If you want to create an email list or want to send email updates to your website’s subscribers, you can use MailChimp WordPress plugin.
Email marketing is one of the most powerful ways of conveying your messages to a large number of web users. In fact, many website owners are using it effectively to engage more and more site visitors. With the use of email marketing, you can increase the audience engagement when you publish a new post.
Why Create an Email List?
Email is a way to stay connected with your website visitors long after they leave your website. With services like Mailchimp, you can send them email updates when you post a new blog.
As we know, email is a private and direct communication medium – a large number of people regularly check their inbox, as compared to other social media platforms. An email will remain in the inbox until the user reads or deletes it.
Use MailChimp with your WordPress Website
Mailchimp is the an affordable service for beginners as it is free until you send less than 12,000 emails per month or have less than 2,000 subscribers. It enables you to setup RSS to email subscriptions, auto-responders, design alluring email templates and monitor the performance of your email activities with thorough analytics reports.
Eventually, when your list grows to 2,000 subscribers, you will be asked to upgrade the account to paid plan. Apart from email service, it also offers some additional exciting features.
How to set up MailChimp?
- If you want to connect MailChimp with your WordPress site, then you will be required a MailChimp account.
- Visit the website of MailChimp and click on the ‘Signup’ Free button.
- Fill your email and create a username or password for your account.
- Now, you can open your MailChimp dashboard.
How to Create your First Email List?
- The first step is to setup an email list in your MailChimp account. Go to the dashboard and click on ‘Create A List’ button.
- You need to provide the information like the name for your email list, an email address, where the different users can reply to, etc. Then, you need to fill the form and click on the ‘save’ button.
- So, that’s how you can create your first email list. Now, you will be asked to connect your email list to your WordPress and then your site’s visitors can subscribe.
How to Add MailChimp Email Signup Forms to the WordPress Site?
- MailChimp is available with an inbuilt basic subscription form that means you only need to go to the List Page in your MailChimp account and then click the download button and choose sign up forms.
- On the next page, you will see different types of forms. You can click on ‘Select’ button next to Embedded Forms.
- You will be redirected to the Setting Page where you can select what fields you want to display in your form. Then adjust the form width and other options and copy the embed code.
- Now, you need to open your WP admin dashboard and click on Appearance >> Widgets. Add the text widget to the WP sidebar and paste the signup form code in it.
How to Add Dazzling Signup Forms
Adding a simple MailChimp sign up in WordPress is quite easy, but attracting the people to join your email list is not at all easy. For that, there are several services that will connect to Mailchimp.
Once tool is OptinMonster, which enables you to add different type of sign up forms, such as floating footer bar, sidebar forms, etc.
You can also do A/B testing; choose from different templates, page-level targeting, etc.
Another tool that will present nice signup forms and connect to Mailchimp is SumoMe. It integrates easily into your WordPress site and gives you options to have signups pop up and more.
How to Set up WordPress RSS Feed Newsletter in MailChimp?
Once getting the subscribers into your email list, it is necessary to send updates related to your new post on regular basis. You can always login to your MailChimp account and send an email to the subscribers manually. But with this, you can also set up the automated campaigns that can send your latest posts through email. It is known as RSS newsletter.
If you are using the FeedBurner to send emails to your RSS subscribers, then you should move the FeedBurner subscribers to MailChimp.
- In order to setup an RSS to Email Campaign, you will be required to login to your MailChimp account and then you have to click on Campaigns >> Create Campaign.
- Then, you will see different type of campaigns on the next page. You can choose the most suitable RSS-Driven Campaign.
- Enter your RSS feed URL and choose when you want to send an automated emails. With this, you can send daily, weekly and monthly emails to the subscribers. To an addition, you can also choose the time for your emails. After that, you need to click on the Next button to continue.
- MailChimp will ask you to choose a list. Then, you need to select the list and click on the next button to get the campaign info.
- Here, you need to give a name to your campaign. Well, you can customize it according to your needs. Then click the next button.
- Now you have to choose a template for your email. After that, the MailChimp will automatically fill out most of the fields for you. Well, MailChimp comes with various options, but still you can choose the suitable one.
- It will enable you to tweak the design of your email. You can add your logo and change the text as per your site’s requirement. Most importantly, you need to add RSS Header and RSS Item box to the email template.
- Now, click on the next button and at the end you need to click on the save and exit button.
- So, that’s how you can create your WP RSS Feed Newsletter with MailChimp.
Wrapping it Up
I hope you enjoyed this blog, where we discussed the importance of MailChimp and procedure to set up the MailChimp with WordPress. Now you can send emails to your site subscribers and increase the visitors to your site quickly and easily.
Author Bio
Lucy Barret works for WPGeeks Ltd., a HTML to WordPress Company and handles all WordPress customization projects. She loves blogging and regularly writes tutorials based on WordPress related topics. Follow her company on various social networks like Facebook and Google+.