|
At flippercode, as internet is changing, we discuss the ways of online promotions. But there is one thing that is as effective as it was ten years ago. Yes! I am talking about the same old email marketing. In this era of social media and networking, building your email list still prevails as the most powerful weapon for any internet marketer. The backbone of any email marketing campaign is a good and reliable email marketing service. I know most of you stick with the same old Aweber. I have used and recommended aweber to my visitors but not after I was introduced to Mail chimp. Mail chimp is one of the best newsletter and auto responder email service provider in the market. What differentiates Mail chimp from aweber is that it provides a provision to send newsletter to 2000 free subscriber with a limit of 12000 emails per month. Yes! Completely Free for the first 2000 subscribers. This might be the factor that 60% of email marketers are drifting towards Mail chimp. Mail chimp comes equipped with an arsenal of tools for Marketers. These tools help the marketers manage their campaigns in an effective and professional manner. Drag and drop email editor with prebuilt templates, Tracking, Mobile and social compatibility, Custom forms, Coupon codes, auto responders, anti spam tools are some of the most prominent features of mail chimp. On June 17, 2013, The Company rolled out version 2 for mail chimp. So, what’s in version 2? Mail chimp has updated their core email marketing application with a lot of new enhancements and developed a fresh user interface design for better user experience. In the new version the company upgraded the service with tablet compatibility and has also introduced a collaboration tool in their core application which means that you can work with a team on your campaigns. How to integrate Mail chimp in your WordPress sites? WordPress is no doubt the most common CMS amongst marketers and mail chimp has certainly kept that in mind. Mail chimp provides numerous ways in which a subscription form can be attached to a word press website. There are a lot of free and paid solutions that can be used to integrate mail chimp in your website. Mail chimp List subscription form Plug-in: Are you looking for the fastest way to integrate a mail chimp signup form in your website, well here is the answer. Mail chimp simple subscription form makes it easy for you integrate a subscription form with the help of a simple widget. Simple to install and operate , thuis plug-in will get you started in less than 2 minutes. Download: http://wordpress.org/plugins/mailchimp/ Setup: 1. Download Mail chimp List subscription form and install it using the standard word press plug-in installation procedure. 2. Once activated , you will find a new menu item under settings named “mail chimp” 3. On clicking the newly created menu item, you will be forwarded to the main setup page of the plug-in. All you see is a small box asking for your mail chimp login information (API in this case). If you dont have an api key already or dont know where to get it , just follow the link under the box that says “get your api key here”. 4. Enter your mail chimp api key and click save 5. Once the API is set, all you need to do is to go to your widget section and drag the widget mail chimp to the required widget area. 6. There are no options for the widgets, just save it and check your website for new mail chimp form. 7. Now, visit your website and find the subscription form in the widget area. Mail Chimp Widget: this is another way of integrating mail chimp form in your website. It also provides a simple widget to place in any widgetised area on your blog. It differentiates itself with its lightweight development and Ajax integration. It has also a unique capability to only appear before non subscribers. Subscribers will never see the form once they subscribed. Another feature that sets this plug-in apart is the ability to place multiple subscription forms on the same page. Download: http://wordpress.org/plugins/mailchimp-widget/ Setup: 1. Download Mail chimp widget and install it using the standard word press plug-in installation procedure. 2. Once activated , you will find a new menu item under settings named “mail chimp” 3. On clicking the newly created menu item, you will be forwarded to the setting page of the widget. 4. The page asks for valid mail chimp API and that’s it! 5. Once the API key is setup, you can drag the widget from your widget area to any sidebar. Remember, you cannot use the widget till you complete your API settings. 6. You can setup your subscription form using the settings provided in the widget area. The widget has very basic settings. Widget extracts your created mailing list using your API keys and provides you with a dropdown of your mailing lists. You can then enter a title, select your required mailing list, enter text for the sign up button and click save. You are done. 7. Once setup, visit your site to check your newly integrated subscription form. 8. You can add as many subscription forms to your website as you need. The plug-in is compatible in feeding multiple forms on the same page. This could be used while creating two lists from the same traffic. Auto chimp: is a great way to synchronise your website with mail chimp. With the plug-in activated on your website , you will be able to perform a lot functions like auto posting emails to your subscribers regarding your latest post , subscribing /unsubscribing users from the mailing list as the user