This post will guide you through the steps of configuring an eNews Extended widget on your WordPress site and connecting it to MailChimp. Setting up such integration will help you effectively grow and maintain your subscribers list, and having different configuration and self-selection options will provide better flexibility in creating targeted interest groups and email campaigns based on your audience interests.
Option 1 – Mailchimp signup using Genesis eNews Extended – simple signup form without interest groups
This is the most basic setup, and you can find a lot of information on how to do it online. Having this type of form will automatically add your WordPress website subscribers as contacts to your MailChimp audience.
Steps: go to the widgets management page in WordPress admin area find and place the eNews extended widget in the area you wish it to show up in. Then fill in the form title, action, first name, last name and email fields in the widget settings:
You can find the values for all the fields in the embed form settings in MailChimp, just grab the pieces you need.
- Go to Audience -> manage audience -> signup forms
2. Go to embedded forms
3. Locate the form code and copy it into your text editor. You’re going to need to grab a few pieces of text/code from there and paste them into the widget fields.
4. At this stage, you only need to grab the values from the form action, first name, last name, and email attributes and put them into respective fields in the eNews widget settings (see above).
Option 2 – interest groups added as hidden pre-selected fields
If you have multiple interest groups in your MailChimp account, you may want to have a News Extended signup form that would collect subscribers for only one interest group and automatically send that info to Mailchimp. You can have the form explicitly say that it is a signup for a specific topic and seamlessly add those people to a respective interest group.
Steps: if you haven’t done it yet, pre-create your interest groups in Mailchimp, in this tutorial we will be working with 2 groups: “Weekly Motivational Tips” and “30 Day Challenge”. Then fill in the widget fields in the same way as above, but you’d need to fill in the hidden fields info this time as well. Add only a pre-checked input field for the group you want these subscribers to be automatically put into.
Your code for the input field will need to look similar to this.
<input type="checkbox" value="1" name="YOUR-FORM-INFO-HERE" id="YOUR-FORM-INFO-HERE" checked style="display: none;">Note the attributes checked and style=”display: none;” – these need to be added manually for this field to be hidden from users and for it being pre-selected. You can also give it a class and then hide using custom CSS instead of doing style=”display: none:” in the input HTML.
Option 3 – interest groups added as visible checkboxes
If you want to give your users an option to choose which topics they are interested in and then automatically put them into the respective interest groups in MailChimp, you can add those options as checkboxes to the basic signup form.
Steps: same as in Option 2, but you want the input fields to be visible to users and not pre-checked so that users can select what they want.
The code will look similar to this. Note the wrapper div elements – these can be added manually so that you can style the fields using custom CSS if/when needed.
<div class="enews-group-field"><input type="checkbox" value="1" name="YOUR-FORM-INFO-HERE" id="YOUR-FORM-INFO-HERE"><label for="YOUR-FORM-INFO-HERE"> Weekly Motivational Tips</label></div>
<div class="enews-group-field"><input type="checkbox" value="2" name="YOUR-FORM-INFO-HERE" id="YOUR-FORM-INFO-HERE"><label for="YOUR-FORM-INFO-HERE"> 30 Day Challenge</label></div>
I hope this helps. Feel free to post your questions in the comments below!