Adding Newsletter Signup to Website

We all know the importance of having a newsletter for our businesses. It’s essentially the way to interface with the client at their own leisure by pushing out content that can be topical, such special offers and deals or to reinforce the brand, while allowing the customer to digest it at their own pace. This is why newsletters have been so successful throughout the history of online business. Also, in the beginning before the internet, newsletters were sent out as a mail pieces. Regardless, customer email lists or contact lists are extremely valuable. Nowadays one of the best tools for creating a newsletter on a website is called MailChimp.

There are other tools out there available such as Constant Contact and others, and they’re great and all but the cool thing about MailChimp is that it’s free to use up until a certain amount of subscribers. This threshold will not be hit by most small businesses, so they can save a lot on monthly fees by using MailChimp instead of some of the other subscription-based services.

Today I’m going to show you how easy it is to deploy a form in your website that allows the visitor to sign up for your newsletter. Now this process is rather straightforward, but to make it even easier, I’ve taken screenshots and we’ll be adding them along with the text instructions. So without further ado, hear are my instructions on how to add a form into your website that allows the visitor to sign up for your newsletter.

The first step is the sign up for a MailChimp account if you don’t already have one. Once inside your MailChimp account, you’ll need to create a list. Lists are the way that subscribers get organized into baskets that will only send them the particular newsletter that they signed up for.

So one example would be a list for your regular customers and a list for new prospects that are interested in your business that want special offers to try out your service. The way you speak to each of these lists is going to be different and that’s why we want to separate them out.

So now that you have a list going, the next step is going to be the click on that list at the top of the menu. See the screenshot below:

Now we’re going to click on the list that we would like to make the form for. In this case we’re choosing the list titled “optin.” Once inside the list area, there is a main menu which starts with Stats, then Manage Contacts, Add Contacts, Sign Up Forms and Settings. We’re going to choose Sign Up Forms. See the screenshot below:

Now that we’re on the sign-up forms page, we’re going to select the second option which is titled embedded forms. See the screenshot below:

This takes us to the embedded forms page where we can customize and add or subtract features from our form that will be deployed on the web page. For this example, we’re going to keep it rather simple and just choose the pre-selected form to embed.

Feel free to look around at the other options they have a Classic Version, Super Slim Version, Horizontal Version, Naked Version and an Advanced Version. All of them will work well, it just depends on what you’re trying to do as far as your design of your website and getting it to fit in well.

Because we chose the classic and it’s already on it, we are ready to go and we will be copying the code in the box to paste on to your website backend text area. See the screenshot below:

This code is going to go into a text element on WordPress websites. All WordPress websites have text elements, but it is important to put the code only in the text element side and not the visual editor side. If you put the code in the visual editor side it will cause an error. See the screenshots below:

Once the code is in, all we have to do is update and save the page and our form will be live on our website. That’s all there really is to it! Now you can sit back and collect visitors email addresses for your newsletter.

Some good tips on when to put a newsletter out, is at the beginning of the month and create the newsletter around the month as far as topical interest like springtime, or fourth of July coming up, things like that. Newsletters are always received better when they are consistent, topical and offer the reader some form of value that they wouldn’t be able to get anywhere else.

That’s all I have on newsletters for now. Stay tuned for future episodes where we might dive deeper into how to fully customize and execute a really nice website newsletter.