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Creating Custom Sign up Forms in MailChimp

July 29, 2011 By Leave a Comment

In a past article I talked about a WordPress plugin called “MailChimp Widget” that allows you to generate a signup form on the fly using a widget for placement in WordPress which was created by James Lafferty.  Feel free to read the article called “How to Integrate MailChimp into WordPress” if that is something you’d like to do.  What I wanted to show you today is how to create a custom sign up form in MailChimp regardless of which type of website you are running including WordPress, Joomla, Magento or even something with custom HTML and CSS code.  Its really cool and it won’t take you that long to get the code to use on your website.  Some things that you will need to do this successfully include…

  • An understanding of HTML and CSS (and maybe a little JavaScript)
  • A MailChimp account and an email list setup for your website
  • And access to your website’s code

Now that you’ve got all that lets dive into this in greater detail and talk about how to generate the custom code for the sign up form in MailChimp.

Step 1: Login to your MailChimp account and select your website’s list from the “Design signup forms” drop down

Step 2: Click on “Share It” tab

Step 3: Select the “Create Form HTML” option.  You can see the click path outlined below to get access to the HTML form.

Step 4: Paste the code into an editor and you can begin to customize the font, spacing, line heights, etc or use the user interface in MailChimp (Shown below) by selecting a number of customization options.  Personally I would rather code then do it through clicks but with sections including Define Form Structure, Form Colours and Enhance Your Form by simply clicking the radio button, checkboxes and input fields options.

Step 5: Lastly copy the code that you’ve edited into your webpage or website depending on where you want to see it (Example “In the Header, Footer or Body)

I hope that if you are using MailChimp you will consider this option when you think about customizing a signup form for your website.  For the more experienced people out there I would suggest copying the signup form code into an editor and customize it through code as you will be able to accomplish even more in terms of look and feel.  Enjoy!

Filed Under: Email Marketing Tagged With:

How to Integrate MailChimp into WordPress

May 18, 2011 By 8 Comments

MailChimp is a great email marketing software that allows you to do a lot of email marketing for your personal blog or business website.  There are a number of great WordPress plugins that allow you to extend MailChimp into WordPress.

Today i wanted to talk about how you can go about integrating MailChimp into your WordPress website but before we get started there is one thing that you will need to do other than signing up for a MailChimp account in order to use MailChimp plugins on your WordPress website.  You will need to create a list in your MailChimp account first and once you’ve created a list in your MailChimp account you will generate an API Key which most plug-ins developed for use with WordPress require to interface with MailChimp.  In order to generate the API Key in MailChimp just do the following when you are logged into your MailChimp account…

 

Once you click on “API Keys & Info” you will see the following information needed to generate the key…

 

Now we can get to the “fun” part where we integrate it with one of the many MailChimp plugins available for WordPress today.  For the purposes of this article I’ve decided to use the MailChimp Widget plugin for WordPress because its one of the best that i’ve been able to find to date and its easy to use.

Now assuming you’ve taken the steps above to find your MailChimp API key, these next steps should be fairly easy to complete and get MailChimp working on your WordPress website.

1. When you login into your WordPress website go to the heading labelled “Plugins”

2. Click on the “Add New” button by the heading “Manage Plugins”

3. Next, search for the term “MailChimp Widget” created by “James Lafferty”

4. Lastly, activate the plugin and install it and then go to “Settings” on the left side navigation menu of your WordPress Dashboard and click on “MailChimp Widget” where you will insert the MailChimp API key that you collected in the previous steps in MailChimp.  The screen view for the API key should look similar to the following…

 

This wraps up the activation and installation portion of this article.  Now its time for the fun stuff, implementing the MailChimp Widget on your WordPress website.

1. The first thing that you are going to do after activating and installing the plugin is go to “Widgets” under the “Appearance” tab on your left side navigation menu in WordPress.

2. Next drag and drop the “MailChimp Widget” into the “Sidebar” area.

3. Configure the settings of this widget by clicking the “expand” arrow and find the MailChimp email list you want to use with this Widget and select it and click “Save”.  The MailChimp Widget once you’ve dragged and dropped into the sidebar area will look similar to the screenshot below.

 

4. Finally you should see the newly created widget on your WordPress site ready to collect people’s email addresses

 

 

Filed Under: Email Marketing, WordPress Plugins Tagged With: , , , , ,

3 Ways to Reach Your Customers for Free

November 24, 2010 By Leave a Comment

If you are a small to mid-sized company running a website for your business then you probably look for solutions to get the word out about your business that are free (or almost free).  Today I am going to talk about 3 ways for you to reach your customers for free including RSS Feeds, Email Marketing and the use of Facebook pages.

1. RSS Feeds – These types of feeds are pretty much available to anyone online today and if not then there are tools available to allow you to create RSS feeds for your website.  RSS (Real Simple Syndication) really came into its own with the invention of blogging and its use on websites albeit company or personal have exploded since then.  Today many people are comfortable subscribing to RSS feeds so this definitely provides a viable way for you to reach more of your customers.

2. Email Marketing – There are many email marketing platforms available today for use in your business.  I use MailChimp for my own email marketing efforts (A basic account and more importantly free account allow you up to 1,000 subscribers and 6,000 sends).  Developing an email marketing list and actively building it can provide your business a way to attract repeat visitors for free or almost free depending on the email marketing platform that you choose.  Also, your website will become less and less dependent on SEO efforts alone to attract people to your website when you use email marketing.

3. Facebook pages – I am pretty sure that most people know what Facebook is but maybe you haven’t thought of what Facebook can do for your business.  Creating a Facebook page for your business or a product that you offer can help you reach more people that are interested in your product or business.  With so many people currently on Facebook today this has become an acceptable way to promote to your customers and potential customers and the best part is its viral marketing at its finest.

Whether you choose to use all or one of these ways to reach your customers is up to you but one thing you can be sure of is that you are going to find is that you can reach your customers faster and cheaper then ever before.  After all, with a free price tag attached to it how can you not try out at least one of these methods?

Filed Under: Email Marketing, Online Advertising & Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Website Tips Tagged With: , , ,