Introduction

MailChimp makes it easy to send email newsletters, manage subscriber lists, and track campaign performance, but why should bloggers be concerned with email? Turns out, there are great opportunities for increasing audience engagement when bloggers introduce email as an option for content delivery.

People have different preferences when it comes to consuming information. Some want to come to your site directly and browse your latest posts. Others prefer skimming your content via RSS without ever visiting your site. But there’s another group of people who want to read your blog in their email clients. It’s true! They may not have many sites they care enough about to warrant a feed reader, or they just prefer getting email to visiting your blog. Whatever the reason, an email newsletter is a nice option to offer your readers. That way, they can engage with you in the way that suits them best.

Aside from promoting your regular blog content, there are other ways you can use email to engage your audience and track the effectiveness of your communications. You could send exclusive content to your mailing list, like special articles or sales. You could inform them about updates and news that may be outside the scope of your typical blog postings, or new items for sale in your online store. The bottom line is this: When people sign up to receive updates from you, they’re saying, “I’m interested in what you have to say.” You may not know how engaged your average reader is. You don’t know who’s reading your RSS feed, or how devoutly they’re reading it. But you know that people who give you their email addresses are indicating a certain level of commitment. And with a service like MailChimp, you know who those people are, and you can actually track their engagement by how often they open your emails, what they click and what they share with their friends.

Oh, and did we mention that MailChimp is completely free for lists of up to 2000 subscribers? Yep, totally free. No credit card, no expiring trial, no hidden fees or commitments. You get access to our amazing features, including powerful reports, list management, awesome templates, and lots of integrations.

This guide will explain everything MailChimp offers for bloggers. If you have questions or concerns that aren’t addressed here, please feel free to contact our support staff at mailchimp.com/support. We’re happy to help.

Build Your Mailing List

Signup Plugins

You can easily add a signup form to your blog with plugins for WordPress, TypePad, Moveable Type, Expression Engine and Drupal. Go to connect.mailchimp.com for downloads, descriptions and installation instructions.

Signup Forms

If you don’t use one of the services above or would like to customize your signup form to put on your website, you can easily create a form in the MailChimp application. Here’s how::

• From the MailChimp dashboard, click the Lists tab.
• Choose which list you want connected with the signup form, and click Forms in the list options.
• Customize the details of your form. Use the Build It tab to determine what information you collect in the form and the Design It tab to change colors, header and more.

• When the form is finalized, copy the Link to Subscribe form located in the middle of the page, and link to it from the website you choose.

  

Embed Code

If you’d rather keep your readers on your own site than direct them to an external landing page to sign up for your newsletter, use our embed code to create a customized signup form on your website. The embed code provides more customization options than the signup form. Creating the code is easy, and it’ll make signing up for your newsletter easier for your fans.

Just follow the steps for building the subscribe form. Then click Create Embed Code.

Copy and paste the code into the appropriate place on your site. If you’re a TypePad user, you can send the code directly to your blog with the Install Widget on TypePad button.

Evil Popup Form: Use With Caution

For users who want to actively recruit reader signups, MailChimp offers a way to make your signup form pop up on the page so readers will be forced to make a decision about signing up. Just check Enable evil popup form on the embed-code page and paste the embed code into your blog. When the box is checked, you can decide how soon you want the form to pop up after someone navigates to the page (it loads after two seconds by default). When readers navigate to the page where the code is embedded, they’ll be presented with the popup form at your chosen interval.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can my subscribers choose to receive emails in formats besides HTML?

Yes. By default, we include a preference in your subscribe form that allows your subscribers to choose how they want to receive email. HTML includes all your images, links, and formatting. Text strips out everything but the text in your email. Mobile reduces the sizes and stacks your content into a single column for easy reading on a mobile device.

A mobile format is a great option for subscribers who prefer to read email on their phones. (Incidentally, we found in our Email on Mobile Devices study that this is a lot of people!) It preserves the images and links from your HTML campaign, but presents them in a way that’s more suitable for mobile reading than full HTML.

If you want to remove this option from your subscribe form, go to Lists > Settings > List name & defaults and uncheck Let your subscribers pick an email format.

Can my subscribers choose how often they want to receive my emails?

Yes. With MailChimp’s groups feature, you can allow your readers to choose their frequency (daily, weekly, monthly) or select specific interests they’d like to be emailed about, such as classes, live appearances or updates to your online store. Then you can segment your list to make sure your readers are getting exactly what they want.

