1.2 Add MailChimp Signup to Your WordPress Site

[SOUND] Hello and welcome this Tuts+ Coffee Break Course on adding MailChimp Signup to your WordPress site. In this course, I'm gonna show you how to add a widget that let's people register for your MailChimp mailing list on your WordPress site. And this is a dummy site that I've set up using a theme that I downloaded from the theme directory, but you can use this with any theme that's got widget areas built-in. So, I've created a MailChimp account for myself and I've got a few mailing lists here. What I'm gonna do is use this, my Compass Design Newsletter, which is my agency's newsletter. So, I'm gonna add that my widget, but the first thing I'll need to do is install a plug-in. So, let's go to the Plug-in screen and click Add New to add a new plug-in to my site. Now, I'll type in my keyword here, which is MailChimp, so, now I got a list of some plug-ins for MailChimp. I'm gonna use this plug-in here, MailChimp for WordPress because it's been very recently updated and it's the most popular MailChimp plug-in there is. So I'll install that, and then once it's installed I'll activate it. I click Activate to do that, and then the plug-in is active on my site and that gives me a widget that I can use. So, if I go into the Appearance and then Widgets screen, or alternatively you could do this via the Customizer. You can see that I've got the MailChimp Signup form widget here. But before I add that to my sidebar, I need to configure the plugin. And I do that down here via the MailChimp for WP link that's been added to my menu. So let's just click on that and that gives us a screen where we need to enter an API Key. So, I'll click on this link, get your API Key here and that takes me to my MailChimp account. I'm already logged in MailChimp, if you're not, you'll need to log in here. And then, under your API Keys here, I'll scroll down and I'll copy the API Key that's been created for me by MailChimp. If you haven't already gotten an API Key, you click Create A Key here, I've already got one, so I'm going to copy it. Okay, back to my Setting screen and my plug-in and to that I click on Save Changes and that's working. So, I'm now connected to my MailChimp account and as you can see down here, it's pulled up the lists that I've got in MailChimp. So I can then link my widget to any of my mailing lists, so now, I'm going to add my widget and I'll do this by the Customizer. So I'll go into the Customizer, click on Widgets and I'm gonna select the Sidebar because that's where I want my widget to go. I click on Add A Widget here and then select MailChimp Signup form. And here I'm gonna give it a title. So I'll Save that but it won't actually work until I've hooked it up to a form. Because this plug-in requires you to create a form which will then be displayed in your widget. And the plug-in will give me the Edit Form screen. So, I'm gonna call it Sign up for newsletter, I'll save it. And then I'll check some of the fields that have been added to it by default. So you can see here, email address has been added and the submit button. You could add other forms as well such as first name, last name and company. And you could also give people a choice, of which of your newsletter lists they want to sign up for. So you can create more than one listing MailChimp and give people the option to sign up to whichever ones most relevant to them. In my case, I'm just gonna use the one list, so I'll keep things simple. You can also edit the messages relating to your form. So, there are messages for somebody subscribed if they've been put in valid fields, and other things as well. So take some time to scroll through these and identify what you want to edit. So, I'll save my changes and then take a look at Settings, here you can select which list your form relates to. So, I'm gonna select Compass Design Newsletter. By default you have double opt-in selected and you can also update existing subscribers if this duplication. You can choose whether or not to hide the form after somebody signed up, and you can also redirect people to a specific page on your site, using this URL here. So you could create a page on your site that's specifically for people who've signed up for the newsletter. Maybe giving them an example of a newsletter or thanking them for signing up. So now I click on Save Changes there, and have a look at the final tab. Now, here my form style I can either use themes that are provided with the plug-in, or I can inherit the styling from my theme. I'm gonna stick with that, so, let's take a look now at the sign up form in my site. It's not all that visible, it's down at the bottom of my widgets. So, let's get back into the Customizer and move it up a bit, below the search bar. Click Save and Publish, go back to my live site and refresh it and there it is, little bit more obvious. So, somebody can simply type their email address in here and they'll be automatically signed up to my mailing list in MailChimp. So, that's how you add MailChimp Signup to your WordPress site. I hope you found this course useful. Thanks for watching.