In this article, we are going to talk about the "global" essence of RSS sources and the "local" significance of a campaign's dynamic block settings, and how the Piano ESP internal Campaign task manager operates. All of these affect the content of an email campaign, and incorrect setup may cause expected content (articles or sections) defined in a campaign's email not to actually be fetched from the Source and propagated in the newsletter your users receive at the time of the campaign's sending.
First, we will provide some more general information about the three important features that affect the content in the email received from an ESP campaign.
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A Dynamic Block is one of the 12 building block types designed and used in Piano ESP, but it is special. It uses external sources. We may, therefore, intuitively think that its content is updated automatically. But what is not so intuitive is that external circumstances will also influence its display based on the settings the source item within a campaign template carries.
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The RSS Source is not an entity created and bound to a campaign's Dynamic Block. You can add them in the ESP dashboard under Setup → Sources → Create Source.
When it comes to setting up campaigns with it, we may think of each individually, but the RSS sources are a "global" ESP thing used by campaigns. Besides, the ESP source feature enlists content from the RSS feed every 15 minutes by default. In other words: a dynamic block will look for new content inside those lists, not on the fly from the RSS feed.
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The ESP task manager is quite complex, and like any other task manager, it is designed to optimize systems performance by staggering some tasks not to overload the whole system.
Each of these points might play a role — alone or together in the absence of a specific article or section in an email campaign.
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First, If you update the RSS feed a few minutes before sending out a campaign, you might miss those articles in the email because the source feature checks for RSS updates every 15 minutes by default (unless defined otherwise).
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Understanding how the ESP task manager works is crucial. Let's say that a campaign is scheduled to fire between 8 and 9 a.m. Internally, the system will see that and "think," " I will not fire ALL of them precisely at 8 o'clock and stagger some jobs". This will cause the email delivery to be split throughout the scheduled hour, and emails not to be sent at 8 a.m. sharp.
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When in the Dynamic block advanced settings' features are toggled on — let's name one — "Exclude stories sent previously" we must read it not like "Exclude stories sent previously in this campaign" but "Exclude stories sent previously in ANY campaign."
To sum up, we recommend not switching on the following settings for a Dynamic block in a regularly scheduled recurring campaign to ensure these don't interfere with the fetching of content from the Source for a campaign and users receiving newsletters with enough content.
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Include only recent stories
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Exclude stories sent previously
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Exclude stories read by the user on the site