Does MailChimp offer any form integrations?

MailChimp integrates with WuFoo and FormSpring, two online services that make creating forms fun and easy. You can use these services to create all kinds of forms, from registrations to surveys, but they’re handy for signup forms, too. Check out our integrations page for more info.

How do I add a signup form to a hosted blog on WordPress.com?

WordPress.com strips out form code, tags and JavaScript for security, so it’s difficult to make signup forms available for these blogs. The easiest solution is to just add a link to your hosted signup form from your blog.

Set Up an RSS-To-Email Campaign

RSS stands for “really simple syndication,” and it’s an easy way for people to follow updates to your blog without having to check in routinely to see if you’ve posted anything. It’s a great tool, but many people prefer to receive updates in their inboxes instead. We think email and RSS work beautifully together, and we recommend that bloggers allow their readers to choose how they consume new content. MailChimp’s RSS-to-Email campaigns provide an easy solution for automatically sending your new content via email. Here’s how to create one:

• From the MailChimp dashboard, click the Create campaign button and choose RSS-driven campaign.
• Enter the URL of your blog. You can give us the URL of your RSS feed, but it’s not necessary. We can usually find it for you if you just provide your blog’s URL.

• Decide how often you want the campaign to be delivered. You can choose when you want to send campaigns by hour for daily campaigns, and by day and hour for weekly and monthly campaigns. Click Next.

  

• Choose the list and/or group that will receive the campaign. Click Next.

  

• Name your campaign, give it a subject and review additional options on the preferences screen. There’s also an option to auto-tweet your campaign from this screen (more on auto-tweets in the Social Sharing section). Click Next.

  

• Choose a template for your campaign. You can design the template yourself or let MailChimp help you. If you have custom HTML, you can upload that as well. Use our handy merge tag cheatsheet if you want to customize how your RSS feed is displayed in your campaign. You can use the Pop-up preview tool to pull in live content and see exactly your campaign will look like when its delivered. When you’ve completed the template, click Next.

• We’ll prompt you to automatically create a text version of your campaign for readers who use mobile devices or have HTML disabled.

• Confirm the details of your campaign, send a test, and if everything looks good, click Start RSS campaign. Your first campaign will be delivered after your next blog post, at the frequency you determined in step 3.

  

Frequently Asked Questions

My RSS feed isn’t working. Am I doing something wrong?

Our application generally cooperates well with RSS feeds, but every once in a while, our customers have issues with their feeds not working correctly. Check to make sure you’ve added the correct URL for your feed (especially if you’re having problems when you just add your blog’s URL). If it still doesn’t work, we recommend running your feed through Feedburner and giving us that feed instead.

To do that, just go to feedburner.google.com and create a feed for your blog. Once you’ve completed the simple steps there, copy and paste your new Feedburner feed into the Feed URL field in the MailChimp campaign builder.

Will my old posts be emailed out in my first campaign?

No, we won’t start sending email until new content is added to your feed.

Will my campaign go out if I haven’t posted anything?

No, we only send campaigns when there’s new content in your feed. So if you’ve got your campaign set to go daily, but you didn’t post anything today, a campaign will not go out tomorrow.

How can I update, edit and pause my RSS-to-Email campaigns?

To update your campaign, go to Campaigns from the dashboard. In the left column beneath Create campaign, you’ll see folders containing all your campaigns. Navigate to the RSS-to-Email folder, and you’ll see a list of all your campaigns. Click the one you want to update, and the parent—the template for your all your emails—will be the top item in the folder. Click Edit email to make changes.

Customize With Merge Tags

Merge tags are pieces of code you can place in your email to add content dynamically. Instead of using copy-and-paste or manually entering information, drop a merge tag into your email and the information will be added for you. For example, add *|MC:SHARE|* to your email, and MailChimp will add links to social-networking sites so your readers can share your campaign.

Merge tags are especially helpful for RSS-to-email campaigns because after you add them to your template and format, you never have to worry about your campaign again. MailChimp will do all the work of collecting new content, formatting with merge tags, and sending at your specified times. That way, you can spend more time focusing on your blog.

Here’s a sample of merge tags MailChimp offers for RSS-to-email campaigns. For more, check out our merge tag cheat sheet.

