E-mail is one of the fastest and the most popular ways of communication prevalent in the businesses. As emails enjoy a huge user base, email marketing has not lost its sheen among the digital marketers. Being an efficient communication channel, emails are able to take your business to a wide range of users.
However, the backbone of email marketing is the service provider that is responsible for sending bulk emails to the users and generate conversion and revenues. MailChimp is one such email marketing service provider that not only sends email newsletters and campaigns but also allows you to create email design templates without implementing HTML code. Those who love WordPress as a CMS for their website prefer MailChimp for email marketing as they gel along quite well together.
What Exactly is MailChimp and how it Works?
MailChimp is an email marketing service provider that lets you collect and store email addresses and send them email newsletter to promote your business or brand. Apart from the email campaigns, MailChimp has an additional feature that allows the email marketers to create campaigns using an easy-to-use interface.
If you are using WordPress, MailChimp turns it into an email marketing powerhouse. The popularity of Mailchimp can be assessed by the fact that more than 7 million users implement MailChimp. For simple WordPress integration, there are dedicated plugins that ease the process. Also, for on-the-fly usage, there are many mobile apps for MailChimp.
Advantages associated with MailChimp
- MailChimp allows easy creation of email templates
- Keeping track of important data is easy
- It is free for first 2000 users and 12000 monthly mails.
- Subscription cost starts from $10 for unlimited mails and increases with increasing number of users.
- You can perform A/B testing for subject lines and other components.
- Opening rates, subscriber’s location, and click-through can be recorded and tracked.
- It is optimized for mobile phones.
- The user experience is quite great.
How is MailChimp integrated with WordPress?
- As already mentioned, MailChimp integrates with WordPress without any hassle. There is a manual way as well as through a plugin to integrate MailChimp into WordPress. The first step towards the integration of MailChimp into WordPress is getting email subscription from your visitors. There are MailChimp email subscription forms that are similar to other subscription forms.
WordPress MailChimp Integration Plugin
There is a plugin called MailChimp for WordPress. To use this plugin, the users need to download, unpack and upload the plugin into the designated plugin folder. You can also install it from the backend of WordPress. After the installation is over, you need to connect the plugin with your MailChimp account.
Once the connection is made, you will get an API key from the MailChimp backend by following the path Account > Extras > API keys > Create A Key. This key just needs to be pasted in the plugin and you are connected. Now, you can create sign-up forms and get them on the website.
Manual Integration Method
Although the plugin is the best method for MailChimp integration, there are manual methods as well. MailChimp offers the subscription forms that you can copy and paste to the website. This method is usually implemented by the developers as there are more customization features that they like. There is an option of Sign up forms and create different forms like- embedded forms, Form Integration, General Forms, Subscriber’s Popups.
Apart from these two methods, there are some other plugins like SumoMe and WP PopUp plugins that aid MailChimp Integration with WordPress.
Closing Remarks
Although many new ways of digital marketing have emerged, email is still hailed as the most effective medium. With MailChimp integration with WordPress, creating and sending email newsletter has become quite a cakewalk. You can have MailChimp integrated into your WordPress through a variety of ways viz. Plugins, manual methods and others.
Author’s Bio
The post has been authored by Nola Arney who works as a web developer at HTMLPanda- PSD to responsive email service provider. Apart from having expertise in web app development, responsive web design and mobile app development, Nola also has a flair for writing and sharing her insight on the different aspects of web development, design, and marketing.
