Email Marketing with Mailchimp + WordPress – Start collecting emails

Hello ! Its been a while since my last post. Today I am going to tell you how you can collect email addresses trough your website or blog. As you already know email marketing is a huge part in business. This is where MailChimp enters to the scene. 

MailChimp is one of the most popular email service provider, and it is extremely easy to use.

To send newsletters, offers we need to have a collection of email addresses or email lists. In this guide, I will show you how to use MailChimp and WordPress to get more subscribers. I assume you already have a MailChimp account. If not please create an account here.They offer a free plan up to 2,000 subscribers and 12,000 emails per month. Its more than enough for a startup.

Step #1

The first thing you need to do in your MailChimp account is setup an email list. On your MailChimp dashboard, go to Audience section and click on ‘Create A List’ button.

On the next window provide information for our list. Next you will be presented with the below screen.

Step #2

Go to Signup forms. You have to decide how you want to show the form on your website. We have some options.

1. As an external link.
2. Embedded Form
3. Popup form

I personally think Popup Form are great at its job. So lets start with it first. Click on Selectbutton next to Subscriber Popup option. On the next screen you can play with the design. Spend few minutes there to design a nice form. Once finished click Generate Code button and copy the code to the clipboard. And then Save and Exit > Publish. Thats it. Now go to your WordPress dashboard.

Step #3

Now you have to paste the code in the header of your wordpress site. Go Appearance > Editor. On the right column find the Theme header file (header.php). And paste the code you just copied before </head> which is the closing head tag. If you don’t have courage to touch the theme core files you can use the Header and Footer plugin which do the same thing the easier way.

Now you can go to the live site and refresh.

MailChimp popup is coded that if a visitor subscribes or clicks the popup close button, the form won’t be shown to them again. So don’t think its not working. Just remove the cookies and refresh the site. It will show you the popup again.

Lets add the signup form to sidebar or footer widgets

Step #1

Go to your list and select the Embedded forms from the list

Like we did before just use the dashboard to style the form to match with your needs. Once done copy the code and go to WordPress Dashboard > Appearance > Widgets

Step #2

Add a text widget to the widget area you want to show the form. I am just putting it on the left sidebar on my demo site. Paste the code you copied from MailChimp and Save it.

Go to the front end and you will see the sign up form on the sidebar widget.

Thats it! The other way is to have a link or QR code for the form. Its just working the same way. You have to select General Forms and go ahead. Also QR code is a nice way to add a sign up form to some kind of Product, Brochure, Flayer, Business cards etc. So the visitor or client can just scan the code with their smartphone and sign up.

Thats all for now. Will be back again with something new related to WordPress or Web design. If you have any questions or if you need any help please comment below. Always happy to help.