subscribe/unsubscribe from your blog. All you need is a mail chimp API key. Download: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/autochimp/ Setup: 1. Download auto chimp and install it using the standard word press plug-in installation procedure 2. Once activated , you will find a new menu item under settings named “auto chimp” 3. Clicking on auto chimp will lead to a setting page that will ask for an API key before you even start with the settings. Once the API is setup, you are ready to move to other tabs of the page. 4. Now , click on the mailing list tab and you will see a mailing list management section where you can select which mailing to work on for the website. You can also perform a manual sync of mail chimp with you present user base. By clicking sync existing users, a process will start to synchronise data between your site and mail chimp. 5. In the campaigns tabs, you can set your settings for posts auto posting. You can select the group, required template and the categories accordingly. There are also other options for sending the campaign as soon as the blog is posted. You also have the option to send only the excerpts rather than sending the whole article. The last setting box is to limit the campaign creation capability of mail chimp API and create only one campaign for all the posts. It is advised to keep the last setting box checked until you need to create separate campaign for every post. Mail Chimp for WP: This is a free word press plug-in to attach a mail chimp opt in form in your comment box. The added checkbox will add the commenter to your subscribers list. The plug-in comes equipped with simple and fast setup with mail chimp API and has a spam protection ability to ignore spam commenter’s. Download: http://wordpress.org/plugins/mailchimp-for-wp/ Setup: 1. Download auto chimp and install it using the standard word press plug-in installation procedure. 2. Once activated, you will find a new menu item named “Mail chimp for WP”. 3. The very first thing required is you mail chimp API key. Once the API is setup you will see a change in the mail chimp settings section. 4. Next setting provides options to integrate the form with your registration and comment section. Check one or both depending on your requirements. 5. You can change label text, pre-check the checkbox or can load default CSS for the form .once all the settings are done, click save. 6. Once done, you can check your comment form to see if it has the required opt-in checkbox. Analytics360 How important is tracking and stats for your email marketing? All your marketing efforts are completely useless if you can’t track your progress. For the sole purpose of tracking, mail chimp introduces their official stats plug-in to integrate Google analytics with mail chimp. It provides complete Google analytics data for a website along with the mail chimp data. You don’t need to leave your dashboard to check your stats; you can see a real time statistics right into your admin panel. It provides detailed information about site traffic and helps you differentiates your site traffic from the one generated by mail chimp campaigns. It also provides information regarding Top referrers and provides complete stats for List growth. You can compare new and existing subscribers or even check two different lists with each other. Download: http://wordpress.org/plugins/analytics360/ Setup: 1. Download auto chimp and install it using the standard word press plug-in installation procedure. 2. Once activated, you will find a new menu item named “Analytics 360”. 3. You need to enter your mail chimp API key in the first box and click submits. 4. For Google analytics integration , all you need to do is to authenticate your Google analytics account using the begin authentication button 5. Once the above required settings are done, you will see a page with a section on top to toggle between different traffic types. You can check CPC, email, organic and referral traffic for your website. 6. Other information provided on the page is the location and referral sources of your visitors that helps track down things to the next level. Some other worthy mentions for mail chimp are as follow: Launch Effect: is a viral campaign creator theme for word press integrated with mail chimp. It’s a one page responsive theme with some remarkable functionality. It has a free lite version. You can ask your visitors to sign up using their email and provide them an automatically generated unique URL to share with their friends. You can then track active referrers from the URL and then reward them accordingly. This theme can help generate a lot of viral traffic from social networks. Download: http://launcheffectapp.com/ Mail Chimp Campaign Archive : This is a simple short code plug-in which helps you place your mail chimp campaigns in an ordered list on your word press page. This provides links straight to the html version of your campaign. All you need is to place a simple short code [mailchimp_campaigns] to the page or widget area. This could be a great option to provide your users with a glimpse of your newsletter subscription before they subscribe to your list. It has a limit of up to 1000 campaigns display and is very simple to setup. The plug-in requires Mail chimp API only and has a lot of functions to order, manage and extract your email newsletters from mail chimp. Download: http://wordpress.org/plugins/mailchimp-campaign-archive/
Related Articles -
mail chimp, word press, email marketing, cms, wordpress plugins,
|
