It’s no secret that email marketing is one of the most effective marketing channels out there, offering an incredible ROI of up to $42 for every $1 spent. It offers some unique advantages over other forms of marketing and helps you build a base of loyal users independent of other sources of traffic that tend to be mostly out of your control.
However, you need the right tool to power your email marketing efforts. And as a small business manager or event manager, you probably can’t find anything better than Mailchimp. It offers a perfect balance of simplicity and functionality. Combining it with an opt-in tool like MailOptin to collect emails is going to help you build a solid email marketing foundation.
With that said, let us begin with creating an opt-in form with MailOptin and integrating Mailchimp with the versatile opt-in tool.
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How to Create a Mailchimp Email Signup Form
MailOptin is one of the most flexible yet easy-to-use email opt-in WordPress plugins out there for Mailchimp users. It not only offers seamless integration with Mailchimp but also comes with many other features that you can leverage to take your email marketing to the next level.
Step 1: Install and Activate the MailOptin Plugin
Once you have downloaded MailOptin on your computer, you need to upload it to your WordPress site. To do so, click on “Add New” under the “Plugins” menu on your WordPress dashboard.
Next, click on the Upload Plugin button at the top. You will be able to upload the MailOptin plugin file here.
Add MailOptin Plugin through WordPress Plugins screen
Once you install it on your WordPress website, click on the Activate button to put it in action.
Step 2: Integrate Your Mailchimp Account with MailOptin
You need to integrate Mailchimp with MailOptin to make the former send emails to your subscribers who opt-in using MailOptin. You need to get the API key from your Mailchimp account and use it to connect Mailchimp with MailOptin.
Log in to your Mailchimp account, click on the user photo button that appears at the button, and then click on the Account option. Once you’re there, click on Extras, and then API Keys. You will find your API key on that page. Copy it.
Find your Mailchimp API key
Go back to your WordPress site. Click on the Integrations option under the MailOptin tab. You will find a long list of email marketing tools and services on the left. Scroll down to find Mailchimp and click on it.
Paste your API key there and click on the Save Changes button. If you have put in your Mailchimp API key correctly, you will see that it has connected successfully.
Mailchimp connected to MailOptin
Step 3: Create an Email Opt-In Form in MailOptin
This is probably the most fun part of the entire process. You get to play around with different customization options and create something you will be proud of.
It starts with clicking on the Optin Campaigns option under MailOptin. Now, you have 5 different types of opt-in forms to choose from.
- Lightbox
- In-post
- Sidebar/Widget
- Notification-bar
- Slide-in
Choose one of them depending on how and on which areas of your site you plan to collect your users’ emails. There is also a huge range of different themes for each of these form types, and you can choose the one which blends in well with your site’s design.
Give a title to your form and choose the theme you want. Now you will land on the page of customizations!
You can change your opt-in form in every way imaginable. You can change the color combination, size, the way it pops up, background color and so much more. And that’s just for the design of your form. You can of course also customize the headline, text color, size, and font, as well as the description and the note that appears at the bottom of your opt-in form.
You can also add as many fields as you want based on how much information you want to collect from your subscribers. However, remember that the lower the number of fields, the higher would be the conversion rate. Adding too many unnecessary fields is just going to lower the number of subscribers you get.
By default, you get a name and an email address field. We believe it should be enough for most users. Apart from adding more fields and many other functionalities, you can also customize the call-to-action button the way you want.
Customize your opt-in form
You can also make changes using HTML if you would like to get your hands dirty with some code. In addition, depending on the type of form you choose, there are also going to be many more functionalities and customization options. Display rules, for one, is one area where you can get as specific as you want with your targeting. You can also choose whether your subscribers get a confirmation message or are redirected to some other page of your choice after they opt in. You can do this under the After Conversion option.
Another amazing feature is the ability to lock content below the opt-in form for the in-post form type. You can use this for the more premium posts to increase your conversion rate and get more subscribers. Once you have made all the customizations you want, click on the Save Changes button at the top. Then go back to MailOptin in your WordPress dashboard.
Click on the Activated slider to activate the form you want.
