Help With Mailing Lists

/ Marcia Meara

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I know a Mail List is an important part of marketing tactics, but for the life of me, I can’t get Mail Chimp set up on my WordPress blog. Does anyone have any ideas that might help? Do you use Mail Chimp with WordPress? How?? Have you found another service that is easier to set up with WordPress? Any help you can give me would be greatly appreciated.

14 thoughts on “Help With Mailing Lists”

  1. Setting up MailChimp with WordPress wasn’t hard. Setting it up to LOOK GOOD was really hard. I’m not sure where you’re getting stuck so I’m just going to say everything I know in hopes that some of it is helpful.

    There’s a drop down menu on the right side of your MailChimp lists view (it says Stats by default). You can go there and pick Signup Forms.

    Hit the Select button next to Embedded Forms.

    Select the form you want from the top (Classic, Super Slim, etc.) and the options you like on the left (if you want the title for your form, etc.). I’ve found using the Super Slim form and taking off the title gives me the most flexibility because then I can put whatever text I want around it on the actual WordPress page or widget.

    Select EVERYTHING in the Copy/Paste box and copy it.

    If you’re doing a widget for your sidebar, just put in a plain text widget and name it whatever you like, then paste in the code and click Save.

    If you’re putting the form on a WordPress page, set up the page however you want (introductory information for your newsletter or whatever you want to say), and paste the code where you want your signup box to go. In the WordPress editor for the page, make sure you’re on the Text tab rather than the Visual tab when you paste in the code; that’s where you can edit the page’s actual html.

    If you hate the way the form looks, that’s where it gets tricky, because you have to mess with their embedded code, but you can probably use mine as a starting point if it’s helpful. First, look at the embedded code they gave you and find a line that looks like this:

    <form action="//jenrasmussen.us8.list-manage.com/subscribe/post?u=88f7359198f902919aa03f1ce&id=8064f7c19d"

    You need everything inside those quotes (in my case //jenrasmussen.us8.list-manage.com/subscribe/post?u=88f7359198f902919aa03f1ce&id=8064f7c19d, yours will look different) to point properly to your list. Copy and paste that into a Word document or something so you can use it whenever you want.

    The other parameters in their code can be messed with, or you can just put HTML around it to specify background color, etc. So for example, you can see the widget in my sidebar here under the heading “Rook Post”: http://jenrasmussen.com/

    This is the code for that widget:
    <div style="border: 3px groove #bdb76b; padding: 5px;”> Tasty! Refreshing! Carried in canteens that have supernatural powers! Sign up for Very Occasional News and get Lydia Trinket’s switchel recipe.

    <form action="//jenrasmussen.us8.list-manage.com/subscribe/post?u=88f7359198f902919aa03f1ce&id=50261cb451″ method=”post” id=”mc-embedded-subscribe-form” name=”mc-embedded-subscribe-form” class=”validate” target=”_blank” novalidate>

    If you want to take mine as a starting point, you can just copy/paste that into a new text widget, and then I’ve bolded three things for you to customize. The first is the hex code for my border color. The second is the message above my sign up box. The third is that string of code you need from MailChimp to identify your specific list.

    Similarly, you can see my mailing list page here: http://jenrasmussen.com/post-office/

    The html for that looks like this:

    Want to be the first to know about my upcoming books? Dislike salty canned meat products? The Very Occasional and Sometimes Not At All Newsletter is for you! I won’t flood your inbox with relentless self promotion, or make up filler to meet a set schedule. Pointless nonsense is what my blog is for; I only send the newsletter when I’ve got purposeful nonsense. You’ll get new release announcements, excerpts, artwork, and other book news about 4-6 times per year, and always with a story-themed recipe.

    <form id="mc-embedded-subscribe-form" class="validate" action="//jenrasmussen.us8.list-manage.com/subscribe/post?u=88f7359198f902919aa03f1ce&id=50261cb451” method=”post” name=”mc-embedded-subscribe-form” novalidate=”” target=”_blank”>

    You can do the same thing with this, just copy/paste that code onto a page (again just make sure you’re on the text tab), then change the first bolded section to whatever your message is, and the second to your unique code string for your list.