RSS-to-email: Basic merge tags

*|RSS:POSTS_HTML|* or *|RSS:POSTS|*

Creates a progressively generated set of all of your posts in HTML format

*|RSS:POSTS_TEXT|*

Creates a progressively generated set of all of your posts in text format

*|RSS:POSTS_FULL|*

Displays the full content of your posts in HTML format, if available

*|RSS:RECENT|*

Show links for the five most recently published entries before the posts in the email

*|MC:TOC|*

Adds a dynamically generated table of contents. Note: This tag adds items to the TOC that use the “Title” style. For RSS-to-email campaigns, this tag doesn’t work with the default *|RSS:POSTS_HTML|* tag. Instead, use the individual items tags, and give *|RSSITEM:TITLE|* the “Title” style. That way, the title of each post in your email will be included in the table of contents.

Here are a couple examples of how you can add merge tags to MailChimp’s templates to create custom RSS-to-Email newsletters:

When you create an RSS-to-Email campaign, your template is automatically populated with the *|RSS:POSTS_HTML|*.

When you preview or send the campaign, this is how the content looks when the merge tag brings it in:

Work With Templates

MailChimp offers a wide variety of templates for free, and some of them are specifically designed for RSS-to-Email campaigns.

We've got AutoConnect templates that are completely automated from your Twitter, Facebook, Etsy, iTunes, Amazon, eBay, or Yelp profiles; pre-designed templates for specific types of marketers and events; and start-from-scratch templates that allow you to customize as much as you like.

If you’re a designer and want to code your own HTML template, we’ve exposed our template language.

Here’s an example of an RSS template that’s available in MailChimp’s campaign builder. Note all the different RSS merge tags that are used, including feed title, post title, content, date and author.

When you preview and send the email, you’ll see your template populated with all the content from your feed. You can move the merge tags around, add more or delete some of them, or you can create your own template from scratch.

Socialize Your Campaigns

Social-networking sites give you excellent opportunities to promote your blog and connect with your readers, but they won’t replace email marketing any time soon. In fact, social media and email complement each other nicely. MailChimp analyzed more than a billion emails to track the inclusion of links to Twitter and Facebook, and the data showed an 84% increase in campaigns that included links to Twitter, and a 66% increase in campaigns that featured Facebook.

Social media is great for networking, quick updates, and linking to articles, while email campaigns are better for delivering content and providing in-depth updates. As a blogger, you want an engaged audience—a blend of social media and email marketing will give your fans several ways of following your posts. Most importantly, it ensures that they’ll follow you in their preferred way.

Social Share Button

The simplest way to get social with your email marketing is sending out a link to your campaign on social networks like Facebook and Twitter.

After sending a campaign you want to share, click Social share beside the sent campaign in the Campaigns dashboard. You’ll see a screen where you can share your campaign on Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Digg, and Delicious. Choose your networks and you’re all set.

Social Share Merge Tag

In addition to sharing your own campaign, MailChimp lets you offer your fans a way to share your campaigns. When you place the *|MC:SHARE|* merge tag in your template, MailChimp will add links to more than 20 social networks. If you want to limit the networks in the social share merge tag, you can use *|SHARE:SITENAME1,SITENAME2|* to specify which sites are included. For example, *|SHARE:Facebook,Twitter,Digg|*.

Auto-Tweet

If you know you want to tweet an email campaign before you send it, MailChimp will do it for you as soon as you send the campaign.

In the Account tab from your MailChimp dashboard, click Integrations and open the Twitter integration. You’ll be redirected to Twitter, where they’ll ask if you allow or deny the integration. (If you haven’t set up a Twitter account in MailChimp, you’ll have the option to do that instead.) Authorize the connection. Once the account’s set up, you won’t have to re-authorize.

In step 2 of the Campaign Builder, check the Auto-tweet campaign box (find it on the Tracking, Authentication and More form).

MailChimp will automatically send a tweet with your subject line and a link to the online version of your email. And don’t worry about having your tweet cut short—we’ll shorten the link using our EepURL tool.

Auto-post To Facebook

MailChimp will share your campaigns with your Facebook fans too.

First you have to connect your MailChimp and Facebook accounts. Go to Account > Integrations > Facebook > Install Application, and enter your Facebook info.

In step 2 of the Campaign Builder, check the Auto-post to Facebook box (find it on the Tracking, Authentication and More form).

MailChimp will automatically share a link to the online version of your campaign with your subject line. It’ll show up in your Facebook news feed, so all your friends and fans can check out your campaign (and then pass it along to their friends).

