How to Collect Blog Update Subscribers in WordPress

There are a couple of ways to “build a list” – lingo which in blogging circles most often refers to a mailing list. There are definitely a lot of ways to approach this, but overall, the best way to get it done is to follow the proven path which is collect email addresses on your website using a simple form and send them your blog updates via email.

One important concept in regards to list building is “segmentation”. What this means is that in whatever campaign you’re running you want to reach out to only the target people who are most likely to be interested in whatever you’re selling, regardless of whether you are actually selling something or just running an advertising campaign.

Also, very importantly, segmentation of your mailing list will make it less likely for people to unsubscribe who feel as though you’re sending them too much unsolicited e-mail. So, at least a weekly vs. a daily segmentation should be attempted at first. This means that you allow your subscriber to tell you if they want daily or weekly emails.

The Nuts and Bolts

Before you start, you need to have a MailChimp account or any other email autoresponder account that helps you do the job. Logging in to your account will show you a number of items. You are mostly interested in the following: view groups and send to list.

Groups are pretty self explanatory and simple in MailChimp; you define a group and add email addresses to it. Management of the group is easy (splitting, adding, etc.).

Creating a group is simple: you can group people as checkboxes and you will have a group defined as “interested in” plus name. When you’ve defined a group you can save it and you can add new groups whenever you feel the need.

Forms: Forms is a tab that takes you to a header customization page which can be used to create a signup form embed code, so that you can have a link that a user can click on to subscribe. Creating this code can take multiple forms/options, but Naked Form is one of the better ones since it allows you to easily customize things.

The basic form of the code looks like this:

<form action="http://list25.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe/post?u=549b83cc29ff23c36e5796c38&amp;id=184bf03dd3" method="post" id="mc-embedded-subscribe-form" name="mc-embedded-subscribe-form" class="validate" target="_blank">

<input type="email" value="" name="EMAIL" class="required email" id="mce-EMAIL">

<input type="submit" value="Subscribe" name="subscribe" id="mc-embedded-subscribe" class="button" />

<input type="checkbox" checked="checked" value="1" name="group[9][1]" id="mce-group[9]-9-0">

<label for="mce-group[9]-9-0">List25 Daily</label>

<input type="checkbox" checked="checked" value="2" name="group[9][2]" id="mce-group[9]-9-1">

<label for="mce-group[9]-9-1">List25 Weekly</label>

</form>

The email field is the only one that needs to be modified for better usage:

Edit it in the following way:

<input type="text" value="Enter your email..." onblur="if (this.value == '') {this.value = 'Enter your email...';}"  onfocus="if (this.value == 'Enter your email...') {this.value = '';}" name="EMAIL" class="required email emailupdatesinput" id="mce-EMAIL" />

Adding classes to the form

<form action="http://list25.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe/post?u=549b83cc29ff23c36e5796c38&amp;id=184bf03dd3" method="post" id="mc-embedded-subscribe-form" name="mc-embedded-subscribe-form" class="validate" target="_blank">
<div class="subscribe">
<input type="text" value="Enter your email..." onblur="if (this.value == '') {this.value = 'Enter your email...';}"  onfocus="if (this.value == 'Enter your email...') {this.value = '';}" name="EMAIL" class="required email emailupdatesinput" id="mce-EMAIL" />
<input type="submit" value="Subscribe" name="subscribe" id="mc-embedded-subscribe" class="button subscribesubmitbutton" />
<div class="clear"></div>
<div class="subscribecheckboxes">
<input type="checkbox" checked="checked" value="1" name="group[9][1]" id="mce-group[9]-9-0">
<label for="mce-group[9]-9-0">List25 Daily</label>
<input type="checkbox" checked="checked" value="2" name="group[9][2]" id="mce-group[9]-9-1" class="secondcheckbox">
<label for="mce-group[9]-9-1">List25 Weekly</label>
</div>
</div>
</form>

This adds more divs to the list and a class to the input button.

css styling

Add the following code:

.subscribe { width: 296px; height: 38px; border: solid #bbbbbb 1px; margin: 0 0 60px 0;}

.subscribecheckboxes {margin: 20px 0 0 0; font-family: 'ProximaNovaRegular', sans-serif; font-size: 14px; color: #626262;}

.secondcheckbox {margin: 0 0 0 28px;}

.emailupdatesinput { width: 162px; height: 38px; border: none; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 14px; font-style: italic; color: #949494; padding: 0 10px 0 10px; float: left;}

.subscribesubmitbutton { background: #ff370f; height: 40px; border: none; width: 115px; margin: -1px -60px 0 0; float: left; font-family: 'ProximaNovaRegular', sans-serif; font-size: 12px; color: #ffffff; text-transform: uppercase; padding: 0 1px 0 0; cursor: pointer;}

This will do the following:

Replace the font with the font on your theme. (You need to replace it in the code with the font you’re using)

When finished, a user will see the subscribe button and also a daily and weekly tick option that allows one to pick the option they are interested in.

The last step is to use RSS to create a campaign in MailChimp which is very intuitive: you click on create campaign and then select the type of campaign you want, regular, plain text, A/B campaign or RSS-Driven. For the RSS campaign you will have to input an RSS feed URL and select the time to get it done.