How To Integrate A MailChimp Signup Form In Blogger

If you're the savvy internet marketer who's interested in tracking the lead-ins that are being generated by your blog, then you'll need an effective e-mail marketing service to help you in easing up the process. One of those e-mail marketing services available on the market today, is the one offered by MailChimp.

Configuring your blog to use MailChimp's lead-in delivery service for your newsletter forms, and adding them to your Blogger-based blog is very easy. All it just needs is a little tinkering, and some code-searching.

NOTE: This tutorials obviously assumes that you already have a ContactUs.com account and a MailChimp account. If you haven't had one yet, it's strongly recommended that you create one.

Creating The Newsletter Form

The first thing that we need to do is to first create an e-mail signup form, also known as a “newsletter”, so that visitors may subscribe to updates on your blog via e-mail. Here's how you do it.

1.     Log in to your ContactUs.com account, which will immediately take you to the account's dashboard. Once you're in there, select “Form Settings”.

2.     You may want to leave the the “Add Form” field as it is, because it's set to “Newsletter” by default. Instead, head over and click the “Configure Form” button.

3.     Clicking the “Configure Form” button opens up a menu wherein you can customize many aspects of your newsletter form. For this purpose, we will need to configure the form so that it integrates with MailChimp. For that purpose, select “Delivery Options”, then select “3rd Party Integrations”. This will bring up a list of third-party e-mail marketing services that you can use for your ContactUs.com form. Once you're in there, select the button for MailChimp (located at the very first column).

4.     To integrate a third-party e-mail marketing service into your newsletter forms, different credentials are needed to be filled. For MailChimp, you needed an API key, and a Unique List ID. Both of these credentials can be found on your MailChimp account, right around the settings for it. Once you've secured these credentials, simply copy and paste them into the designated fields.

5.     Once you're done with customizing the newsletter form, simply click on “Save” to retain the changes you made. This will take you back to the main menu, and you can see your newly-published form. In order to see the code for it, simply click on “Get Code”.

6.     The field displayed above the page is the code for your newly-created form. Simply copy this code, and paste it to your Blogger using any of their methods available for integrating third-party code. Congratulations! Now your newsletter will be able to send any updates to your subscribers through your MailChimp account.

Enabling Double Opt-in For MailChimp

There are times when you may want your subscribers to give them a chance to see if they really want to subscribe to your newsletter or not. You can do this by having the subscriber be sent a confirmation e-mail which is automatically generated, and by having the user click the confirmation link which is located inside the e-mail.

This process is known as double opt-in, and MailChimp can offer that service.

If you've configured your e-mail signup form to use MailChimp, yet you're still not receiving any lead-in notifications to it, then turning on double opt-in may help resolve the problem.

To enable double opt-in, just follow these simple steps.

1.     Log in to your ContactUs.com account, then go to “Form Settings”. From there, select “Configure Form”, then “Delivery Options”. Afterwards, select “3rd Party Integrations” to bring up the list of the third party e-mail marketing services. Select “MailChimp”, which will display a pop-up regarding the integration of your MailChimp account. From here, just set the “Double Optin” option to “Yes”, to enable double opt-in.

2.     If anytime you wanted to disable double opt-in, just simply access the MailChimo integration menu using the same process described in the previous step, then set “Double Optin” to “No”. By disabling double opt-in, visitors won't be sent a confirmation e-mail whenever they subscribe to your newsletter. After filling out the required fields, they will be automatically subscribed.

By following all these steps, you will now be able to receive lead-in notifications to your MailChimp account using any of your ContactUs.com e-mail signup forms in Blogger.