By Utilizing data feeds from RSS.app with NiftyImages allows you easily show real time content in your email campaigns without any coding or IT resources. Create custom designed images using feeds from hundreds of news site, social networks and even custom feeds from your website/store.
This blog post will show you how to create a feed of your company Instagram account.
You have complete control over the design and even the ability to personalize your feeds using subscriber data from your email service provider.
Note that you will need to sign up directly with RSS.app to build your own feeds and utilize their paid plans to increase the amount of feeds you can create or change the refresh rate that content is updated.
Creating Your First Instagram Feed
Go to RSS.app and create an account, then navigate to My Feeds. In the upper right corner, click on New Feed and then select Instagram RSS Feed from their template options. Now enter your Instagram URL, for example (https://www.instagram.com/niftyimages/), and click Generate.
You can then copy the URL that is provided to use inside of NiftyImages.
Setting up your Data Source in NiftyImages
Login to your NiftyImages account and click on Create Image and then select Data Sources. Add a new Data Source and select the External API option. Paste in the URL that you copied from your newly create RSS.app feed and click Next.
This will give you the results of the API Feed allowing you to select the information you wish to pull from your Instagram posts. Click on the Create List by the Item option.
Name your list(Recent Post) and then under Title on the left hand side we have mapped the #cdata-section and renamed the Mapped Field on the right to Title as well. These friendly names will be used when designing your images.
Next we mapped the Link and under Field Type on the right changed it to Click URL. This will allow us to link directly to this post from our emails.
And finally we mapped the @URL field under Media:Content, this is the Image posted to Instagram. We renamed this to Image on the right hand side.
Simply click Save List and then Save Data Source. You can then click on graphic below to go directly to our editor.
Building Custom Designs
For this example we used the image below as our background, though you can use any background you want or start using a custom image size/color.
To add the newly mapped content, click on the Data Source button located on the bottom left of the Elements panel. Find your newly saved Data Source and click the list to find the mapped fields. In the example below we centered the Image and modified Text color and size to fit the image.
After saving this image we will give you an Image URL that you can use in any email template to show the most recent Instagram post in your email campaigns.
Based on your subscription level to RSS.app, the content will refresh at different rates.
More Options.
You will notice under the Options tab we give you an example to use the same Image URL you created to capture the different posts from Instagram. Follow the examples to show post 2, 3, 4, etc. using ni_item_number=
Here is the same image URL, getting Post #2.
Here is the same image URL, getting Post #3.
These same techniques can be used to show recent posts from Twitter, YouTube, even custom generated feeds using RSS.app.
Here is a live feed from YouTube, that is also personalized with the subscriber’s name.
Please reach out to us with any questions you may have.