Watching our clients flourish is what drives us at Elastic Email. We take great pride in providing the tools that help remarkable organizations connect with their audiences and reach new heights. That is why we share with you their success stories. In this feature, we are highlighting K County Events, a unique organization specializing in popularizing events happening in Kosciusko County. By leveraging the Elastic Email marketing platform, they have successfully transformed their digital outreach into a powerful engine for growth and engagement.
Table of Contents
- K County Events - your go-to community calendar in Kosciusko County
- Email - the best way to reach your audience directly
- Elastic Email - an email marketing platform with RSS feed integration
- Using Elastic Email in practice
- Main Elastic Email features used by K County Events
- K County Events case study - conclusion
- FAQ
K County Events - your go-to community calendar in Kosciusko County
K County Events is an initiative located in Warsaw, Indiana, within Kosciusko County. It collects and popularizes events happening within this county. It aims to make it easy for people to find what is happening in their community. The collaboration between Kelly Mager and Joel Widman, the founders and owners of K County Events, offers various ways to stay up-to-date with events happening in Kosciusko County: a website that lists all the events in a calendar format, a blog section for highlighting things such as where to see holiday lights and to find summer camp opportunities, a Facebook group for social media presence, and a daily emailed newsletter hosted by Elastic Email.
Email - the best way to reach your audience directly
As Kelly says, email is an important piece to reach their customer base. Like any other channel, email allows K County Events to reach its customers directly. Members of a Facebook group can decide to leave the group without the administrators knowing. Similarly, administrators do not know how many people see their content, because Facebook's algorithms may decide to show it to a very small group. There is also a problem with website visitors. K County Events may be able to see how many people visit their website, but they have no further information about these people. All these constraints make email marketing so special, direct, and personal.
Facebook group members can come or go without us ever having a way to reach out directly or knowing if the algorithm is showing them our content. With website visitors, we currently do not have a way to know who is visiting the site, just how many. Additionally, many people prefer a push style notification rather than remembering to visit our website when they want to find an event to attend. Email allows us to reach our customers directly. - Kelly Mager, co-founder and co-owner of K County Events
Since switching to Elastic Email, K County Events has maintained an average open rate of 40% across its daily newsletter. It is a strong result for a high-frequency send, where subscriber fatigue typically drives open rates down over time. For context, the industry average open rate for daily newsletters sits well below this figure. The consistency of this number reflects both the relevance of the content (hyper-local, time-sensitive events) and the reliability of inbox placement that comes with a dedicated email delivery platform.
Elastic Email - an email marketing platform with RSS feed integration
Kelly admitted she did extensive web searching when she was looking for an email provider. She was looking for a solution with a clear contact and email sending limits. Also, she wanted a tool that supports RSS feed integration. She discovered that Elastic Email offered all three things at a price point her new business could afford.
Before choosing Elastic Email, K County Events used MailerLite, but decided to make a switch. The RSS feed integration is the most crucial feature this organization needs. MailerLite allows it to show only a certain number of events in an email. It means you have to click to view more events in the browser. It didn’t meet K County Events’ expectations, as such constraints add steps for the subscribers to see the information they want. After considering Brevo, Mailchimp, and Constant Contact, Elastic Email appeared to be the best choice.
The biggest influencing factor was RSS feed capability and being able to send a large number of emails per month, since we have a daily newsletter”.
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Using Elastic Email in practice
Kelly uses Elastic Email to send daily newsletters with a fresh dose of events happening within Kosciusko County. She finds Elastic Email easy to use as the template pulls the RSS feed from the K County Events website using a merge field. It means she doesn’t have to change anything in the template at all. Unless, she wants to change the layout or add a specific, limited-time piece of information. Kelly just adds events to the RSS feed on her website and the feed is automatically pulled into the template.
She also praises the fact that the entire RSS feed shows up when viewing the email in her Elastic Email account. Owing to that, she knows exactly what the email her subscribers are about to receive looks like. By sending her daily newsletters packed with her events automatically added to her campaigns through merge fields, she managed to reach her customer base daily with minimal time and work required.
