- For this video, I'm going to be showing you how
to connect your MailChimp account to your WordPress website.
If that sounds like something you're
interested in, stay tuned; it's coming up next.
(glitch, static)
Now for the last week or so, I've been
putting together a whole bunch of,
or a series of MailChimp videos for you.
How to's, how to do WooCommerce,
how to do a whole bunch of different things with MailChimp,
pop-up forms, that type of thing.
A lot of you have asked, how do I get
a signup form on my WordPress website?
Well, with this plugin by Ibericode, it does just that.
So I'm going to show you how to install the plugin,
how to set up all the settings,
and how to actually put up a signup form.
All right, so let's get started.
So, the first thing we got to do is install the plugin.
So we go to plugins, add new,
we search for MailChimp for...
WordPress.
And this is it right here, it's by Ibericode.
One million plus active installations.
Updated three weeks ago, and five stars.
You can't beat that, my friends.
Click install,
click activate,
and let's get started on setting up this plugin.
So it's right down here, MailChimp for WP.
Go down to MailChimp and right away, it'll say,
"Hey! You're not connected!"
So just like in the previous videos I did
on connecting plugins to MailChimp,
it asks for the API keys.
We're going to go grab that, and that's under
account, extras, API key.
We're going to grab ours, copy, go over to our plugin.
Paste it in, save changes.
All right, MailChimp says, "Ah!
I see! Yes, we are now connected!"
So it'll do a quick refresh and it'll load
all the lists that you have in your MailChimp account.
So you don't have to do anything right here.
We're just going to click on save changes,
just in case it missed anything, okay?
The next step, we're going to go down to form.
Here it's going to ask, "What is the name of this form?"
This is an internal thing,
it doesn't matter what you call it.
You can call it Default, you can
call it Sign Up,
Home Page, you know, whatever you want to call it.
Maybe Sidebar, something like that.
Select the list that you want this form attached to.
So we'll do the free ebook signup.
Click on "add new form."
Aha, success!
Form successfully saved.
That's good news, right?
And it'll say, heads up, your form is missing
list fields that are required in MailChimp.
Well why are they saying what's required?
Well, your list settings are tied to this plugin now,
because we made that connection, right?
So anything you do in MailChimp, you'll list settings.
Not list settings, it's list settings,
and then list fields and merge tags.
That's where you'll have your actual list fields.
If you were to remove first name, or add first name,
or make it required, or all that,
then things would change over here under form fields.
It'll give you more options because
you've changed things on MailChimp.
I hope that makes sense.
So they're connected.
So I have my first name as required in
my form field over in MailChimp,
so it's saying, hey, you have it required.
If you don't want it required,
go over to MailChimp and fix it.
So I'm just going to add the field "first name."
Now, a couple of things to point out.
So we're in the HTML, this is behind the scenes of the form.
If I were to click my cursor right here,
I'll put first name there.
So it'll be first name, and placeholder text
is whatever you want, I'll just do First Name,
and I will click "add to form."
Now see how "first name" came below "email address?"
If you're not familiar with HTML,
don't worry about it, don't freak out about it,
this is a very simple thing to take a look at.
Basically the P's are paragraph tags,
and we have a label for the form field,
and then we have the form field itself.
So it's very basic HTML, don't freak out about it.
But just so you know, that's what it's doing.
So if you wanted to have "first name,"
you could certainly undo it, take it off,
and because I have it required, it's going to pop up again.
So if I put my cursor at the top here,
if I put it right up here in front here,
and click on "first name," and add to form,
it'll pop up above email address form.
You could certainly copy and paste them
however you'd like to have them in there.
Let's just go over some of the other options here.
I could add in last name if I wanted to,
I could add in other interests.
Now that's something that I've set up
on my MailChimp account, my list settings,
and I'm not going to go over that
in this video, but maybe in a future video.
Some of the other form fields on here is the submit button,
and since I already have a submit button,
I don't have to click on that.
If I click on that, it'll pop up and say,
"Do you want to add to form?"
And I'm not going to do that.
And we have list choice, so we could
actually put in a check box for any of your subscribers
to click on any of your lists.
If they want to subscribe to all of them, none of them,
and they could single out which ones
they want to subscribe to, which is pretty neat.
Form action gives the ability for people to
unsubscribe or subscribe, so you could have it,
by default, you could have it selected on "Subscribe."
So it's just more transparency for people to,
let's say I'm already subscribed
to your list, how do I unsubscribe?
They just click on that.
It'll show up as a radio button.
They can select which one they want,
or you could have a drop-down button.
I'm just going to leave that as is
because we want people to subscribe by default
without having it listed there.
Once we're all happy with our form,
we're going to click on "save changes."
At the top, it says we can preview that form.
If we preview that form, it's going to create a page
and draft on WordPress to preview that form.
So we can do that now.
And this is what it looks like.
What it's taking in is the default
font style and default button color for the
theme that I have on here, which is the 2017 theme.