Facebook Like Merge Tag

Our Facebook Like merge tag allows your readers to “Like” your campaign and share it with all their Facebook friends. Place this merge tag anywhere in your campaign:

*|FACEBOOK:LIKE|*

And it’ll turn into a handy little image that says “Like”.

When a reader clicks Like, they’ll go to your campaign archive page, which will then show up in their Facebook feed for all their friends to see.

Social Plugin for WordPress

If you have an active blog, Twitter feed, and Facebook page, conversations with your readers can become a bit fragmented. That’s why we created a plugin for WordPress called Social Social. A lightweight and totally free addition to WordPress, Social handles a lot of the heavy lifting of making your blog seamlessly integrate with Facebook and Twitter. You can associate your accounts with your blog and its users, and when you publish a post, it will broadcast through those channels. Mentions, retweets, and @reply comments are then conveniently aggregated in one place.

Instagram and Pinterest

If you’re one of the more than 27 million worldwide users who “share your life with friends through a series of pictures,” you’ll want to check out our Instagram integration. And if you are one of the many folks who “organize and share all the beautiful things you find on the web,” our Pinterest integration is worth investigating.

Track And Report

For a lot of email marketers, the best part of sending email newsletters is looking at the stats after a campaign goes out—it’s kind of like checking out your blog comments. How many people opened your newsletter? How many clicked? What did they click? What didn’t they click? Did they like the content?

Once you’ve sent a campaign, it’s time to sit back, relax, and wait for your stats to come in. MailChimp offers insightful tracking and reporting. Review this information for every campaign you send—it’s full of clues and feedback that will help make your newsletters better and better. Just like when you receive feedback on your blog, you make adjustments or keep doing what you’re doing accordingly.

Standard Reports

MailChimp's standard reports use neat, easy-to-read graphs, tables, and maps to show you things like opens, clicks, bounties, and unsubscribes. To access your reports, go to the Reports tab in your MailChimp dashboard and click View report next to the desired campaign.

We even offer maps that show you where your readers live.

Social Tracking

MailChimp’s Social Stats allow you to watch your campaigns as they make their way around Facebook and Twitter. To find out how many people Like or retweet your campaigns, click Reports in your MailChimp dashboard. Select your desired campaign and click Social Stats.

Tracking Likes and Tweets

The Like stats are located under Facebook Activity and organized by subscriber. You can see how many times each subscriber liked your campaign and how many other Likes they generated. Good to know!

We even track comments and analyze their sentiments with our Facebook Comments feature.

Twitter stats are located in the same place as Facebook stats: Click the Reports tab in your MailChimp dashboard, and you’ll see a list of all your campaigns. Select a campaign and click Social Stats.

Under Twitter Activity, you’ll see how many times your campaign has been tweeted and retweeted, who did the tweeting and a timeline of all tweets. Only tweets that include the automatically generated EepURL for your campaign are included in this report, so you might have even more tweets than you think.

Merge Tag Reference Guide

Merge tags for RSS feeds

ABOUT THE RSS FEED

*|RSSFEED:TITLE|*

The title of the RSS feed

*|RSSFEED:DATE|*

The publish date of the feed

*|RSSFEED:URL|*

The URL for the feed as a whole

*|RSSFEED:DESCRIPTION|*

The feed description, if provided

INDIVIDUAL ITEMS IN THE RSS FEED

*|RSSITEMS:|* and *|END:RSSITEMS|*

Creates the beginning and ending flags for each RSS item. The stuff between gets replicated for each RSS item in the feed. For each item, these tags are available:

*|RSSITEM:TITLE|*

The title of the RSS item

*|RSSITEM:URL|*

The URL for the RSS item

*|RSSITEM:DATE|*

The publish date of the RSS item

*|RSSITEM:AUTHOR|*

The name of the author for the RSS item, if provided

*|RSSITEM:COMMENTS_URL|*

The URL for comments, if provided

*|RSSITEM:CATEGORIES|*

A comma-separated list of the categories for the RSS item

*|RSSITEM:CONTENT|*

A short summary of the RSS item content in HTML format

*|RSSITEM:CONTENT_TEXT|*

A short summary of the RSS item content in plain-text format

*|RSSITEM:CONTENT_FULL|*

The full content for the RSS item in HTML format, if provided

*|RSSITEM:CONTENTTEXTFULL|*

The full content for the RSS item in plain-text format, if provided

*|RSSITEM:ENCLOSURE|*

A link to any attached file (like a podcast) with an icon, file name, and file size

