How to Use MailChimp with WordPress

Email marketing is an important part of your project in WordPress. Consider the fact that 70% of your site`s visitors will not get back to you after the first visit. Are you willing to lose the biggest part of your potential audience? In addition, a protection from such serious traffic loss is not a difficult task. It is enough to wisely use ready-made tools – MailChimp mailing service, integrated WordPress functionality or additional features of special plugins.

Our choice has stopped on MailChimp, because it provides the most user-friendly interface and free service for newcomers. If your subscriber base has not yet reached 2000 people, you can use all the capabilities of the service for free. Then you will be offered to buy one of the existing packages of services at very reasonable prices. In any case, the start and initial testing does not require any financial investments.

Today we will talk about how to carry out initial MailChimp setup to work with the site on WordPress platform. A few simple steps will help you to understand that setting email campaign does not require extensive training or deep knowledge in the field of marketing or web development. In addition, we will address the theme of setting the most useful plugins to increase the effectiveness of your email campaigns – from the increase in the number of subscribers to the improvement of their interaction with your site.

Sign Up for MailChimp

Registration in MailChimp passes quickly and does not require much effort. But there are some features you should know in advance.

The first feature is that you will need to come up with a strong password with the length of 8 characters, the presence of at least one special character, one uppercase letter, one lowercase letter and one number. You can use a random password generator, but you will need to save the result, as it will be difficult to remember.

The second feature concerns the compulsory input of personal data: real name and residence address. This information is necessary to meet the requirements of the international anti-spam policy.

Create Your First Email List

Create the first email list is easy. There is a corresponding menu item on the dashboard of MailChimp:

When creating a list, you will need to fill in a few fields: the name of the list, name and email address of the sender, a reminder about how a user have subscribed to your newsletter, address and telephone number of the responsible person. You can also set up automatic notification about users subscriptions and unsubscriptions from the list.

Then you can add email addresses of registered users of your site. You do not have any registered users yet? Then we move on to the next step.

Add a Subscription Form to Your Website

The subscription form is an additional way to collect email addresses of people who are interested in your site. It may look like a normal form to enter the email address and the “Subscribe” button, and can have an extended structure and features. Now we focus on the simplest form.

In the “Lists” menu there should be at least one list already created. Even if there are no subscribers, you can create a subscription form with the following menu:

Select “Embeded Forms”. Next you will need to put a few simple settings. Then you will receive the HTML code that you need to copy.

Return to your WordPress site and go to the Widgets menu. Then add a new Text Widget. Paste the code from MailChimp into a new widget. So it is done: now there is a form to subscribe to the email newsletter on your website!

But what to send to your readers? This will be discussed further.

Create RSS Feed Newsletter

RSS Feed of your site is the easiest source to generate automatic emails. In fact, you just give your subscribers the opportunity to follow the updates of your project via email. Creating RSS Feed Newsletter is also very easy.

Go to “Campaigns” menu in MailChimp. Click “Create Campaign” button. Select the last item (RSS campaign) in the following list:

Enter a link to a page of your site where the RSS Feed forms. Typically, this link contains the domain of your site and the prefix “/feed”. Then select the frequency with which users will receive your newsletter. You can also set a specific schedule, which means choosing a specific day and time to send the newsletters.

MailChimp then ask you to add an existing list of email addresses to send the newsletter. You should not be afraid about the updating process for the list. If users will be added to your list, they will also receive a newsletter automatically.

The final stage is the design configuration of the letters` appearance. You can use prepared templates or create your own unique design.

At the end, click “Save” to complete the automatic mailing setup.

Plugins to Connect MailChimp and WordPress

Some plugins can greatly facilitate the work of the site administrator in WordPress and extend the functionality provided by the default. For example, plugins facilitate the task of further customizing the subscription form, the creation of user groups by interest (and various newsletters for them), creation of popup forms, and more.

WooChimp – WooCommerce MailChimp Integration

The second plugin is very useful for online shops in WordPress platform. WooChimp combines WooCommerce opportunities, MailChimp and WordPress in a single plugin. For owners of online stores in WordPress platform, this means campaigns targeting, advanced functionality for user groups and in-depth analytics on the basis of detailed reportes about sent newsletters.

Final Words

The combined capabilities of WordPress and MailChimp open up new horizons for the website owners of different types – from personal blogs to online shops.

You can customize email newsletters for any needs of your site or business. The main types of mailing lists can be divided into information, marketing and automatic trigger. The first type includes interesting and informative articles on the topic, which is dedicated to your website. The second type involves unique offers or promotional items that you want to offer to your visitors. Automatic trigger newsletters are used in response to a certain actions of a user: registration on the site, an order of the goods, a question through your feedback form, and much more.

The main idea of marketing emails is to maintain the audience`s interest to your project. You should not allow users to forget about your site. On the other hand, intrusive reminders may annoy visitors and lead to the cancellation of the subscription. It is therefore necessary to find a balance between too frequent and too rare mailings. Analytics can help with this task. Th analytic tools are built into MailChimp and supporting plugins. They will show how many emails were opened and read, what links or buttons in a letter are often pressed and which are ignored by the recipients of the newsletter. Based on this knowledge, you will be able to continuously improve your dispatch in accordance with the interests and expectations of your audience.

Email marketing does not lose relevance, as only gaining it each year. Therefore, one can not ignore the opportunities to advertise your site.

Use MailChimp and WordPress and let the interested audience be with you!