How to Integrate MailChimp With WordPress in Few Simple Steps

As a business owner, keeping your customers coming back is key. Repeat customers are loyal, and staying in touch with them after their first purchase helps maintain that loyalty.

Email marketing is one of the most effective ways to build these relationships and grow your business. It’s simple and impactful, offering an average return of $42 for every dollar spent.

While there are many tools businesses use for email marketing, MailChimp is hands down the most popular choice. It allows you to build a subscriber list, run email campaigns, and much more.

In this blog, I’ll explain why you should use MailChimp with WordPress, its basics, and how to integrate it in just a few simple steps.

Why Is It Important to Build an Email List?

Building an email list is super important. About 59% of consumers say that marketing emails affect their buying choices. Plus, email marketing is a powerful strategy to bring back cart abandoners and urge them to make a purchase.

Email marketing lets businesses connect to their consumers in a natural and personal way, unlike paid ads. Additionally, an email stays in someone’s inbox until they decide to act on it, while social media posts and ads can quickly get buried under new content.

Now that you know the importance of building an email marketing list, let’s why you should consider using MailChimp with your WordPress site.

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Why Use MailChimp for WordPress Sites?

If you have a WordPress site, like an online store or blog, you may want an easy way to keep your visitors updated on new products, services, or content. This is where Mailchimp can be helpful.

Mailchimp offers features like automation, A/B testing, analytics, and audience segmentation, allowing you to manage email campaigns with ease. The interface is simple to use, so you can quickly create attractive emails to send to your subscribers.

I’ll show you how easy it is to integrate MailChimp with a WordPress site and customize MailChimp forms in just a bit…

How to Integrate MailChimp With WordPress?

Integrating MailChimp with WordPress is super easy. Essentially, there are 2 steps to it:

1. Create a MailChimp account
2. Download the “MC4WP: Mailchimp for WordPress” plugin and use the API to connect MailChimp to your WordPress site.

Intimidating as it may appear, it is really not. Let’s get started.

Step # 1: Create and Set Up an Account on the MailChimp Website

• Go to the Mailchimp website and click on the Sign Up button.

• Click on the Sign-Up button again on the pricing page.

• Next, create an account with email or sign up with Google.

• Enter your email address, choose a username, and set a password for your account.
• Follow the prompts on the screen to complete the setup process.

• After your account is created, you’ll be taken to your Mailchimp dashboard, which will look like the screenshot below. Click on the Create button.

• Next, select the Signup Form and Embedded Form option.

• This will take you to a new screen, where you’ll be asked to name your form. When you’re done, click on “Begin.”

• Next, you can customize the look of your form or click on Continue. Like I’m doing here.

• Now your form will be ready.

• Now, to test the form and see if it is working properly, you need to embed the form code we created earlier. For this, I’ll create a new post in my WordPress dashboard.

• Now, add a new block.

• Select Custom HTML block.

• Next, paste the embed code into the Custom HTML block.

• Now, preview your post, and you’ll see your embedded MailChimp form.

Here’s where we’ll take a quick pause. You see, if we simply add our email in the form and click on subscribe, nothing will really happen. This is because we haven’t connected our website with MailChimp yet.

Step # 2: Install MC4WP: Mailchimp for WordPress Plugin & Generate API Key

Now, we need to install a plugin called “MC4WP: Mailchimp for WordPress” and then get an API key from MailChimp and connect it with the plugin.

Here’s how to do this:

• First, go to the Mailchimp for WordPress plugin and click on “Get your API key here.” This will take you to MailChimp, where you’ll be able to generate a new API key.

• Click on the “Create A Key” button.

• Now, give a name to your API Key and click on “Generate Key”.

• Now copy the code to your clipboard.

• Now, head back to the plugin and paste the API. Click “Save Changes,” and you’re done.

• Now you can see that we’re fully connected.

• Now, you can go back to the form we created and click subscribe. As you can see, emails have been added to my MailChimp account.

That is it. This is how easy it is to integrate MailChimp with WordPress. Integrating it with WooCommerce is just as easy. Let’s check that out, shall we?

Integrate MailChimp With WooCommerce

We already have a MailChimp account ready, so we just need to install the WooCommerce plugin on top of our WordPress site.

If you don’t have a WooCommerce site yet, I highly recommend using Cloudways WooCommerce hosting if you want a fast, secure, and scalable platform. With our WooCommerce hosting, you’ll have WooCommerce pre-installed on your WordPress website.

Since I already have a WordPress site, I’ll just install and activate the Mailchimp for WooCommerce plugin:

• First, log in to your WordPress website and navigate to WordPress Dashboard > Plugin > Add New.
• Search Mailchimp for WooCommerce on the top-right search bar.
• Click on the Install button.

• Now click on the Activate button after the installation.

• Now that the plugin is installed and activated go to the Mailchimp plugin page and click on the Connect Account button.

• Add your Mailchimp account credential in the pop-up modal, and click Log In.

• On the next screen, click Allow to authorize access to the account.

• Once you log in, you’ll be redirected to the WooCommerce Store Settings page.
• Enter the Store Settings’ name, email, and other details.

