If you’ve sent an email newsletter in the past then you probably know the laborious process that can be involved. For some applications a unique build or manual update of a newsletter template each time a message needs to be sent is essential. Some campaigns are less like newsletters and more like ‘updates’ being sporadic and unique, featuring varied content and copy that needs to be written up more like a personal message to users reading it.

Fairly often though that’s not the case, in fact nowadays in order to remain socially connected many companies’ sites contain a news feed where they publish articles about themselves, their industry in general or anything else that might be eye catching to their particular audience. In order to ensure that people know this news you’re providing is always updating it’s good to have a “Subscribe to our newsletter� function on the site to on board people right when they’re there enjoying it. If you continue to provide information like that which the user originally found interesting then you can expect them to return.

So how do you aggregate those news stories into an email to send to all your lovely new subscribers? Well as I mentioned above there’s the manual approach. Simply handpicking what content and links you’d like in your email and placing them into a pre designed template. This can take a few rounds to perfect and get approved, even when working on a template that only has certain editable fields. When you know you have the flexibility to edit it yourself every time then you surely will. Wouldn’t it be better to just do that once though? Basically crafting a template, approving it amongst your team and then just knowing that you can populate it with data and send a newsletter whenever you like, no messing around with decisions on final copy or imagery each time, just tell it to update from your newsfeeds and hit send.

You’ll be pleased to know this is indeed possible and in fact there are a few services out there that can achieve it for you, from the absolute basic down to the highly customisable. I’m going to mention just a couple of these services in detail but there really are quite a bunch out there for example:

• Feedburner
• Mailchimp
• Campaign Monitor
• Aweber
• Feedblitz

So let’s start with the top of my list, Feedburner, this is probably the simplest of the bunch. It’s also the cheapest of the bunch however coming to a grand total of £0 so it’s worth looking into if all you need is simplicity. Many of you will probably already know Feedburner as a simple way of turning your raw rss data into an easily viewable feed page for viewing in almost any browser, desktop or mobile.

What it can also do however is redeploy this neat html into an email and send it to a list of addresses for you. Now this is really as simple as it gets and you won’t get much customisation here at all. You can change colours of headers and lines, adjust image sizes and positions and such but other than that the look of your mail is pretty limited. There’s no custom templating here, the best you can do is have a custom subject line with each one you send.

The reason I mention Feedburner though is that it’s a “does what it says� option. Not much style or grace but very functional. If you have users who just want to get your latest updates and don’t care too much about stylish, designed newsletters then it’ll do for you.

There’s two others on my list which will fully automate for you, as in; you choose a template set up your feed and intervals and they’ll send emails automatically with new news at those intervals. Those are Aweber and Feedblitz and I’ve never used them before but the developer community does seem to approve of them so they’re worth looking into if that’s what you’re after.

The final couple on my list are mass mailer platforms that we use very often, which have both now introduced the ability to populate emails from RSS data and they are MailChimp and Campaign Monitor. We actually use these for various clients and they’re really the two leading platforms in the mass email field. The options for customisation are almost unlimited allowing you to create some really dazzling emails. I don’t want to get too much into the art of html email design in this article but it’s pretty archaic work thanks to the myriad of email clients like outlook, mac mail, hotmail (now being replaced by outlook.com by the way, take a look), gmail, etc… and you have to create a template that deals with the little quirks of every one.

Campaign Monitor and MailChimp (from here on CM and MC) make it really easy to create customisable emails once you’ve created your template by each having a huge set of inclusion tags. For example you could create a block with an editable image and editable text block below it. Then users in CM and MC could create a new campaign and go into a design view where they choose an image and type in some text, thus updating the template for that new campaign. But wait, that involves the user having to create the copy, find the image, basically create the whole email from scratch. What if they already have all this data in their news feed? Well CM and MC have tags for RSS inclusion as well, what this will basically allow you to do is include tags that read your RSS feed and place specific content from it in certain blocks. So the first story excerpt with the first story image for example.

The main thing that these two systems do really well is automating this process within these stylish templates. So you can tell it to send every day, week, month etc. Even every first Monday at 9am if you like. What’s more, they’re intelligent about it, so if they read the feed and find it hasn’t changed since the last time an email was sent then they won’t send another one, to prevent spamming your valued readers.

So there you have it, a brief overview of the ways you can make life easier by automating your newsletter emails. You can get even trickier with it too, how about outputting an RSS feed of your events calendar and having latest events pulled into the sidebar of your email too. The options are many and it makes life much easier when that newsletter time of the month comes around. Have you ever automated your newsletters? I’m sure there are other tried and tested methods too, let us know in the comments below if you have any thoughts.