You can go back to — you just click RSS blaster to go back and you see that I have CNN’s feed RSS, it’s active.
The way this works is RSS feeds in Customers.ai will be updating every 15 minutes or so.
Now that it’s active, there’s no way to get it to happen faster or slower.
It happens on the regular RSS feed schedule.
So I’m going to open up this Facebook page here I have, I made a dummy account for Facebook. I have this dummy account made in Facebook. I’m on Adventure Media Group’s Facebook page.
And the chat blasts and the RSS that we just created is actually attached to Adventure Media’s test chatbot.
So we should see that RSS feed push a CNN update shortly.
I’m going to go over here to just open up Messenger. And here’s just this message from a different chat flow that we were building as a sample.
But if I leave this open for a little while, we should get that CNN blast. I’m going to go back to Customers.ai for a second, and we’ll check back on this in a moment.
Another really powerful technique that I wanted to let you know is you might want to create an opt-in for RSS feed subscribers.
So how do you do that?
Well, we can go back to our HTML elements. I would add a new HTML element, open up a new link to messenger, send them to a RSS feed opt-in page, right?
So I would go back to my pages, I would create a new page. I would title it ‘RSS feed opt-in’ and I would say something like, ‘do you want to opt in to our blog updates?’
And obviously, I wouldn’t — and I wouldn’t probably write it — I would probably write it in a little bit more of a smooth way, but just for the sake of showing this to you – wrong, wrong, wrong, we need to do a quick question.
So I would title the page RSS feed opt in, I would add a quick question. I would say, ‘hey there, first name, do you want to be notified when we publish a new blog post?’, right?
And I would answer this. I would make a new attribute called ‘RSS opt in’ and I would add an answer yes/no page, or no and I associate with no page, right?
That would be my — that would be my entire RSS feed opt-in process.
Wait till it saves. okay?
Now it’s saved. I’m still getting a little bit of a warning. Refresh the page, wait till it saves.
Now it saved, great. That’s my entire page. And I would go back to my HTML elements.
I would edit this element, call it ‘RSS feed opt in’. It’ll be a link and I would send it to my RSS feed opt-in page.
So I’m going to go find that under my default pages, ‘RSS feed opt-in’.
I’m going to now copy that link and put that link in my emails. I’m going to put that link in my blog post.
I’m going to put that link in the sidebar of my site, I’m going to put that link as an organic Facebook post and Twitter post, right?
I’m going to do all those things. I’m going to promote it through all my available channels.
It’ll then send people to that opt in page, and then I’m going to go back to audiences.
I’m going to create a new audience of people who opted in to my RSS feed.
So RSS feed opt in, I’m going to add a filter.
I’m going to use my custom attribute. Attribute is ‘RSS opt in’ equals ‘yes’.
Save it. It’s obviously going to be nobody on this audience right now because it’s brand new.
But then I’m going to go back to my RSS blaster. I’m going to edit it; and under this audience, I will be able to choose RSS feed opt in to use as the audience.
This way I’m only sending these RSS feed blog update blasts to people who specifically opted in. That’s another very good strategy.
So in just the last three minutes, we combined pages and HTML element, audiences and an RSS blaster to create a more sophisticated funnel where we’re catering more to the users interests.
I’m going to switch this back to all contacts to make sure that I actually get that notification.
And that’s just double check to see if we have it yet.
And here it is, sure enough, Aretha Franklin, who inspired generations with hits that symbolized black and dot, dot, dot.
And I click read more and then I get more message from that.
RSS feed tells me more about the story, she was 76. And I can click full story, I’ll get a link, press ENTER to hit send.
Click the link and I’ll be sent to the entire story on cnn.com.
So that’s a really great way to just get that blog post content, get more reader users to your website.
Just lastly before we finish off, the way to get your own blog feed is just to google search your website and say an RSS feed if you don’t get that feed, if you have an RSS feed set up.
And again, if you’re on WordPress or any of these popular CMS systems, you will have one.
You’ll get that link to your RSS feed and that’s what you’ll use in Customers.ai.
It’s the simplest, simplest part of marketing automation and Customers.ai.
It’s really, really easy setup. And it’s just one of those things where you set it and forget it.
That way whenever you update a blog you publish a blog, it’ll automatically get pushed to all the contacts on the audience that you chose, super powerful.
It’s a way to get people to actually read your content, and you will see the engagement rates and the read rates from these RSS feeds are just through the roof compared to what you’re doing now, which is basically email.
So that’s all about RSS feeds.
You now know how to set them up, you know what — you now know how to get your feed.
We double check to make sure it’s working and it’s just a beautiful, beautiful thing.
