How to Access Protected Content through RSS Feeds

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Are you using an RSS feed to have ActiveCampaign monitor and send an email when a new (protected) post is published? Maybe you simply need a way of sharing protected content using an RSS feed? Here’s how you can achieve that with Memberium for ActiveCampaign…

As an example use case, we’ll talk about how to trigger an ActiveCampaign email campaign whenever your RSS feed is updated (RSS Triggered campaign).

RSS Triggered ActiveCampaign email campaign

Here are the steps we’ll take:

  1. Turn OFF the “Disable RSS Feeds” option
  2. Create a page in WordPress and put the [memb_feedurl] shortcode on the page
  3. Create a non-admin test user which has an ActiveCampaign record (syncs with ActiveCampaign)
  4. Apply the correct membership level/tags access to the test user, so that the test user is able to access the posts you are about to share through the RSS feed. In other words, this user needs to be able to view the protected content/posts.
  5. Copy the URL that was generated from [memb_feedurl] and paste it in ActiveCampaign RSS trigger element in the email

First of all, we need to make sure that the “Disable RSS Feed” option in Memberium => Settings => Site Security tab is turned OFF.

“Disable RSS Feeds” option

Once we’ve turned that OFF, we’ll need to generate an RSS link we can use as the RSS feed link in ActiveCampaign for the email campaign. In order to do that, we can use [memb_feedurl] shortcode. There are two other RSS feed related shortcodes: [memb_reset_feedurl] and [memb_is_feed] but we won’t need those two in this case.

We’ll now create a page in WordPress which we’ll use just for the [memb_feedurl] shortcode. Of course, you can put it on any of your existing pages. On the page, we’ll put the [memb_feedurl] shortcode.

Once we publish the page, we need to create a test user in order to be able to get the RSS feed link from the shortcode. The important part is that you’ll need to create a test user for each membership levels you have and then generate a link using the shortcode. In case you have protected specific post with just tags and not membership level, then you’ll need to apply those tags to the test user as well so that he is able to access that particular post.

The membership of the test user should never change as it’s not a paying account per se. Its only purpose is to provide us with the link to use in ActiveCampaign.

For example, if you have 3 membership levels (Free, Premium, Gold), you’ll create 3 test users. The first test user will only have access to Free, the second one only access to Premium, and the third one access to Gold membership level. In that way, you’ll have 3 different RSS feed links generated from [memb_feedurl] that you can use in ActiveCampaign in order to trigger posts that are protected for specific membership level.

Think of it as one of your test users represents ANY of your actual users who have access to that specific membership levels. So, instead of generating RSS feed link for each one of your users, you would basically create just one test user and use that link. That’s because your test user with Free membership level will have the same kind of access as any other Free membership level user.

Once we have created test user, we can now visit the page on which we’ve put [memb_feedurl] shortcode and we should see a link that looks similar to this one: https://example.com/feed/?rss_user=xxx where “xxx” will be a randomly generated value.

An example output of the [memb_feedurl] shortcode
Since we have successfully generated an RSS feed URL, we can paste it in ActiveCampaign email campaign. Let’s say you have 3 membership levels (Free, Premium, and Gold). You’ll be having 3 separate email campaigns in ActiveCampaign and you’ll put a different RSS feed link from each of your test users.

For example, the first email campaign will be used to send emails to Free membership level users only. In that campaign, you’ll put the link you’ve generated with the test user that has access to Free membership level. For the second email campaign, you’ll use the link you’ve generated with test user that has access to Premium membership level. And for the third email campaign, you’ll use the link generated with test user that has access to Gold membership level.

The first step is to select the “RSS Feed” element and then paste the link from [memb_feedurl] in the field
Once you add the link and publish the campaign, your users should be able to access protected posts through the RSS feed triggered email campaign you’ll be sending through ActiveCampaign.

We’d recommend you run a test to make sure it works the way you need before you start adding your real users into the campaigns.


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