Did our last post convince you why you should use MailChimp as an email marketing platform to support your WordPress site? Did it? Great! Here’s how we can help you do just that. It’s pretty simple, broken down into steps below.
1. Open a MailChimp account and create a list
This couldn’t be easier:
- Go to MailChimp, sign up for a free account and log in
- Create a list (here’s MailChimp’s own guide on how to do it: https://mailchimp.com/help/create-audience/)
2. Create a sign-up form on your website
You have two choices here:
1. Use MailChimp’s own registration form
Advantages
- Quickly
- simple
- You can probably do it yourself: https://mailchimp.com/help/how-the-form-builder-works/
Disadvantages
- Limited design customisation
- You don’t get your own record of registrations outside of MailChimp’s own records
- You can’t let people opt-in when they fill out other forms. They must specifically fill out the newsletter sign-up form
- When users sign up, they are redirected to a page on MailChimp, they move away from your website.
2. Use Gravity Forms (with MailChimp Add-on)
Advantages
- Gravity Forms will keep its own records of form submissions (as a backup and for you to analyse and gain insight from registrations. For example, which pages/posts are driving registrations for newsletters)
- Almost infinite control over styling, form submission behaviour, validation and confirmation messages
- You can add conditional consent for newsletters to other forms, like contact forms and e-commerce checkouts.
Disadvantages
- You will most likely need help setting this up
- Gravity Forms is a paid add-on, so there’s an ongoing annual cost
3. Creating your template
MailChimp comes with a wide range of pre-built templates, ready for you to customise (e.g. add your own logo and change colours). Alternatively, you can code your own or take advantage of their easy-to-use drag and drop editor. In this case, we’re looking for an RSS-powered campaign template, which has been set up to automatically display content from your WordPress posts. Of course, you can also create one-off templates for use with complementary campaigns.
While it’s fairly straightforward, it’s usually better to get help choosing and setting up a template to make sure you’re following best practices (you certainly don’t want to get reported for spam) and that the template looks good and works well.
If you modify a ready-made template, or create your own using the drag-and-drop editor, you can save it under Email Templates for future use.
4. Create a campaign
Once you have a template ready to use, all you need to do is create an RSS-powered campaign that automatically sends your latest content to your list. It’s pretty straightforward. You’ll be able to choose how many posts to send and on what schedule, even what time of day!
If you just want to target specific content to send out via email, then MailChimp supports sending content only from a specific category or tag, rather than every post you post. If you want to make it really fancy, you can allow users to choose to receive posts from different subject categories, and then create different campaigns based on different categories and user information.
5. Post some content
Once all the settings are done, you’re ready to begin. Just write a new post and MailChimp will use the WordPress RSS feed to monitor your site and send out anything new on the schedule you’ve set! It’s that simple! If people want to unsubscribe for any reason, they will be able to do so instantly without your input. The most positive thing is that if people want to view a web version, forward it to a friend or share it on social media then all these tools are built in too.
6. Keep track of your admin panel in MailChimp
If you check your admin panel in MailChimp regularly, you can see what’s happening with your email lists. Who has subscribed? Unsubscribes? Is your list growing? All this information is really important to keep an eye on.
A word of warning
Be really careful to make sure people understand that they are choosing to consent to sign up for your newsletter/mailing. Use MailChimp’s double consent feature (this gives users the chance to confirm their subscription and avoids misunderstandings about what they are signing up for) and don’t be tempted to import any other mailing lists if they haven’t consented in the same way.
If MailChimp receives complaints from users, they will close your account and you will lose all your contacts, templates and account history. That can be pretty devastating! That’s one of the reasons we recommend using Gravity Forms as an intermediary, that way you always have a record of email registrations in case the worst happens.
Are you ready to go?
You’re good to go. We’re ready to help you. Here’s a checklist of what we need from you (with our help):
- Your MailChimp login (and the name of the list you want us to use)
- The name of the template you like and any customisations you want us to make to it
- Your Gravity Forms licence (if you want us to use that option) and what forms you want us to add (and what fields to use, e.g. name, email, company name)
- If there is any special category or tag you want to use to define what content to send
- Your schedule for sending and how many of the latest posts you want to send (maximum number per email).
If there’s anything else you’d like to know about using WordPress and MailChimp, feel free to contact us.