Building An Email List From A WordPress Site

Josh Pollock - January 08, 2014

So far, the focus in my series on content strategy has been on attracting the right audience to your site, but maintaining your audience is just as important. So, today I will be showing you how I set up the optin slide-ins and pop-over optin forms for subscribing to this series. I will also be covering how I use MailChimp to send the updates themselves.

Building an email list is a very important step in building an audience for a site. Last week I wrote about the importance of building an email list, and not loosing track of what the real conversion rate is.

The steps I’m outlining are aimed at increasing conversion rate, the percentage of total visitors who sign up for the email list. Right now the only thing I have to offer as an incentive is connivence and the value of the content itself. As I get farther into this process of re-designing my content strategy, I will re-visit this topic, showing you how to use more tangible incentives, like free eBook or PDF downloads as well as some more innovative rewards.

A Way To Send

mailchimp-list

Make sure you choose the right list in MailChimp to add people to before creating a template.

The first thing you’re going to need is a way to send emails. I chose to use MailChimp. MailChimp has a generous free plan that I’m using to send subscribers an email with an excerpt and link to each new post. In the future I will be moving to a newsletter, using the list I’m building now.

In MailChimp you will need to create a list, and a template. Don’t worry about campaigns, WordPress will create those automatically for you, which is something I will cover later on in this post.

This post is not a detailed tutorial about how to use MailChimp–their site has great tutorials–but instead is about how to use MailChimp to mail your WordPress posts. If you need help finding the right resources or setting things up in MailChimp, contact me and I will be glad to help.

If you haven’t already created a MailChimp account, make sure to do so. From your MailChimp dashboard, select “Lists” from the left hand sidebar. Follow the onscreen instructions to create your list. Make sure to give it a name you will remember. Later on we will be using WordPress plugins that will retrieve that list.

The other thing you will need to do is choose a template and add it to “My Templates.”

A Way In

Getting people signed up to your newsletter can be a challenge. This is what why many people offer a reward, a free eBook, PDF or video, which are sure-fire ways to increase your conversion rate–if you have attractive content to offer that is. Just getting the user to the optin can be difficult. That is why I’m using OptinMonster on this site. If you look at the bottom right of the page you will see a OptinMonster slide-in to sign up to get updates in this series. OptinMonster has a slick system for detecting when someone is about to leave the site and can uses that as a trigger to add a optin. Try and move your mouse towards the back button in your browser and you will see a lightbox pop-up offering to subscribe you to you to this series. Pretty cool, right?

OptinMonster is a great plugin, is widely used and proven to raise conversion rates, but it’s not the only option. MailChimp for WordPress is another popular option that allows you to create sign up forms and add them to your site using a shortcode, widget or template function.

Setting Up An OptIn

OptinMonster Configuration Step 2

The second configuration step for OptinMonster includes several crucial decisions. These include when to show the optin and what MailChimp campaign to associate it with.

Again, OptinMonster has really good tutorials on their site, so I am just going to walk you through the basic steps to create two optins, one slide-in and one Lightbox. To get started, go to the settings for the plugin and click the blue “Create New Optin” button. On the next screen, for your first optin, choose “slide-in” as the type of optin.

On the next screen point you will need to make some decisions about when the optin will be shown. For the slide-in on this site I chose to have it show right away and didn’t use exit intent. Exit intent overrides the other settings about when to show the optin. Instead it shows the optin when the current user looks like they are about to leave the page. I chose to use this for the lightbox optin instead.

Another important decision is where to redirect the user to after signing up. This could be a thank you page, the download page for the free eBook, PDF, video or whatever you incited them to sign up with. It could also just be a simple thank you page, or a page with more content they might like. I chose to redirect to the category archive for this series, though that will be something I will reevaluate in the future.

Also on this page you must choose a title for the optin, and choose an email list provider and a campaign to add people too. When you select MailChimp as your email list provider for the first time, you will need to set your API key. In MailChimp, in your account settings, go to the “Extras” menu and select “API keys”. In the screen that takes you to, click “Create A Key” and copy the key that is generated.
Back in WordPress, from the settings menu, select AutoChimp. In AutoChimp’s settings, go to the “API” tab paste in your API key and click “Save.”

On the next page you will choose a template for the optin and once you have done so you can customize the template. The customization is handled by a slick interface that is very similar to the WordPress theme customizer.

Once you have your design set, the last section controls where the optin is shown and enables it. Until you select “Enable optin on site?” the optin will not function. If you are setting up on campaign for your whole site, you can select “Load optin globally?” and ignore the other options. If the optin has a specific purpose, like for a specific category you can choose to show it only in that category. You can even specify a specific post ID or IDs if you need to get that specific.

Be sure to save when you’re done and don’t forget to activate the optin. Once you have your slide-in setup, you can follow the same steps to set up a Lightbox with exit intent, which is only available with the Pro and Ultimate licenses for OptinMonster, enabled to grab users on their way out.

Bypassing The Double Optin

In order to prevent users from having to optin to your list again, via a link in the confirmation email, you will need to either install this simple plugin, or just copy and paste the last line of it into your theme’s functions.php file.

A Way Out

OptinMonster or MailChimp for WordPress will help you build your email list, but you will need a way to get your posts into MailChimp messages. For that, I use the plugin AutoChimp. AutoChimp allows you to send an email, using the MailChimp template in your account you choose, for every post on your site or every post in a specific category.

Setting Up AutoChimp

Before setting up AutoChimp, make sure you have generated an API key in MailChimp and set up a template.

Add Your API KEY

In MailChimp, in your account settings, go to the “Extras” menu and select “API keys”. In the screen that takes you to, click “Create A Key” and copy the key that is generated.
Back in WordPress, from the settings menu, select AutoChimp. In AutoChimp’s settings, go to the “API” tab paste in your API key and click “Save.”

Mailing List Settings
AutoChimp campaign options

The campaign options in AutoChimp to create a new campaign, from the same list, for each post.

Now it’s time to connect AutoChimp with the correct mailing list. Go to the “Mailing List” tab in AutoChimp options and select which MailChimp list you want to send to. Also be sure to select “When a user subscribes (Adds the user to your mailing list)”. The other options are up to you, you can see my choices in the screenshot.

If you already have an established list, I recommend using the manual sync option to make sure your list is properly synced with AutoChimp.

Make sure to click save before moving to the next tab.

Set Up A Campaign
WordPress category updates via MailChimp

The AutoChimp options I am using to send updates in this series via MailChimp.

Now it is time for the actual campaign. AutoChimp actually can create a separate MailChimp campaign for each post, which is what I do. The first step is to click “Add new post category mapping” to match a category with a mailing list and a template. Just choose a category, a MailChimp list and a MailChimp template, and leave the three options as is. If you want to include the whole the whole post instead of the excerpt, you can by unchecking the second box “Only use an excerpt of the post,” but I recommend that you do not. You want to get people to your site, don’t you? The other two options decide whether to send the emails as soon as the post is published or just to create a draft as well as if AutoChimp should resend the message once, or every time you update the post.

Be sure to click save.

Don’t Forget To Give Value

Well that’s a basic overview of how to set up a system to get people signed up for updates on your site, and actually get the updates to them. I know there are quite a few steps and in 1600 or so words I can only go into so much detail. If you need anything clarified or need any help, don’t be afraid to reach out to me for help.

I’d also love to know what ways you use to get people to sign up for your email lists. Let me know in the comments. Also, never forget that the point of your email list is to serve the people who sign up with something of value. You only get so many chances to put something useful in their inboxes before they start ignoring your emails or unsubscribe.