Integrating Mailchimp and WordPress for Better Results

Mailchimp is an email marketing company which is free for upto 2000 Subscribers.

Mailchimp devotes three plans:

Entrepreneur : Send 12,000 emails to 2,000 subscribers for free. No credit card required while sign up. Mailchimp promises this package to be free forever.

Growing Business : 50,000 subscribers , unlimited number of emails.

High volume sender : More than 50,000 subscribers

Read more about the pricing at mailchimp.com/pricing

Though we will stick to the Entrepreneur plan for this post.

Why do you need Mailchimp ?

When you have a satisfactory traffic to your website/blog, and want the flow to remain and increase, it’s best to shuttle your blog with a subscribe button. But you need to make sure you provide quality content to your subscribers.

The need for mailchimp arises when you have pretty good quantity of followers and need a medium to disseminate your news/blog post to the audiences.

Sign Up for MailChimp

1. Visit Mailchimp. When on homepage, have a look at the upper right of the page and click on Sign Up Free.

2. Enter your details when prompted. It is recommended to use your website’s official mailing id but alternatively you are free to use any valid email. Enter other details like username and password and finally stress the Create My Account button.

3. Before starting off with MailChimp, you should click the conformation link in your email. On the landing page, you need to verify your humanity (Captcha). As soon as you are done with verification, you will now have to enter informations for your account.

These include your name, company/website information, address, etc. Make sure you fill up each fields before submitting the form.

Once done you will be prompted to a page simillar to this.

4. Moving on, click on Creat A List as shown in the figure. Since we have no lists, we are going to create one. Click on Create List button on the right top of the screen.

You will now to taken to a form. The list name must be sensible as it can be seen by your subscribers. “Your Website Name Newsletter” may be an appropriate name for the list.

Put the email address associated with your blog/website and an appropriate name (website name or your own name).

Remind people how they got on your list section is a way of telling people how they are incorporated with your website or a gentle reminder about their role in your website. For Example : “You received this email because you have subscribed to Your Website Name Newsletter”.

Enter other essential details and submit the form.

5. Now that you have successfully created a mailing list, it’s time to get people subscribe to your newsletter. Let’s get to our wordpress powered website/blog to get things done.

Under plugins, go to add new and search for “mailchimp widget”.

Install and activate the plugin. As soon as you do so, you get a message on the top of the dashboard similar to one below.

Click the link and you will be prompted for an Api Key.

6. Login to your mailchimp account and click account as shown below.

Next up, click on extras and then on API keys. Scroll down until you see Create A Key option. Click on it to get the API key.

Now copy the API key and paste it in the field asking API key in your wordpress blog and save the changes.

7. Now go to Widgets which is under Appearances and drag the MailChimp List Signup widget to the sidebar your theme allows. I am using Noteworthy theme at the moment, therefore I have right sidebar where I am going to place the MailChimp List Signup widget.

Since we have only one mailing list so the widget selects the available mailing list by default. Change the title to something appropriate and changing button text to “Subcribe” will be better. Click on Collect First Name. You may edit the success and faliure message as well.

All set and done. Just wait for the subscribers and grow your business. You can view the subscribers in your mailchimp account under the mailing list you created. To throw an email to everyone in the mailing list, create a campaign and that’s all it takes. Take some time to comment on my writing.