• Under the Locale Settings section, select the physical location of your store.

• Scroll down to the Permission Settings to select the minimum permission to manage Mailchimp for the WooCommerce plugin. Check the circle next to administrators and then click Next from the top-right corner of the page.

• On the next screen, select your audience. By default, I have only one audience created and pre-selected.
• Next, enter the From Name, From Email, your Subject line, select the language, and a message that reminds your customers how they subscribe to your emails.

• Under the Opt-in Settings tab, choose how you want the opt-in to your newsletter checkbox to render at the checkout page. Select the Checkbox display options to enter the Message for the opt-in checkbox.

• To send targeted marketing emails to your customers, you can add tags to your new subscribers through the WooCommerce store under Subscribers Settings. You can tag your new subscribers as ‘WooCommerce’ or whatever tag name you like.

• Under Product Settings, you can change the default Product Image Size used by abandoned cart emails, order notifications, and product recommendations. I’ll leave the size as default.

• Now scroll up and click on the START SYNC button

• The Synchronization process may take some time if you have many products and customers. The Overview tab shows the progress of synchronization.

• If you have any issues with the connection, you can click the RESYNC NOW button by scrolling down to resync the audience without losing any of the data.

Congratulations! Your Mailchimp integration with the WooCoomerce store has been completed. Now, go to your WooCommerce store checkout page. You will notice that the ‘Subscribe to our newsletter‘ checkbox is selected by default.

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Best Plugins for WordPress MailChimp Integration

There are many WordPress MailChimp integration plugins. Here’s a quick summary of their features and ratings.

1. Another Mailchimp Widget by MotoPress

The Another Mailchimp Widget is a straightforward plugin that helps website owners integrate Mailchimp subscription forms directly into their site. It’s simple to use, with options for adding forms via widget or shortcode. This allows users to sign up for your Mailchimp lists and groups effortlessly.

Key Features

• Offers both widget and shortcode options for easy form placement on your website.
• Supports customizable fields like email, first name, and last name, with options to hide or display each one.
• Lets you subscribe users to specific Mailchimp lists or groups by entering their IDs in the shortcode.
• Offers the option to use placeholder text for a cleaner, more intuitive form layout.
• Allows custom success and failure messages after a form submission.
• Supports multiple list subscriptions, so users can be added to more than one Mailchimp list at a time.

Rating and Reviews

The plugin holds a 4.6/5 rating based on 9 reviews.

2. MC4WP: Mailchimp for WordPress by ibericode

MC4WP: Mailchimp for WordPress is a plugin designed to simplify adding Mailchimp sign-up forms to your WordPress site. It allows seamless integration with various WordPress forms and makes it easy to grow your email list. Whether you’re looking to create a new form or integrate with existing ones, this plugin helps streamline the process.

Key Features

• Connects to your Mailchimp account quickly for efficient list building.
• Supports creating user-friendly, mobile-optimized forms with full control over fields using native HTML.
• Integrates seamlessly with popular WordPress plugins
• Offers custom integration options and a PHP API for more advanced setups.
• Provides premium features for WooCommerce, including tracking order data in Mailchimp.
• Developer-friendly with extensive hooks and filters for customization.
• Compatible with PHP 8.4 and backward-compatible with PHP 5.6.

Rating and Reviews

With 1,464 reviews, MC4WP holds an impressive 4.8/5 rating.

3. MailChimp Forms by MailMunch

Last, we have MailChimp Forms by MailMunch. This plugin provides a straightforward way to turn your site visitors into email subscribers using customizable opt-in forms. It integrates with Mailchimp to sync subscriber details like names and birthdays. You can add these forms to various parts of your website, whether it’s a blog, eCommerce store, or regular pages, offering flexible options for form placement.

Features

• Offers unlimited opt-in forms for any Mailchimp list.
• Connects with your Mailchimp account without requiring API keys.
• It supports various form types, such as popups, embedded forms, sidebar widgets, top bars, and scroll boxes.
• Provides deep integration with Mailchimp to collect additional data like phone numbers and tags.
• Supports A/B testing and provides detailed analytics for optimizing form performance.
• Fully GDPR compliant, with features like Google reCAPTCHA and customizable thank-you messages.
• Allows advanced subscriber management, including profile updates and list removal.
• Includes a landing page builder and supports Mailchimp interest groups.

Rating and Reviews

With an average rating of 4.6/5 based on 371 reviews, MailChimp Forms by MailMunch stands out for its comprehensive form-building options and seamless integration with MailChimp.

Summary

Email marketing is a must for any business. It is cheaper than paid advertising and drives faster results with lower ROI than organic marketing. As a marketer with experience in both, I can definitely say email marketing is relevant in 2024.

I hope this article has helped you understand how to integrate Mailchimp with WordPress to build your email list.

If you don’t have hosting yet or are considering migrating, I highly recommend Cloudways Managed WordPress hosting.

You can also check out how to integrate your MailChimp API with PHP on Cloudways. If you still have any queries or comments related to this article, feel free to ask via the comment section below.