Activate the opt-in form
That’s it! Your perfect opt-in form will go live on your site and those subscribers will start showing up on your list. However, remember that it’s going to be important to track registrations and other important email marketing metrics so that you can make necessary tweaks to refine your approach and get the most out of your setup.
But what do you do after people sign up to be your subscribers? Well, you set up an automated email newsletter that notifies your subscribers through email when you publish a new post. This can not only be a very effective way of getting some good initial traction on your new posts but also keep your subscriber list active.
Setting up an automated email newsletter might seem like a very technical task, but when you have a powerful, beginner-friendly combination of Mailchimp and MailOptin, all it would take is a few clicks to set up.
Setting Up Automated Email Newsletters
You can set up an automated email newsletter to send out an email to your Mailchimp subscribers every time you publish a new post. The good thing is that once set up, this would require absolutely no effort on your part.
So let’s walk you through the steps to follow below.
Click on the Emails option under MailOptin. Next, click on the Add New button at the top.
Create a new email
You will get two options on the next screen: Email Automation and Broadcast. Choose the former. Put a title and select “New Post Notification” from the dropdown menu.
Here you will get to choose between coding your own template or using the pre-existing one built within MailOptin. Once you click on the standard pre-existing template, you will land on the screen where you can customize everything and save the automated email template and design.
Customize automated email template
Here are the main customizations you will find under the Settings menu:
- Automation title
- Email subject
- Content type — whether you want to display a larger part of your post content or just an excerpt
- The content length field allows you to set a particular number of words to be displayed, while also offering the option to display full post content
- Under the Recipient section, you need to choose Mailchimp
Select an email recipient
- You also need to select your email list you want to send these automated emails to
- If you have set up segmentation for your list, you can also choose a specific segment
- Finally, you also have the option to schedule these emails to be sent after a certain time of your new post going live, and of course, you can also just choose to send them out immediately
There you go! By following these easy steps you would be able to create an automated email newsletter that notifies your subscribers when you publish a new post on your site.
But is that all? Certainly not! Let us also give you a quick overview of what else you can do with the powerful combination of Mailchimp and MailOptin.
Display Rules
The display rules, in particular, are something that offers a great level of versatility for your opt-in form and its targeting. You can set up page-level targeting, user-level targeting, and even device-level targeting.
In addition, you can activate the Click Launch feature to track the user activity and where they are clicking while being on your site. Then there’s the Exit Intent, which allows you to show the opt-in form when the user is about to leave your website.
What’s more, there are many other targeting conditions, such as:
- The ability to choose after how many seconds the opt-in form pops up
- You can also make it appear after the user has scrolled down a specific percent of your page
- Another option is to make it appear after a user has viewed a certain number of pages on your site
Then you have the ability to show the opt-in form even to visitors using Adblock, alongside some other advanced targeting conditions as well.
Set display rules and targeting options
The Email Digest
The ability to send an automated email to your subscribers when you publish a new post is great, but what if you could also send them an automated weekly round-up newsletter just as easily? That’s precisely what you can do with the email digest feature when setting up an automated email newsletter in MailOptin.
All you have to do is choose the Posts Email Digest option from the dropdown menu instead of the New Post Notification when creating new email automation.
Choose an email digest
You can choose the number of posts to include in the Email Digest, as well as how frequently you want to send it out. MailOptin currently offers 3 scheduling options: Daily, weekly and monthly.
Broadcast
Sure, the email automation functionalities are impressive. But what if you just want to send a one-off email? After all, there are going to be announcements to make and events to promote. You need to have the ability to send one-off emails for these occasions.
You can use the Broadcast setup in MailOptin for this purpose. You will find it under the Emails section under the MailOptin menu on your WordPress dashboard.
Promote events with an email broadcast
It’s very easy to set up and has pretty much the same customization options as the automated emails while being relevant to a one-off broadcast email. You just need to choose Mailchimp from the Connection dropdown menu and the broadcast email will be sent to your subscribers through Mailchimp.
Simple Steps — Big Results!
Finally, let us again reiterate the importance of email marketing. There’s no other form of marketing that can offer a better ROI for your ad spend dollars.
Follow these simple steps to build a powerful automated email marketing system for your WordPress website. It’s the first thing you should do after creating an event registration website.