The Best Gravity Forms Mailchimp Plugins and Integrations

Gravity Forms is, far and away, the premier form building plugin for WordPress. It’s the most customizable and an entire ecosystem of add-ons and plugins have developed over the years. Many of these plugins are built with the idea of integrating with third-party services and applications. One of the more common services that people like to integrate with Gravity Forms and WordPress is Mailchimp. We’re going to take a look at some of the best Gravity Forms Mailchimp plugins and integrations available today.

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Gravity Forms Mailchimp Add-on

We’ll begin with the official Gravity Forms Mailchimp add-on. This is the easiest way to connect Gravity Forms to Mailchimp. You can use this add-on to make a Gravity Form to collect subscribers for your newsletter. The obvious way to do this is to just create a brand new form, ask for an email address, and tie that together with your Mailchimp account. You can then place that form throughout your site to help grow your list.

Of course, the power of the add-on is that you can connect any of your forms to Mailchimp. It doesn’t just have to be a Gravity Form dedicated to collecting email addresses from your visitors. You can integrate Mailchimp to any Gravity Form you have that collects an email address: support requests, contact forms, data collection, and estimates and proposals. The possibilities are endless.

How to Install the Official Gravity Forms Mailchimp Add-on

You can download the Mailchimp add-on directly from the Gravity Forms site. The add-on is available across all three of the Gravity Forms licensing levels: Basic, Pro, and Elite. The easiest way to install the add-on is to access the Add-Ons option in the Forms menu of your WordPress installation.

From there, just find the Mailchimp add-on, press the Install button, and follow the steps. Once the add-on is installed and activated the final step is to add your Mailchimp API Key to the Gravity Forms Settings.

Useful Tips for the Gravity Forms Mailchimp Add-on

You can use the official add-on to map individual fields in your form back to fields in your Mailchimp-created forms. This way you can collect multiple pieces of information and not just a simple email address.

Supporting double opt-in is a requirement for any email marketing tool and Mailchimp is no exception. Luckily, the official add-on makes this easy to enforce. Simply check the option when setting up your form’s Mailchimp Feed.

If you get stuck at any point during the setup process don’t forget to check the official documentation. Gravity Forms is well-known for great support and documentation for its plugin and all of its add-ons.

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Workflow Automation Tools

One of the more common ideas in software now is connecting applications together. In the past, this was done with custom software or manual data entry. In recent years, several services have come out to automate workflows. The two most popular, Zapier and Integromat, have a few ways you can make your forms and Mailchimp talk to each other.

Zapier

Zapier is another great way to connect Gravity Forms to your Mailchimp account. Your options are a little limited but you can find more details over at the Zapier website. The most interesting integration Zapier suggests is to use a Gravity Form submission to unsubscribe a user from a list. Giving your subscribers an additional way to remove themselves from your campaigns is always a user-friendly touch. Making the process automated through a Gravity Form on your website and a Zapier integration would make that easy.

Integromat

You might not be familiar with Integromat. They are a Zapier competitor that offers very similar services but at different, more affordable pricing. There are a handful of integrations between Gravity Forms and Mailchimp you can check out on the Integromate site. The most interesting is adding a tag to a subscriber whenever they submit a Gravity Form. You could use this integration to help categorize and identify returning users, existing customers, or any other of the myriad ways that Mailchimp tags are useful.

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Making Gravity Forms Talk to Mailchimp Is Easy

We’ve gone through several really good options to make these two popular applications communicate. Our personal recommendation, since you’re using WordPress anyway, is to go with the official add-on. But, if you are already paying for Zapier or Integromat, certainly investigate those options as well. Zapier, in particular, can get quite expensive if you use their service frequently so use your best judgment.

How to Send a Mailchimp Campaign with WordPress

Most online presences run on email marketing and website publishing. Mailchimp is one of the most dominant email marketing platforms around. It’s the go-to solution for many marketers, organizations, and individuals looking to leverage email as a promotional and outreach tool. For publishing on the web, WordPress is by far the most popular content management system. Today we’ll show you how you can combine the power of Mailchimp and WordPress with our ChimpBridge plugin. With ChimpBridge, you can send a Mailchimp campaign with WordPress in the same way you write and publish a blog post. It couldn’t be easier.

As time goes by, and social media advertising and other new ways to market come and go, an email will always remain one of the best ways to reach an audience. Unfortunately, the complexity of writing and sending a simple email newsletter has increased. Even tools like Mailchimp, which are specifically designed to cater to a wide pool of users, haven’t escaped this added complexity. The goal of ChimpBridge, our WordPress plugin for Mailchimp, is to make using the core act of writing a newsletter a built-in part of the familiar WordPress experience.

