jlesliefam

This what I just received from MC:

I’m happy to take a look at this with you. Based on the information you’re giving, it looks like the issue is indeed in WordPress and not Mailchimp. Mailchimp simply searches for the pubdate that’s in the feed, and it looks like WordPress isn’t publishing it to the feed at the same time you publish it.

In general, we advise for blogs to be posted to the feed at least 3 hours before the scheduled send time of your campaign. That is for the time posted in the feed itself though. The issue here, moreso, is that the feed isn’t showing the actual time you’re posting. That is something you would need to address with WordPress. I’ve heard some cases where scheduled blog posts aren’t sent to the feed until someone actually views the blog. WordPress would have more information on this.

MC has replied back but haven’t been very helpful. I can view the post in the feed immediately after I post a new entry. But it won’t even show up in MC preview until UTC +0000 which is 6 hours after publishing (even with my MC set to Chicago CST – same as my WordPress). I just don’t get it!

I don’t yet. I have a free MC account so no support, however I heard you could get support through their Twitter or Facebook pages. So I sent them a message through Twitter and they gave me a support ticket # and are checking it out. I’ll post an update if I hear anything that resolves the issue.

Thanks for helping me narrow this down to a Mailchimp problem. Grateful.

Thanks so much for checking this out. Very helpful! I confirmed that Mailchimp was also set to CST (UTC-6hr). What’s happening is let’s say I publish the post at 12:00 pm CST, and have Mailchimp set to send out new posts at 2:00 pm. It won’t send until I change the Mailchimp time to 6:00 pm. Does that mean Mailchimp isn’t taking the timezone change into account?

If so, yes, I’ll need to try to get help from Mailchimp.

Thanks so much for your help! As it turns out confirmation emails seem to be going to junk mail (I just recently turned on double opt-in). I’ll just have to include in the success message to check junk mail!

Thanks again!