    But further customizing the html is probably not something I could help you much with. I had to struggle to do this much, mainly by googling blog posts on what other people had done with their forms, so I don’t really understand a lot of what I did. 🙂

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    • Yikes, somehow I managed to cut off the html for the signup on my post office page. The proper html for that is this, again just copy/paste it and change the bold sections to your own info.

      Add your text here.

      <form id="mc-embedded-subscribe-form" class="validate" action="change me to your special string” method=”post” name=”mc-embedded-subscribe-form” novalidate=”” target=”_blank”>

      You can continue adding other text below the form too, if you want.

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      • Nope, it’s WordPress that’s cutting off my code because it thinks I’m trying to add code to my comment and getting confused. I can’t edit the comments to your post, so sorry for making a mess.

        Bottom line, none of the sample code in these comments will work! Because WordPress has seen fit to cut them off halfway through. I can email them to you if you like, or put them in a new post here.

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  2. I can tell at first glance that this makes more sense than what I was trying to set up on Mail Chimp, following their directions. I’m going to print it out (noting that the html is incomplete) and see how I do. If I can’t figure it from there, I’ll email you about the complete html codes. THANK YOU a thousand times. If this works, I’ll be so happy!! You are now my HERO! 😀

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      • That’s how I felt the first six times I tried following their directions, but I was wrong. 😦 Of course, some WordPress themes are set up to support certain functions only, so I suppose it’s possible that the theme I’m using doesn’t support this option. But I think it more likely that I was just misunderstanding some part of their instructions. I will definitely work on this later today or tomorrow. I want a Mail List running before A Boy Named Rabbit comes out. I really appreciate your help, Jen!

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    • I haven’t used HTML on WordPress, either, Marcia, except for the Bold or Italics commands in commenting. But know enough about them to do it in most cases. Back in the day, way back when I was a sweet young thing of FIFTY (hahaha), I wrote my own HTML code for my first webpage. It was all you could do if you wanted to put one up. They didn’t even have WYSIWYG editors then, so you learned basic code, or you did without. Blogs were just a blip on the horizon, and blogs like WordPress where it’s all done for you, and you just pick your theme design, and maybe tweak it a bit here and there…well, that was still a long way off. (I’m older than dirt, you know.)

      But this should be easier than it was for me. I simply could not understand what they wanted me to do, and some of the things it suggested weren’t options on my theme, as far as I could tell. I’m going to give it a try with Jen’s instructions, and I’ll report back on how it works.

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    • MailChimp is a program you use to start and manage a Mailing List. There are others, but that seems to be the most popular one. As a writer, you really want to have a mailing list for your fans, so you can send them notices of things before anyone else, or offer them specials, or just communicate directly with them. It’s one of the first things the books tell you to do when you are self-marketing. But I’ve had trouble figuring out how to add it to my site. I’ll be working on it soon, though. With Jen’s help above, I bet I’ll get it up and running.

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      • I will have to check it out. By the way I am back to writing – actually did some of the research and time lines I needed to get. I finding out I am enjoying the researching part more than I thought, maybe I found a new career to pursue! 😉

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        • Glad you are writing, Patty. And research can be a lot of fun, if you aren’t scrambling for some bit of info you can’t move on without, and can’t find, either. Arrgghh. THAT can get old. Good luck with adding a mail list to your blog. I’m still struggling with this. I just don’t know what I’m missing. But eventually, I’ll get it if, I have to contact WP Support. I’m leaving out something, and it is not working. OH, well. Just because every single book out there tells you it’s KEY to have a Mail List………gleep.

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            • For me, writing is the easiest part. It’s the marketing and other what-not that can drive me crazy. Jen helped me figure out the problem with the Mail List, though. WordPress doesn’t allow the type I was trying to use on the kind of blog I have. So we’ve gone another way, and I think it will work, though I’m not done tweaking it yet.

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