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MailChimp Integration

Mailchimp is a marketing automation platform and an email marketing service. Our plugin allows add new members into the MailChimp audience lists, with the information collected by the website's forms.

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The marketing is a pillar for any business, service or personal website, the capture of new users or leads is as important as have a good product or to give an excellent service. There are multiple services and tools to manage marketing campaigns, and MailChimp is a very popular alternative. The Platinum version of "Calculated Fields Form" plugin is distributed with the "CFF - MailChimp" add-on that allows to add new members to the MailChimp audience lists with the information collected by the website's forms.

This post describes the integration process of a MailChimp campaign with a website's form.

Creating a MailChimp campaign

There are many articles and documents to teach the users how to create a MailChimp campaigns, and the audiences lists, so, I'll jump this part of process, but I leave a link to the help page of MailChimp that includes some video tutorials:

Create a Regular Email Campaign

Enabling the MailChimp add-on

• Go to the settings page of the plugin, through the menu option: "Calculated Fields Form" in the main WordPress menu.

• From the list of add-ons, tick the box corresponding to the "CFF - MailChimp" add-on, and press the "Activate/Deactivate addons" button.

Integrating MailChimp with the form

After enabling the "CFF - MailChimp" add-on from the settings page of the plugin will appear a new section in the form's settings titled "CFF - MailChimp"

The integration process would be as follows:

• Get your API Key from MailChimp. To get the API Key go to the MailChimp account, enter into the user's profile, press the "Extras" option, and then the "Api Keys" sub-menu:

• Copy the API Key from MailChimp, and paste it into the "API Key" attribute in the form's settings, and then, press the "Get lists" button to get the list of audiences available on MailChimp.

• Select the audience list you want to populate with members generated from the website's form, and press the "Get Fields And Groups" button to get the list of fields defined in the subscribe form on MailChimp:

• Finally, you should enter the names of fields in the website's form for capturing the user's email, first name and last name (and any other field you have defined in MailChimp) and select the group(s) for grouing the users in the audience list. Furthermore, it is possible to assign tags to these users.

Pay attention to the last attribute: "Status if new", it includes two possible options: "Pending" and "Subscribed". If the "Pending" option is selected MailChimp will send a confirmation email to the possible new member, but he/she won't be added to the audience list until confirm explicitly he/she authorization to be added.

• Finally, press the "Save" button for saving the changes in the form's settings.