How to Add a Mailchimp Mailing List Sign-Up Widget

 

A mailing list sign up form is a wonderful thing!  It’s also very easy to set up. Let’s go through the major steps first:

• Sign up for a free account at Mailchimp.
• Install the Genesis Enews Extended plugin on your Genesis-powered WordPress site.
• Add the email list sign up form to your website/blog.

 

1. You need to sign up for a free account over at Mailchimp and follow the steps.

 

 

2. Once you’ve finished setting up and activating your free account, create a mailing list and configure the details as you like.

3.  You now have a list that people can sign up to, now create the form that they can sign up with. Find your list and select the button for Embedded Forms.

4. Choose Naked HTML and copy the resulting code.

Your code should will be full of information and will be quite long. Don’t get overwhelmed.  You should see something that says <!– Begin MailChimp Signup Form –> at the beginning of your code and <!–End mc_embed_signup–> at the end. The information in the middle is what we are going to be using.

You will only need the form action URL.  It will look like this:  <form action=”http://fancygirldesignstudio.us7.list-manage.com/subscribe/post?u=6b92c9caa691727533566ee19&id=4f528cf871” method=”post” and so on and so forth.

Copy the part of the code that’s in purple, the one in between the quotation marks.

5. Log into your dashboard, install the Genesis Enews Extended plugin and activate it.

6. Navigate to Appearance>Widgets and drag the Genesis Enews extended widget into a widget area (e.g. Primary Sidebar).

7. Fill in the details.

• Fill in the title for your mailing list sign up form widget
• Enter your text to show above the entry field, explaining the benefit to readers in joining your email list.
• Paste the Form Action from the snippet you copied in MailChimp
• Enter EMAIL into the E-Mail Field If you want users to fill in their first name, enter FNAME in the First Name Field. For users to enter their last name, enter LNAME in the Last name Field.
• If you want, change the Button Text
• Click the Save Button

Here’s a screenshot of how I configured the one on this site.

 

Once you’ve completed these steps, just click save and you’re done! If you’re using one of my themes, prepaid or custom, your enews widget is already styled to match the theme.  The fonts, backgrounds, and buttons will all coordinate with the rest of your site.

I hope you’ve found this helpful!