How to Get More Email Subscribers for Your Site: MailChimp WD Review

For those of you who think email marketing is dead I tell you it’s not. It’s still alive and is yet evolving. If you’ve been around in marketing for a while you probably understand the importance of email marketing. It’s a major marketing channel webwide, outperforming its fellow channels in ROI and effectiveness.

There are many email delivery platforms available out there, however the number of MailChimp users exceeds the 5 million mark. It’s the most popular and complete email delivery service proven to work and trusted my millions. If your website is powered by WordPress and you’re searching for an easy way to to integrate it with Mailchimp, WordPress MailChimp WD plugin is the tool you’ll need. It’s a comprehensive and feature-packed plugin which makes it easy to connect to your Mailchimp account, create beautiful and dynamic opt-in forms and take control of your subscriber lists and submissions right from your WordPress dashboard. With that being said let’s have a closer look at MailChimp WD,from its installation to the core features and functionalities.  

Installation and Setup

Before you get to installing the plugin, It’s worth mentioning that it comes in FREE and PRO versions. The FREE version is awesome itself, giving you all the features to create unlimited attention grabbing subscription forms. The PRO version of MailChimp WD, however, comes with some more customization and form display options. I’ll walk you through the features of both separately, so that you know which of the versions best meets your needs.

Now, let’s get down to the installation. Generally,there are two ways to install the plugin. You can either add it from the plugins section of your WordPress admin area, or head over to wordpress.org, download the plugin file in a zip format, and then upload it to your website. After the Installation you have to activate it. Once the plugin is activated it will ask for your MailChimp API key, to get access to your MailChimp lists. As you copy and paste the key in the relevant  input field you’ll be good to go.

Lists

Under the lists section of the plugin you’ll find all of your MailChimp lists. As you click on any of the lists it will give you a quick overview of it, where you can see the list of your subscribers and the MailChimp form fields that are connected to this list. The lists’ section is searchable, which lets you search for a specific user from the list. In case you need to download and keep the list’s data, MailChimp WD offers you a quick data export to a CSV format.

Forms

You have to go through a couple of simple steps to create a form with MailChimp WD. To add one you have to go the forms menu in the plugin admin area, and click on the “Add new” button. The plugin will take you to the form creation page, where you can start customizing your form. First, you’ll have to give it a title and choose a form theme. If you’re using the FREE version, there is only one theme option you can apply to it. If you’re a PRO user, you’ll have 13 beautiful themes at your choice, which you can further customize according to you needs.

As you create a form, you can choose the form action, that is whether it’s a subscription or unsubscription form. Moreover, you can leave this up to your users, and let them choose themselves the action and the lists they want to subscribe to.

Below the form title you’ll see the form fields ,which are the fields you have in your MailChimp account. You can add them to the form by simply clicking on any of them.

PRO uses have the option to add custom fields to the forms, which makes it possible to obtain any kind of information from your visitors. The custom fields include various inputs, single/multiple choices, survey tools, file upload, as well as page breaks, PayPal integration, and many more.

There is also header customization option in the PRO version ,which allows you to create attention grabbing form headers with custom image, animation and description. The plugin also gives you an option to choose whether the image is displayed or hidden for mobile users.

Conditional Fields

This is probably the most outstanding feature of the plugin which is available in both FREE and PRO versions. It allows you to show or hide fields on your forms based on the specific selections your users make. You can set the options for the condition and choose the field to which that action will refer to. The condition can occur if all or any of the specified selections match. For example, you can configure the social security number field to be displayed to the users who select United States as their country.

Form Options

The plugin comes with extensive form options that you can customize. Among the form options you can find general form options, email options (more on this later), custom texts for notices and error messages, actions after submission, Paypal options and settings for conditional fields. To further enhance the functionality of your forms MailChimp WD provides a custom Javascript editor, which you can use to write additional Javascript functions (jQuery included).

Email Options

The FREE version of the plugin uses MailChimp’s global email options. To get more advanced emailing options you should go PRO,but you’ll never regret doing it. The plugin comes with its own set of emailing options, which allow you to customize the emails sent to users and administrators. Moreover, it also allows you to keep the data from your MailChimp list name, such as list from email, from name, subject, etc. From the same page you can configure the options for opt-in confirmation and final “welcome” emails.

Display Options

MailChimp WD has  four form display options. The FREE version supports only embedded forms, when you insert the forms to your posts and pages with the provided shortcodes. The PRO version comes with additional top bar,popup and scrollbox options, which have their own set of settings. You can choose an animation for the popups, define the time before they’re displayed,specify the frequency in which they will appear for the same user, select the posts and pages on which they will be displayed, etc. Check the plugin demo to see the form types.

Themes

The PRO version of MailChimp WD has 13 fully customizable form themes, while the FREE version comes with a single one which you can customize with custom CSS only.

If you want to edit any of the themes, you just click on the yellow button in front of it and the plugin will take you to the theme customization page. The adjustments you can make apply to all the parametres of the theme, from general ones to the content display options, pagination and button styles.The preview of the theme is displayed instantly next to the theme options.

Another outstanding feature that MailChimp WD offers to its PRO users is the form header customization. You can create attractive form headers for each of the theme with custom settings and parameters.

Submissions

MailChimp WD has a very straightforward submissions section, where you can view all the submitted forms. You just have to select the form from the drop-down menu and it will show the number of entries, conversion rate and number of views for this particular form at the top of the page. The submitted data is displayed below. You can filter data in the submissions section by the entered values, submission ID, submitter’s IP and submission date. The plugin also allows you to download the full data of the list by exporting it to CSV file format.

To help you to quickly check the submitted data, MailChimp WD allows you to customize the view of the entries. You can temporarily hide the form fields which you don’t need at the given moment and have them back at any point later.

IP Blocking

Spam is a common issue with form submissions. With MailChimp WD you can block IP addresses sending spam with a few clicks. Just mark the spam submissions as checked and block them right away. The blocked IPs will appear at the Blocked IP section of the plugin, and you can unblock them at any time.

Pricing

MailChimp WD offers a great value for the price you pay. It comes with a FREE version and a PRO version which has 3 pricing plans: Personal, Business and Developer. In addition to the advanced features PRO version plans offer professional and timely support for its users. Find below the features and pricing for each plan.

Final Thoughts

MailChimp WD is a fully featured WordPress plugin with some great functionality, detailed documentation, timely support and affordable pricing.