*|RSSITEM:ENCLOSURE_URL|*

The URL for any attached file (like a podcast)

*|RSSITEM:SOURCE|*

A link to the external “source” of this item, if one is provided

SOCIAL MERGE TAGS

*|TWITTER:FULLPROFILE|*

Inserts Twitter avatar, follower count, and five most-recent tweets

*|TWITTER:PROFILE|*

Shows profile information and follow link without the latest tweets list

*|TWITTER:TWEETSXX|*

Shows your “XX” latest tweets, so *|TWITTER:TWEETS3|* will show the latest 3 tweets instead of 5

*|MC:SHARE|*

Inserts links that allow your readers to share your campaign on social-sharing sites. See the Social Sharing section if you want to customize what sites are included in your email

MORE MERGE TAGS FOR BLOGGERS

*|MC:DATE|*

The current date displayed as month/day/year

*|TRANSLATE:EMAIL_LANG|*

Add links in your email to translate the content from “EMAILLANG” to several other languages using Google Translate. EMAILLANG must be the code for one of the languages we support

For more information and a list of all merge tags, visit mailchimp.com/merge.

Resources

Here are some more tools and integrations MailChimp offers that may be a good fit for your blog:

Analytics360 for WordPress

MailChimp’s Analytics360 plugin allows you to pull Google Analytics and MailChimp data directly into your dashboard, so you can access robust analytics tools without leaving WordPress.

In order for the plugin to work correctly, you need to run a WordPress.org blog, not a WordPress.com blog. The difference is that you download and install the .org blog on your own server, whereas the .com blog is a free, hosted blog. Plugins don’t generally work for .com blogs, so this is just for .org users. You should also have Google Analytics installed on your blog for Analytics360 to work.

You can find Analytics360 plugin at wordpress.org, and you can learn more about the plugin on our website. Once you’ve downloaded and installed it, you’ll see it available on your dashboard. You just need to authorize your MailChimp and Google Analytics accounts the first time you run the plugin, then you can click on Analytics360 and you’ll have access to all your data right in your WordPress dashboard.

ChimpFeedr

ChimpFeedr is a tool that takes several RSS feeds and mashes them into a master feed. If you have more than one site (say, a blog and an online store) you want to combine for a single RSS-to-Email campaign, ChimpFeedr is an easy way to do it. Just go to chimpfeedr.com, enter the feeds, click Chomp Chomp!, and MailChimp will return a new URL you can drop into the campaign builder.

Yahoo Pipes

Yahoo Pipes is a tool that allows users to build data mash-ups from different sources on the web. It’s a powerful tool that has many applications. We highlight it in this context because there’s a practical use for it when creating RSS-to-Email campaigns.

Say you want to create an RSS-to-Email campaign, but you don’t want every post from your blog in the campaign. You’d like to leave our posts from a certain author or posts about a certain topic. Maybe you just want to include posts from a certain author, or you want to mash up more than one feed and then filter the results. Yahoo Pipes allows you to do that.

Social Plugin for WordPress

If you have an active blog, Twitter feed, and Facebook page, conversations with your readers can become a bit fragmented. That’s why we created a plugin for WordPress called Social. A lightweight and totally free addition to WordPress, Social handles a lot of the heavy lifting of making your blog seamlessly integrate with Facebook and Twitter. You can associate your accounts with your blog and its users, and when you publish a post, it will broadcast through those channels. Mentions, retweets, and @reply comments are then conveniently aggregated in one place.

Chimpadeedoo

Collecting new subscribers on your blog is easy thanks to MailChimp’s signup forms, but what about when you’re out meeting people at conferences or festivals? With Chimpadeedoo, you can sign up new readers using your iPad without an internet connection. Simply make a custom form for your device, let users sign themselves up, then sync with your MailChimp account when you’re back online.

InstaChimp

If you’re an Instagram user, you already know how fun it is to take and share great pictures. InstaChimp allows you to share your photos with your email subscribers, even if they’re not on Instagram. Use InstaChimp’s templates to create simple newsletters and showcase your best shots. Whether you’re sharing photos of products, your children, or your latest project, InstaChimp makes it easy to connect your Instagram and MailChimp accounts.