Money is in the list, Yes, we all know that, at least, the people who are serious about blogging. I have spent years trying different things, just to see whats works and what not.
I wish to write all my experiences on Asiogroup. Unfortunately, I can only write one post at a time.
And today, we talk about how to get started with MailChimp, If you are still curious why MailChimp? Go read the comparison of Aweber and MailChimp and come back fast.
Mailchimp is Startup friendly, meaning you can start using it from the day your blog gets live and you don’t have to spend money on it.
It lets anyone start collecting emails for Free for up to 2000 email addresses and send 12000 emails per month. Other will start charging money right way.
Create MailChimp Account
set of RSS Tags given by MailChimp and sign up for free. Once you are done confirming your account. You can login to your account.
Create a list in MailChimp
set of RSS Tags given by MailChimp, here, you can create your first list.
Give it a name, it can be something like ‘Blog Updates’ or ‘Free eBook/ Free Report’ the basic idea is to give it a descriptive name so that, in future, if you create more than one list, you will know which list you want to send your email to.
Once the list is created, You will be redirected to a page where you can create General Signup forms and Subscription forms to embed them in your blog.
Designing the Signup forms
In General Forms, you can make changes to the sign-up form page, edit the subscription confirmation email and other pages. You can change the colors and other elements to make them look similar to your blog’s design.
You don’t have to edit everything, just make edits to the Signup form and the Opt-in Confirmation email. You can always come back to make changes.
Putting the Subscription Form in your blog
Now go to Embedded Forms and get the HTML codes to paste it in your blog. You can put the Codes in a ‘Text Widget’ and put them in the sidebar by going to Widgets under Appearance in your WordPress Dashboard.
Note: You can use Quick Adsense plugin to insert the Subscription form below the post.
The basic setup of MailChimp to collect emails of visitors ends here. You will be able to collect the emails after you put the Subscription form codes in your blog.
Sending Emails to the list
The Campaign section in MailChimp sends the emails to the list. You can create different types of campaigns.
If you want to send an email you can select Regular campaign or Plain text campaign.
You can also create an RSS-driven campaign to send your blog updates to the list. With that, you can write a generic email with a set of RSS Tags given by MailChimp itself to change the content of the email dynamically.
RSS Campaign is super awesome stuff to automate the process of sending updates to the Subscribers.
If your blog gets updates multiple times a day, you can set to send the emails once a day, once a week or on selected days. (You are in total control)
How to Increase the Subscription rate on your blog
Everything about setting up an Email list with MailChimp has been covered in this post. And you will be able to collect emails of people who visit your blog. But you may also want to know how you can increase the opt-in rate.
There are many premium tools available in the market right now that look professional as well as perform better. I have listed them in a separate post.
And I have been using WP-Subscribe Pro from a long time, It integrates well with MailChimp and works smartly to capture emails on the visitors. You can learn about it in detail ➞
You must also read our guide to Build an Email List which talks about each and every aspect of building an email list. Learn more ➞
