Where can I find it?
SIDE PANEL> MC4WP
What does it mean?
The Mailchimp plugin for WordPress is a tool that integrates Mailchimp's email marketing services with WordPress websites. It allows site owners to easily create subscription forms, manage mailing lists, and automate email campaigns directly from their WordPress dashboard. With this plugin, users can grow their email lists, engage visitors, and track campaign performance, making it a powerful solution for businesses looking to enhance their marketing efforts.
The main benefits are:
- Effortless subscriber collection: Grow your Mailchimp audience without fiddling with code.
- Seamless integration: Connects smoothly with your existing website forms.
- Automated tagging: Segment your subscribers based on how they signed up (e.g., homepage, blog).
- Checkout integration: Gather valuable customer data during purchases.
- Centralised management: Manage your Mailchimp lists and subscribers from your WordPress dashboard.
Capitalise on digital marketing to cultivate leads into returning, loyal customers. While capturing customer email addresses is a crucial initial step, sustained engagement is paramount. To facilitate this, we offer seamless integration with Mailchimp, a leading third-party newsletter platform.
However, simply collecting contact details is insufficient. To foster customer loyalty and establish effective communication channels, the creation of engaging newsletters is essential. Ideally, these should feature exclusive offers, discounts, competitions, and other valuable content. While marketing services fall outside our direct remit, we strongly advise dedicating resources (either internal or through a marketing agency) to ensure your communications resonate with your audience and build lasting relationships.
Recommendation: To maximise reach and subscriber acquisition, consider repurposing newsletter content as magazine articles on your website, incorporating a clear call to action (CTA) to encourage newsletter sign-ups. This strategy offers the dual benefit of enhanced organic search visibility and increased follower acquisition.
In the event that Mailchimp integration was not implemented during the initial website build, please continue with the following section.
What should I do?
How to create an account (free)
Mailchimp offers a few different subscription options, but you can actually start off with their free plan. This gives you up to 500 contacts and allows for 1,000 email sends each month, with a daily limit of 500 sends. Not bad at all to get started!
Here's a peek at what you get with the Free plan:
- One audience to work with.
- One seat for you, with full Owner permissions.
- A decent selection of basic, featured, and themed email templates to choose from.
- The ability to send out abandoned cart emails (handy!).
- A one-click automated welcome email for new subscribers.
- Basic reporting to keep an eye on things.
To set up your free account, just head over here and fill in the form. You'll need to pop in your email address, pick a username (the system will let you know if you need to try another one if someone else has already bagged that name), and choose a password. Finally, click ‘Sign up’.
Once you've signed up, Mailchimp will send a verification email. Open it and click ‘Activate account’.
You can then follow the steps and choose the Free Plan.
Have a look at this site for more details.
How to create an audience
Once logged in, you should create an audience, which refers to your primary database of contacts to whom you will distribute your email marketing campaigns. It serves as the central repository for managing your subscribers and their associated data.
While Mailchimp offers the capability to create multiple audiences, for many users, a single, well-managed audience is sufficient and included with the free plan.
If you don’t find an audience here, then you need to create one:
To create an audience go to Audience > Settings > Manage audience and select ‘Create audience’.
For comprehensive instructions on how to create an audience, please consult the following Mailchimp support article.
How to generate the API key
If you are new in Mailchimp or if you still don’t have one, then you need to generate an API key in Mailchimp to set up tne integration between Wordpress and your Mailchimp account.
To generate the API key, then login to Mailchimp and follow these steps.
- Click your profile icon and choose Profile.
- Click the Extras drop-down then choose API keys.
- In the Your API Keys section, click Create A Key.
- Name your key. Be descriptive, so you know what app uses that key. Keep in mind that you’ll see only this name and the first 4 key digits on your list of API keys.
- Click Generate Key.
- Once we generate your key, click Copy Key to Clipboard. Save your key someplace secure–you won’t be able to see or copy it again. If you lose this key, you’ll need to generate a new key and update any integration that uses it.
- Click Done.
Note: You’ll only be able to see the full API key immediately after you generate it. After that, you’ll only see the name you’ve given it and its first 4 digits.
For more information, please visit this Mailchimp support article.
How to install and activate the Mailchimp plugin
To install the MailChimp plugin for WordPress (MC4WP), please follow these steps:
Go to SIDE PANEL> PLUGINS > ADD NEW
Then, search for MailChimp for WordPress (MC4P) and install it. After that, click on the “Activate” button.
With MC4WP now visible in your side menu, you'll need to link it to your Mailchimp account using the API key you created earlier in Mailchimp.
To do this, go to SIDE PANEL > MC4WP > Mailchimp and enter your API key.
Once you've popped in your API key, you'll see the audiences from your Mailchimp account displayed here:
Next, you have the option to edit your sign-up form if you wish to include additional fields. By default, only the email address is included, and the initial form will appear as follows:
Go to SIDE PANEL> MC4WP > Form and edit the form fields (First name, Last name, Birthday, etc.) you want to add.
Customers can sign up for your Newsletter on the homepage, through a blog post (in the Magazine section), and during checkout. The same sign-up form is used across all these locations.
However, you can easily customise it to include more information. Simply nip over to SIDE PANEL > MC4WP > Form and tick the boxes next to the fields you'd like to add.
For example, if you choose to add ‘First Name’, you can then change how this field is labelled, add some placeholder text, and even set a default value if needed. You can also make it a required field by ticking the ‘Is this field required?’ box. Once you're happy, just click ‘Add to form’:
You can also customise the messages sent out to your subscribers on the 'Messages' tab. This includes things like successful subscription confirmations, error messages if someone's already subscribed, and those sorts of bits.
To change any of these messages, simply click in the text box next to the message you want to alter and type in your new wording. You can make it sound exactly how you like!
Once you're happy with your edits, don't forget to scroll down to the bottom of the page and click the Save Changes button.
How to insert the sign-up form into the website
The subscription form can be displayed on the Homepage and the Blog page:
Note: The social media icons and accompanying text are automatically integrated and are not configurable within this section. For instructions on setting up social media links, please refer to this article.
To implement the Mailchimp sign-up form on the homepage and within the sidebars of blog articles, a shortcode is required. Navigate to Settings > Gray Line Licensee TourCMS Plugin > Common MailChimp Shortcode > Shortcode.
You should observe a shortcode similar to the following: [mc4wp_form id=592]
If a shortcode is present, proceed to the subsequent steps. If this field is empty, go to the section ‘If the shortcode is missing’.
Displaying the sign-up form on the Homepage
To display the sign-up form on the Homepage, navigate to Pages > All Pages > Home > Edit. If the 'Home' page is not immediately visible, utilise the search function in the top right corner to locate it.
Once the 'Home' page editor is open, locate the section titled 'Mailchimp Section Detail'. Within this section, you can customise the image and introductory text associated with the Mailchimp block.
If the Mailchimp shortcode is already populated in the plugin settings, no further action is typically required; the integration is configured.
If the shortcode is missing
If the shortcode is not present in the plugin settings, you will need to retrieve the specific shortcode for your form. This can be found by navigating to MC4WP > Forms in your WordPress side menu.
Subsequently, enter this Mailchimp shortcode under SETTINGS > GRAY LINE LICENSEE TOURCMS PLUGIN > Common MailChimp Shortcode > Shortcode.
How does it work?
When a user signs up via the form, that subscriber gets tagged with the "Homepage" tag.
And all these users will be added to the same Mailchimp audience you've selected here:
We recommend performing a test sign-up and verifying that the submitted email address is added to your Mailchimp mailing list.