How to Connect Your Contact Form to MailChimp

How To Get Your Contact Form To Work With Your Email Marketing Service

If you’re new too all this, WordPress can be both awesome and a headache to work with. Sometimes you’ll find an awesome plug-in but then you won’t know if it’s compatible with a service you need. For example, creating a MailChimp subscribe form for your WordPress website should be pretty easy. But if you don’t know what you’re doing the task can almost seem daunting. But no worries I got you covered! And with our friends over at WPForms we’ll have you connected with MailChimp in a jiffy!

Today we’re going to show you how to create a MailChimp subscribe form in WordPress using WPForms!

To get started you’ll need to make sure you have all the tools ready to go (MailChimp, WPForms). And then after that, we’ll just go through these 5 simple steps to connect your contact form to email in WordPress

5 Simple Steps to Connect Your Contact Form to MailChimp

• Step One: Create your Contact Form
• Step Two: Integrate with your Email Marketing Service
• Step Three: Set up the Logistics (Notifications, Emails, Redirects)
• Step Four: Add the Form to Your Site
• Step Five: Live Test and Celebrate

Step One: Create Your Contact Form

If this is your first time creating a contact form, you’ve come to the right place! We’re going to walk you step by step on how to do exactly that. First things first, make sure you’ve purchased and downloaded WPForms to make this process as easy as possible! (WPForms does offer a ‘free’ version but you’ll need the paid version to link up with MailChimp). We recommend the Pro Plan but the Plus Plan should be sufficient.

Once you’ve purchased and downloaded WPForms you’ll be brought to a page like this. Because today’s focus is on connecting with our email marketing service, we’re going to want to click on Addons. I personally like to use MailChimp because their email desinger is super intuitive and everything always looks nice that’s the addon we’re going to want to activate.

WPForms –> Addons and find ‘MailChimp Addon’

Click Activate and the status should change like the picture above. Once you’ve done that we can start building our first contact form together! From the dashboard just click WPForms –> Add New. And then you’ll get some options for the type of contact form you want.

Because our main focus for today is connecting MailChimp to the contact form the obvious answer would be to create a “Newsletter Signup Form”. So go ahead and give your form a title and then click “Newsletter Signup Form”.

At this point in time, you can definitely add more fields that you want or need by simply dragging the box from the left to the form on the right. But because I believe CTAs (Call to actions) should be short and simple, I think this is more than enough of what we’ll need.

If for some reason you want to reorder the fields its just as simple, just drag the fields to find the exact order you want and that’s it!

Once your main fields are sorted out, always make sure that you comply with you and your audience’s privacy policies (GDPR, CCPA, etc). Thankfully WPForms already has that covered, to add in the GDPR agreement all you need to do is go to settings, activate GDPR enhancements, then drag the GDPR field into your form and you’re good to go!

Once you’ve finalized the form fields all we gotta do is press save and just connect our form to our favourite email marketing service: MailChimp!

Step Two: Integrate Your Email Marketing Service

The great thing about WPForms is that they’re compatible with a load of email marketing services. So in the very off chance that you don’t love MailChimp as much as I do, WPForms works with so many other programs like: Zapier, GetResponse, Aweber, etc. But in today’s example, we’re going with MailChimp!

Click Marketing on the left, and as long as you have a subscription to WPForms and actiavted the MailChimp Add-on all you gotta do is press MailChimp then add a new connection.

The connection is just basically how your site will use WPForms to communicate with MailChimp to make sure that you’re getting the right information. It’ll help ensure that the contact form you collected goes to the right list and it does all this without you even having to think about it! Thank you WPForms.

To do so, you’ll need some information from your MailChimp account, so go over there and click: Your Profile –> Extras –> API Keys. The page should look something a little like this and just make sure you can copy the API Key.

Once you’ve gotten your key, you’ll just need to paste that into WPForms name it if you want then click “connect”.

No that WPForms has access to your MailChimp settings we can organize the fields to make sure that everything goes according to plan like:

• Selecting the MailChimp account you’ll want to use for this contact form
• Choosing the email list you want people to subscribe to when the fill out your form
• Making sure that the fields go to the right place (ex. first name, last name, email)

And then once you’ve tweaked it to how you like it just click “save”!

Step Three: Setup the Logistics

I personally find this part a lot of fun! Cause it’s basically all the things that happen when somebody fills out your form. In the beginning I really recommend setting up notifications cause you’ll get an email whenever somebody signs up through your contact form. That always super exciting but it’s always just good practice to monitor new features you setup for your site to make sure everything works the way its supposed to. WPForms actually sets this up for you automatically which is great. But in case you wanted to adjust the settings like add another email or disable it, all you gotta do is go to: Settings –> Notifications –> and adjust the settings accordingly.

The other really exciting part is obviously the email marketing side of it all! How will you choose to let your subscribers know that they’ve successfully filled out your form? You can display a message, show a page, or redirect them to a different URL. The choice is entirely up to you and WPForms makes it easy to do.

All you gotta do is in Settings –> Confirmation, you can choose the type you want and then adjust accordingly. Once you’re good to go just press “Save” and we can go live!

Step Four: Add the Form to Your Site

Once you press save, and close the form. You’ll be able to see all the forms you have and all we have to do is figure out where you want to put it! WPForms makes it pretty easy to do cause you can add it to your blog, posts, pages, or even in your sidebar widgets area. From working on so many different types of sites the most universal way to do it is by using a shortcode. So from that list of forms that you first see if you look at the second column just copy the shortcode and that’ll probably be the most compatible way to insert your form onto your site.

If you’ve followed my tutorial on How To Make a WordPress Website, it’s like the easiest process with Elementor. Select the page you want to insert the form on the click “Edit with Elementor“. On the left-hand side, you’ll see WPForms as a widget and all you’ll need to do is drag and drop it into the section you want it in. Select the form you want to use and then you’re good to go!

Step Five: Test Your Form Out and Celebrate

One thing I like to do is always test new features. So give it a go and fill out your own form to see that all the features are working like; data validation, email collection, does everything go to MailChimp, do you get the notifications, etc. And then work off from there.

Congrats! That’s all there is to it. You got your form up in a jiffy and are ready to start collecting some emails. There’s always more tweaking that you could do but I can only fit so much in a tutorial at a time. So if there are any special features or requests that you want to know about feel free to send me a message or leave a comment down below.