Launching a new website doesn’t necessarily need to be that hard nowadays, especially if you build it with WordPress. Most hosts provide you with an automatic installer that sets up the world’s most popular Content Management System in seconds, and the web is awash with themes and plugins, giving you the design and functionality you’re after.
Getting people to talk about your project is the tricky part.
There are many tools and techniques you can use to spread the word around, and Mailchimp is arguably one of the most popular ones. But what is it exactly that makes it so special? And how well does it work with WordPress? Let’s find out.
What is Mailchimp for WordPress?
Surviving in the fiercely competitive online world is a challenge most people struggle to overcome. However broad your target audience is, you usually share it with thousands of other projects, and you’re in a constant struggle to keep people interested.
Even if you create the best possible product, you still won’t get the results you’re after if you fail to get the word out. This is where Mailchimp comes in.
Mailchimp is a comprehensive email marketing service. It can handle all the email communication between you and your audience. You can use it to set up newsletters, launch campaigns, inform subscribers about new developments around your company, and send them vital instructions or tips on making the most out of your product.
With the right strategy, Mailchimp can be instrumental in building a recognizable brand that people love to interact with.
Why Mailchimp?
Mailchimp is far from the only platform of its kind. Email marketing continues to be an effective business growth catalyst, and you can find many services that help you effortlessly communicate with your audience. Yet, in terms of popularity, Mailchimp is head and shoulders above the rest. There are a couple of good reasons for this.
First, you have the price factor. Mailchimp offers a free plan that lets you send up to 10,000 emails per month to as many as 2,000 subscribers. This is significantly more than what other free services provide. It’s also more than enough to satisfy the needs of most growing businesses that have yet to build a loyal user base and don’t have a massive marketing budget.
As your website’s popularity grows, Mailchimp also gives you a range of premium plans, helping you set up a cost-effective solution that fulfills all your requirements.
You don’t need to be a technical wizard to operate it, either. Mailchimp has been around since 2001, and it currently has over 1,200 employees. In other words, plenty of people have been working on making the platform as easy to use as possible. They have also built an extensive knowledge base to help you get started, and thanks to Mailchimp’s popularity, there’s an unlimited pool of tutorials, support articles, and other online resources that can help you if you get stuck.
You get quite a lot of features, as well. Mailchimp markets itself as an all-in-one platform for building your brand, not a simple tool for sending many emails at once. Let’s have a look at some of its best features.
Top Mailchimp Features
The free plan does lack some of the extras present in Mailchimp’s paid subscription, but it still gives you many tools to engage your audience and boost your website’s popularity. Here are some of the most important ones:
- Email builder
- Custom email templates
- Landing pages
- Personalized emails
- Email analytics
- Marketing calendar
- Surveys
- Automation rules
If you have the budget, you can get even more with Mailchimp’s paid plans. Here are some of the features you can expect from them:
- Retargeting audience
- Emails with dynamic content
- Behavioral-based automation
- Custom-coded templates
- Custom workflows
- Send time optimization
As a WordPress user, you will be happy to learn that all this functionality can easily be integrated into your website. Let’s find out how.
Integrating Mailchimp into WordPress
You have two options for integrating Mailchimp with your WordPress installation. The first is to use one of the many add-ons available on WordPress’s official plugin repository and finish the process with a couple of clicks.
There are plenty of options available, and the functionality they offer varies from plugin to plugin. Some of them can even integrate Mailchimp’s most crucial features into the WordPress dashboard, so you’ll have everything you need in one place.
That being said, a plugin is not the best solution for everyone. Overstuffing your WordPress website with plugins can affect its performance. This, along with a few security concerns, has prompted many experts to advise keeping the number of installed add-ons to a minimum.
If you don’t want to use a plugin, you can integrate Mailchimp manually. Here’s what you need to do:
- Create a Mailchimp account
You first need to choose your subscription plan and create an account. If you already have a base of subscribers, you can upload it directly to Mailchimp and start work on your campaigns immediately. - Get the WordPress code
After you log into your Mailchimp account, you need to click Integrations from the sidebar and select WordPress. The system will generate a snippet of code that you’ll need to copy. - Paste the code into your WordPress theme’s header file
Next, you need to access your WordPress dashboard and go to Appearance > Theme Editor. Select the header.php file, and paste Mailchimp’s code snippet just before the </head> tag. A subscription form will appear on your website, and you will be able to confirm the successful integration with a tool available in Mailchimp’s dashboard.
Conclusion
Many people remain skeptical about email marketing. We live in the age of social media, and website owners tend to focus on Facebook and Twitter ads to attract the hordes of users who spend hours a day on their mobile phones. What’s more, because spam is such a massive problem, many users frown on every bit of advertising they find in their inbox.
Despite all this, if you plan them carefully, email marketing campaigns can be hugely successful. People still check their inboxes every day, and they tend to open every single message. Mailchimp can be crucial in attracting their attention and keeping them interested. As a WordPress user, you have the added advantage of quickly integrating it into your website and managing your efforts more efficiently.
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