March 28, 2024

Definitive Guide to Integrate MailChimp and WordPress

Founded in 2001, MailChimp has now “7 million users that collectively send over 10 billion emails through the service each month”.  MailChimp is an email marketing and newsletter service functioning well. It helps the users to collect email addresses, store the email addresses and carry out an email marketing campaign.

Maintaining a long list of subscribers is certainly an arduous task but now software like MailChimp have made this task easy for us.

Create email templates without coding

MailChimp comes with an awesome feature of drag and drop email tool.

There are a lot of times when we need to acquire technical knowledge, such as HTML for programming an email template which might not be your cup of tea. Moreover, now it is no more a task, as we have software like MailChimp editor which makes it similar to playing a game.

Benefits of MailChimp in brief:

  • It is available for free till 2000 subscribers and also for 12,000 emails per month
  • Offers drag-and-drop method for creating custom templates
  • Offers trackers for opening rates, A/B split testing , click-through rate and many more such features.
  • Offers a brilliant user experience and an incredible user interface
  • Offers on-the-go marketing via Mobile apps

Giving your website  email subscription forms:

The main reason behind the popularity of MailChimp is the fact that its integration with WordPress which is a widely used platform is quite easy. There are numerous other plugins which render high quality helps further to enhance the services quite easily.

You need to begin by creating a list of all the subscribers in order to give them an opportunity to subscribe. In order to do this we have email subscription form. These subscriptions come in different forms, such as they can be a pop-up, a sidebar widget or even a slide-in. Therefore subscription forms for MailChimp are also the same.

Option 1: Integrate using a Plugin

We can take help of a plugin for integrating MailChimp into our WordPress website named as MailChimp for WordPress.

Using this you can easily create a sign-up form on any of your webpage of your website. This plugin is widely accepted by the audience and has rated positively by the developers. This can be said as the 95 % of the total reviews are narrate positive experience of the users. Moreover, it is used by over 200,000 live websites.

Now we will discuss how to set up this plugin, so as to make your MailChimp up and running on your WordPress website or blog.

The very first step is to go to the plugin directory and  download MailChimp for WordPress. Then you need to upload it in the plugins folder. On the other hand, you can also install it straight away from the backend of WordPress and then activate it there itself.

Installing ‘MailChimp-for-WordPress’ Plugin

After installing the plugin you then need to create a MailChimp account if you don’t have any and then you need to connect it with the plugin. In order to connect the two of them you need to fetch an API key from your MailChimp account and the paste it at a required place inside the MailChip for WordPress plugin.

To get this API key, you need to navigate to the path in the backend of your MailChimp :  Account > Extras > API keys.

After reaching down to API keys you need to scroll down and click on the option which says ‘ Create A Key’. There you will get to see some letters and number in the box which is mentioned in the list and these are your API keys. You need to select them and copy them.

Then next you need to dash out to the WordPress plugin which you have installed right now and there you need to go to its Settings menu. There on the very first page you will get a box where you need to paste the keys which you had copied.

Next you need to click on the Save Changes button and now you are connected.

Creating sign-up forms

Under these forms you also have the leverage to create subscription forms as well.

There are different formats to choose from MailChimp for WordPress offers five different themes as well as a field generator, which one can leverage in order to customize your subscription form as per your need by adding more elements to it.

Getting the forms on your site

There are different ways in which one can showcase their products on their WordPress based website. The very first way it to make use of a shortcode. This is can be found under the builder module as shown in the picture below. In order to add a subscription form inside any of your post or page you just need to paste it at that particular location where you need it to be.

Else you can also use an integrated widget. All you need to do is to drag and drop it wherever you wish it to be, give it a title and save it. This is it.

How awesome is that?

In order to get to know about more exciting features of this plugin, such as to make more people subscribe to your newsletter, you can go to the Checkbox settings.  You can select the best options in order to enable your users who writes comment, or fill in the contact form to enable them straight away to get your newsletter as well.

MailChimp for WordPress also works perfectly fine with numerous other plugins which are famous, such as WooCommerce and Contact From 7 to name a few.

Option 2: The manual method

Although the plugin mentioned has a very easy procedure for adding Signup forms on your WordPress website powered by MailChimp . But this is not the only way to do so,

Though there is an easy way of coping and pasting subscription forms into your site, but there are developers who also follow the manual or other coding way for the same.

You need to go to the Lists mentioned in the MailChimp, so as to create a custom form in it. After creating a subscriber list, you can then go on to create a form using the option of Signup forms mentioned at the top.

Here you can have several other options which you can use to create forms:

  1. General forms
  2. Subscriber popups
  3. Embedded forms
  4. Form integration (for integrating into Twitter cards)

Apart from this we have several other plugins such as WP Popup Plugin and SumoMe to do the same.

I hope this blog helped you to get acquainted with how to install the plugin. Feel free to drop us your suggestions and queries in the comments below.

Samuel Dawson has awesome experience in custom wordpress development. He is also able to convert PSD to WordPress within a certain period of time.

One Comment

  1. Hemang Rindani Reply

    WordPress is one of the most popular CMSes that
    is capable to handle large chunks of data through an easy user interface.
    Developers can choose from number of modules and plugins to satisfy the
    business requirements. With the increasing popularity, large players have made
    a WordPress compatible plugins that works well with any module. MailChimp is
    one such plugin that enables WP developers to include emailing functionality to
    the website. It provides many features like listing the relevant contacts, bulk
    emailing and creating email groups. Use the plugin in contention with security
    plugins and add firewall to save the data communication. These features can be
    managed easily through the main dashboard.

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