So let's go back.
The other thing that this plugin does is it offers you
the ability to put this form anywhere you want.
You could put it in a footer, you could put it in a widget,
you could put it in a page or post.
So we can just grab that shortcode, go to pages,
click on "add new," and make sure you're on the text side.
And just say, "Sign up for our newsletter."
Then paste in that shortcode.
Go to visual, save it as a draft.
Let's do Sign Up here for the title,
and preview.
There you go.
So there it is.
Sign up for our newsletter, first name, last name.
Sorry, first name, email address.
Let's go back to form.
There are tabs at the top here
that we're going to go through next.
We have our basic form now.
Now we have the ability to go in and
set what messages people will see once they subscribe.
So we'll click on "messages."
You can change these any way you want.
You can say "Thank you, your signup request was successful.
Please check your email inbox to confirm."
So it'll show up right below the signup box in green text.
And the same thing with invalid email address,
so it'll verify that it actually is an email address,
or if things are missing, or if you've already subscribed,
or if something went wrong, et cetera, et cetera.
All right, then let's go to the next tab.
This is form settings, so this is
specific settings to MailChimp,
so you want to make sure you're selecting on the right list.
If you want to have a double opt-in,
or you don't want to have a double opt-in, I'll say no.
So it's up to you whether you want
double opt-in or not, it depends on your audience.
I know there was a question the other day,
someone posted in the comments of the video,
"Do I put in double opt-in, do I not?"
That's all up to you and your audience.
If they want to feel more secure about it
and they want to go through the process of
the extra step of actually double opting in,
if you want to do that, or if your
audience is aware enough to do that,
then by all means, do double opt-in.
But if not, just keep it turned off.
Next one down is updating existing subscribers.
So when a person does subscribe and
maybe they have a different name but the same email address,
or maybe some other field that you've added in,
like a company or something like that,
and they've clicked subscribe,
even though it'll tell them that they've already subscribed,
you want the information that they put in,
to see if it's different, do you want to
update the existing subscribers.
And I usually keep that as no, but you could say yes.
The other option here is, do you want to
hide the form after a successful signup?
And I always say no.
It's just something that I just keep on the sidebar
at all times, whether you're signed up or not.
And the last one down here is
actually putting in a redirect URL.
This is something that I would highly recommend because
in Google analytics, then you can track that as a goal.
So I would put in a thank you page here,
and in the thank you page, you would put in,
"Thanks so much for joining our list,
here's all the benefits you get from
joining our list, and stay tuned."
Just give them a heads-up on what's coming next.
What can you expect, all that type of stuff.
When you're done with all this,
make sure you click on "save changes."
The next one down is appearance.
Now I showed you on the, let's see, where is it.
There it is.
On the draft that we have of our form,
I've informed you that it is actually taking in
the blog theme, colors, and font,
and sure enough, here it is in the form
settings, the form appearance.
So you could change that to light,
dark, red, green, or blue.
And I sometimes go with light or blue,
because they're kind of neutral colors.
Depends on your theme, obviously,
if you want dark, red, or green.
Just try them out, see which one goes with your theme.
Now let's go down to the next two things on the plugin.
We have integrations.
With integrations, you can integrate with
other plugins or other WordPress features.
For instance, I have an available integration
with the comment form and the registration.
So it'll subscribe anybody that
comments on my WordPress website,
and it'll subscribe anybody that uses
a registration form on my website.
And you can take a look here, the other ones
are all grayed out because
I don't have those plugins installed.
The last one down here in
the MailChimp for WP plugin is "other."
You can do user usage tracking, and you can also do logging.
So you can do errors and warnings only, or everything.
Then click on "save changes."
You'll also have a debug log right down here,
so if anything does go wrong, and you have
errors and warnings switched on,
you'll see it down here, what's going on.
Let's go ahead and test out our form.
I'll put in my name, and my email address,
and click "sign up."
And there it is.
There's the message, it's actually not in green,
it's in a black, but here it is right here.
Thank you, your signup request was successful.
Please check your email inbox to confirm.
So that's how you add a MailChimp signup form
to your WordPress website, with this plugin
called MailChimp for WordPress, by Ibericode.
Now you can get a little bit more fancy here,
you could create a landing page,
or a more extensive opt-in page,
like I have over on Security Marketing Solutions.
I have a free e-book that you can
go over there and check out if you want.
Free e-book for protection professionals.
I have a picture of it, it's very simple layout.
It's a little landing page, opt-in page.
This is what you can create, and
so you can make it a little bit more extensive
than just, "Hey, sign up for our newsletter."
You could give a lot more reasons for people to sign up,
do a gift card, do something that'll
entice people to click the signup.
So there you go.
I hope this has answered those questions
that you were asking about in the comments.
And do please leave comments below this video,
I really appreciate it.
And for more about me, go to LarrySnow.me,
and I'll see you in the next video.
(rock music)