We have our newsletter set up as a recurring daily email with the event RSS feed. What I love is after I set it up, I can forget about it unless I want to change the layout or add a specific limited time piece of information.”
Main Elastic Email features used by K County Events
Campaign Creator
Campaign creator allows you to design your campaign flow - from choosing your audience, email content, subject line, and tracking parameters, to scheduling when the campaign should be sent.
Learn moreTemplate Designer
With the template designer, you can create beautiful layouts from scratch, use AI to help you, choose one of the pre-built templates, or create one in HTML. You can use merge fields to embed your RSS feed in your emails.
Learn moreSignup Forms
Signup forms allow you to create eye-catching web forms in minutes. Whether you want to embed them in your website or create a pop-up form that appears after a certain delay for your website visitors.
Learn moreK County Events case study - conclusion
After thorough research, K County Events found Elastic Email is its go-to email marketing platform. With clear contact and sending limits that scale with your email list and business growth, an easy-to-use application, and RSS feed capability, Elastic Email proved to be the best choice for reaching the customer base directly. When asked whether she would recommend Elastic Email to a friend, Kelly replied: ”It's a great option for anyone who wants or expects to reach a large number of people without spending an arm and a leg, or needing to worry about quickly surpassing a limit and needing to upgrade your subscription level with them”. If you want to read more success stories of our customers, check out the case study category of our blog.
FAQ
Does Elastic Email support RSS feed integration for newsletters?
Yes. Elastic Email's Email Marketing product supports RSS-to-email automation using merge fields. You can configure a template to pull content directly from any RSS feed. It means the email populates automatically each time it sends, without manually updating the template. K County Events uses this to send a daily events newsletter that assembles itself from the RSS feed on their website each morning.
How do I set up an automated daily newsletter with an RSS feed in Elastic Email?
The setup involves three steps: creating an email template that uses an RSS merge field pointing to your feed URL, configuring a recurring campaign schedule (daily, weekly, or custom), and mapping the RSS fields to the content blocks in your template. Once configured, the campaign runs automatically. Elastic Email pulls the latest feed content at send time and populates the email. You only need to return to the template if you want to change the layout or add a one-off piece of content.
What is the difference between RSS-to-email in Elastic Email vs. MailerLite?
The key difference is how much of the RSS feed content gets displayed in the email. MailerLite limits the number of items shown in the email body, requiring subscribers to click through to a browser to see additional content. Elastic Email displays the full RSS feed in the email, so subscribers see all items without any extra steps. For use cases like community event calendars, where showing the complete list is the entire point, this distinction is significant.
Is Elastic Email a good platform for community newsletters and local publications?
Yes, particularly for organizations sending high-frequency newsletters to a growing list. Elastic Email's pricing scales with email volume rather than subscriber count alone, which makes it cost-effective for daily sends. The RSS feed integration removes the manual work of assembling each edition. Additionally, the campaign scheduling tools support recurring sends without ongoing setup. K County Events sends a daily newsletter to its Kosciusko County audience entirely on autopilot after the initial configuration.
What email marketing platforms support RSS-to-email automation?
Several platforms support RSS-to-email to varying degrees, including Elastic Email, Mailchimp, and Campaign Monitor. The key differences are in how completely the feed content is rendered in the email body, how flexible the merge field system is, and how pricing scales with send frequency. For organizations sending daily newsletters with full feed display as a requirement, Elastic Email's implementation was the deciding factor for K County Events. Especially after evaluating MailerLite, Brevo, Mailchimp, and Constant Contact.
Why is email more effective than social media for reaching a local community audience?
Social media platforms like Facebook use algorithmic filtering, which means your content may only reach a fraction of your followers. It happens regardless of how many people have joined your group or page. You also have no way to contact group members directly if they leave or if the algorithm stops showing them your posts. Significantly, email bypasses this entirely. Every send goes directly to the subscriber's inbox, and your list is an owned asset that no platform algorithm can limit. For K County Events, this direct, predictable reach is why email is the primary channel for daily event distribution.
Ula Chwesiuk
Ula is a content creator at Elastic Email. She is passionate about marketing, creative writing and language learning. Outside of work, Ula likes to travel, try new recipes and go to concerts.
