How To Create A Newsletter Form Using Mailchimp And WPForms
Do you want to create a newsletter form to collect emails? Then you come to the right place. In this article, I will show you how to create a newsletter form using Mailchimp and WPForms.
Mailchimp is the most popular all-in-one email marketing tool.
WPForms is the most advanced and popular form-building plugin for WordPress.
WPForms comes with both plans: free and paid. But to connect WPForms and Mailchimp, you need to buy their Plus or higher plan. Their Plus plan starts from $99/year.
Their pricing plan also maintains the price to features ratio just like others, the more you paid the more features you will get.
Their higher plans come with lots of advanced add-ons like PayPal, Stripe, Salesforce, ActiveCampaign, Zapier, etc.
So, if you are an advanced WordPress user and want more features, I highly recommend you to go with their Elite plan.
But in this case, you can buy their Plus plan to use Mailchimp.
So, let’s start our step-by-step guide where I will show you how you can create a newsletter form using Mailchimp and WPForms.
Create a newsletter form using Mailchimp and WPForms
Before that, make sure you already purchase WPForms, if you don’t, then do that first.
Now, login to your WordPress dashboard and go to your Plugins option, and click Add New. Then in the search box search for “WPForms” install and activate it.
Next, you need to activate your premium license. So, go to WPForms > Settings and paste your premium license key (you will get your license key from when you purchased WPForms) and click Connect.
Step – 1. Create your newsletter form
Before, I will show you how to create your newsletter form, one more step you have to do. Go to WPForms > Addons and install and activate the Mailchimp Addon.
Now it is time to create your Mailchimp subscriber form. So, create your form (to do that, go to WPForms > Add New).
WPForms comes with lots of pre-made templates. And it also offers a Newsletter Form template. In this tutorial, I will be using the template.
If you want to create your newsletter form from scratch, select the Blank Form template.
After selecting the Newsletter Form template, you will be redirected to your form creation dashboard where you can edit your form.
Pre-build Newsletter Form template comes with two form fields: Name and Email. But if you want you can delete or add more fields.
To add new fields, simply drag and drop the fields from left to right. And to edit a field click on that field you want to edit and make changes from the left.
The most important field in a Newsletter form is the GDPR Agreement field. GDPR Agreement field helps you to agree with your user from storing their personal information and sending them email marketing materials.
To add the GDPR Agreement field, go to WPForms > Settings and click on the GDPR Enhancements checkbox.
Now, back to your form editor dashboard and drag and drop the GDPR Agreement field on your form.
Now, we have successfully created our newsletter form using WPForms in WordPress. In the next step, I will show you how to connect Mailchimp to your newsletter form.
Step – 2. Connect Mailchimp to your newsletter form
To connect your newsletter form with Mailchimp, from your form editor dashboard, go to Marketing then Mailchimp.
After that, click on the Add New Connection button.
A box will pop up asking you to name this connection.
Enter any name you want, since this is for your reference only, and click OK.
Next step, you will be asked to enter your Mailchimp API Key. To get your Mailchimp API Key, log in to your Mailchimp account. If you don’t have a Mailchimp account, do that first.
You will find your API Key in the Your Profile > Extras > API Keys Section.
Copy your key and paste it on your form creation dashboard.
Once you have done, you need to fill in more details.
First, you need to select your Mailchimp account. Then select the list where you want to add your email subscribers.
Next, click on the Email Address dropdown, and any other form fields you want to be added to your Mailchimp account when someone subscribes.
If you want to use conditional logic and the double optin option, you can enable it.
Once you have made changes, don’t forget to save all the changes.
Step – 3. Configure email and confirmation notification settings
In this step, I will show you how to configure your email notifications and confirmation email notifications.
When someone subscribes to your email newsletter you can instantly show them a confirmation message on the same page.
And you can also send them an email notification as their confirmation. In the email, you can send them some gifts like coupons (if you have an eCommerce store), pdf book, graphics, etc.
For email notification, I will highly recommend you to read this article about how to send confirmation emails to users after submitting a form.
With WPForms, you can create three types of the confirmation message.
a. With this, you can create a normal message. To create this type of message select Message from the drop-down and put your message.
b. If you select Show Page, you can redirect your users to a specific page.
If you want, you can create a ‘thank you’ page and after your users submit the form, you can redirect them to your ‘thank you’ page.
c. You can show your users a specific URL (like, you can show them a post and redirect them to any other sites). To do that, you need to select the Go to URL (Redirect) option and put your URL.
To configure all of these notification settings simply click Settings from your form editor dashboard.
At least don’t forget to save all of this.
Step – 4. Add your newsletter to your site
We are in our last step where I will show you how you can show your newsletter form to any place on your website.
You can show your newsletter form to your sidebar, any page. You also get a shortcode to show your form. WPForms is fully comfortable with all of the page builders like Elementor, Divi, etc.
To add your newsletter form to any of your posts or page, simply create a new post or page and add the WPForms widget and select your form from the dropdown and publish your post or page.
If you want to know what is the best web hosting for WordPress, then read this article about the best web hosting for WordPress.
Also, read this article on how to add a captcha to your form for protecting your form from spammers.
That’s it in this article. I hope you like it, if so then share it with your friends, and for any query comment in the comment section below. Thanks for reading.