So let’s get started. Here’s the easiest way to send a Mailchimp campaign. And all you need to do is install our plugin and start writing.

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Add ChimpBridge to Your WordPress Site

You’ll need to install ChimpBridge in order to create and send a Mailchimp campaign with WordPress. The easiest way to handle this is to log in to your WordPress admin. Once you have done that, head over to the Plugins menu and find the Add New option. Type “ChimpBridge” in the keyword search and in a moment you’ll see our plugin show up on the screen. Click the Install Now button and WordPress will walk you through the steps of installing and activating the plugin.

You’re almost ready to go. The next step is probably the most important. You are going to need to tell ChimpBridge how to communicate with your Mailchimp account. This is done by finding your Mailchimp API key and saving it in the ChimpBridge settings.

Find and Save Your Mailchimp API Key

Log in to your Mailchimp account and head over to the API Keys section. If you don’t have any API keys yet you will need to create one here. When that is done all you need to do here is copy the key. If you need more help with this step or get lost on the Mailchimp site, there is a handy tutorial about API Keys in the company’s help documentation.

Now, with your Mailchimp API Key copied, head back to WordPress. Go to ChimpBridge in the menu and find the Settings option. This screen simply asks you to paste your Mailchimp API key and save it. If successful, ChimpBridge will let you know it can now communicate with your Mailchimp account.

Integration with MC4WP

There’s a good chance you are familiar with the MC4WP plugin if you’re reading this post. Mailchimp for WordPress is the most popular and widely praised Mailchimp signup form plugin on the market. It’s so popular, in fact, that ChimpBridge has a special integration. ChimpBridge knows to look for your Mailchimp API Key in the MC4WP settings. If it finds something, it is automatically added to the ChimpBridge settings as well. You don’t have to do anything and our plugin will immediately know how to connect to your Mailchimp account.

Still Stuck on API Keys?

Are you still having trouble? Feel free to contact us via our Support form and we’d be happy to help you get your Mailchimp API problems sorted out.

With this step done ChimpBridge is able to get your list of Audiences from your Mailchimp account, save campaigns, and even send those campaigns. All within the familiar WordPress interface.

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Create and Send a Mailchimp Campaign

Now that all of the installation and setup is out of the way it’s time to work on a campaign. Find the New Campaign option under the ChimpBridge area of your WordPress admin menu.

You’ll be presented with an interface any WordPress user will immediately be familiar with. It’s very much like what you would use to write and publish a post or page on your site.

The Basics of ChimpBridge

The field you are probably used to using as the title of your blog posts is where you put the subject of your Mailchimp campaign. From there, the main text editor is for the body of your email. ChimpBridge uses the basic WYSIWYG text editor provided by WordPress, and not the new Block Editor, in order to give you better control. The WYSIWYG editor also helps us guarantee better compatibility with the various email clients that will be used to read your email after it is sent.

There are a few extra interface features we’ll walk you through next.

Mailchimp Reference

Mailchimp supports a few wildcard values for use in campaigns. For instance, you can insert *|FNAME|* anywhere in your subject or body. Mailchimp will automatically replace that text with the first name of the subscriber receiving the email. In ChimpBridge, simply place your cursor at the point of your campaign text you want the wildcard to appear. Then click the corresponding wildcard label in the Mailchimp Reference box.

Manage Campaign

The Manage Campaign section of the ChimpBridge plugin lets you pick the audience you want to send your email to. ChimpBridge Pro users also have the option to select a segment from the selected audience. You can view the raw code that will be sent to Mailchimp and, most importantly, you have the ability to change some of the campaign’s basic settings:

• From Name
• From Email
• To Name
• Footer (ChimpBridge Pro Only)

Preview Campaign

ChimpBridge comes with an easy way to preview what your Mailchimp campaign’s email will look like. Right inside the plugin interface, you can enter an email address to send a test email to. This is by far the easiest way around to write and preview Mailchimp campaign drafts. We strongly recommend every campaign you create with ChimpBridge is first previewed before you actually publish.

Send Campaign

Has your test email been received and looks ok? Finally, you are ready to send your Mailchimp campaign. Hit the Send Campaign button and ChimpBridge will send your campaign contents along to Mailchimp. Once Mailchimp receives the campaign information they take over from there and make sure your selected audience gets your email.

Not quite ready to send? Click the Save Draft button to save your campaign and come back to it later when you are ready. The campaign details will save inside of WordPress and Mailchimp as well.

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Want to Learn More About ChimpBridge?

You can discover more about ChimpBridge and ChimpBridge Pro here at our website. There is more about ChimpBridge available at the plugin’s listing at WordPress.org as well.