Mailchimp Guide: Design Your First Email and Create a Signup Form

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Overview

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In our previous post, we guided you with in-depth steps to create your first Mailchimp account from scratch and set it up for your business. Now, you are ready to design your first email in Mailchimp and create a signup form to generate new leads for your business.

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What you’ll learn in this Mailchimp guide:

How to Design Your First Email
How to Add Your Contacts with a Signup Form
Add Contacts with Pop-up Form
Add Contacts with Embedded Form
Add Contacts with Form Builder

How to Design Your First Email

Designing your first email in Mailchimp is easy as the email marketing platform offers various templates to help you get started. You can pick from an array of templates and tailor it to fit your brand’s style.

Mailchimp also offers a website builder if you don’t have one for your business. Nowadays, if you don’t have a website, it’s difficult to let customers know you are available for business. Here are 10 reasons why your business needs a website.

If these reasons convinced you to build your website, get in touch with our software developers to start building your site.

Step 1: Choose an Email Template

In Mailchimp, you are able to choose a Layout, Theme, or you can code your own email. You are also able to save the template you designed.

There are different types of templates for you to choose one depending on the type of email you want to send. Is your email focused on selling products or making an announcement? Is your aim to tell your company’s story or to educate?

The platform also offers basic template layouts with various columns or simple text.

How to Add Your Contacts with a Signup Form

Now that you have designed the first email that will be sent to new contacts, it’s time to set up a signup form to collect new subscribers.

Add Contacts with Pop-up Form

Choose the Use a pop-up form to collect subscribers option.

Step 1: Select an Audience

For the first step, you must select an audience.

For now, you will only have your business name as an option until you have grown your audience.

Click Begin once you have chosen your audience.

Step 2: Build Your Form

After choosing your audience, you will be directed to the Pop-up Form Builder. This is where you’ll design your signup form.

In this step, you can style the following:

Font
Colours for headings, paragraphs, and labels
Font size (small, medium, or large)
Form layout – There are 5 basic options
Overlay opacity
When to display the popup – Immediately, After 5 seconds, After 20 seconds, Scroll to the middle of page, Scroll to end of page, or On exit
Position

You are only able to remove the Mailchimp branding at the bottom when you upgrade your account.

Within the pop-up builder page, you are able to connect the form with your website.

In order to connect the pop-up form with your site, you must add the code inside the < head > tags. Learn about < head > tags here.

Add your website URL, then select I accept the additional terms for Connected Sites to continue.

Next, you’ll receive a new pop-up with the code you need to add between the < head > tags of your website.

Add Contacts with Embedded Form

If you don’t want to add a pop-up form on your site, you can embed the form on your website instead.

Step 1: Design Your Form

You have the following options when choosing which type of embedded form you’d like to add to your site:

Classic – includes all visible fields.
Condensed – collects only email address. Great for small spaces.

Horizontal – the same as condensed but different style

Unstyled – provides only the raw HTML with no CSS or JavaScript.
Advanced – build it from scratch

After you have chosen the form layout you want to use, scroll down to Copy/paste onto your site. Copy the code and navigate to your website.

Step 2: Add the Form to Your WordPress Site

Adding it as a Widget

Select the area (footer, sidebar, etc.) where you want to add the code. Choose Custom HTML, then paste your form code in the appropriate space.

Adding it on a page

If you’d like to add the form to a page, open the chosen page, add a Custom HTML section, paste the code.

Add Contacts with Form Builder

The Form Builder is a great way to share a signup form to your social channels to help people sign up.

You can share your form either by using the unique URL generated when building the form or by using the QR code.

The form builder allows you to drag and drop fields of your choice into the form and it lets you style it as well.

Get the Leads Your Business Deserves

Having a solid digital marketing strategy in place will help your business reach more customers and increase traffic to your website. This increased traffic will have a positive effect on increasing your rank on Google. Get in touch to discuss a marketing strategy tailor-made for your business.

Glossary

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