Those who know how important email lists are probably also know how difficult it is to have people subscribe to any of your lists. Visitors may come and go, but only a few of them would subscribe to your blog. Pop-ups asking for a subscription are oftentimes annoying for users, especially if your popup doesn’t look good, and you’re using the wrong display timing and wrong popup frequency.
Getting people to subscribe to your site or blog is not an easy task, and it requires a lot of time and consideration. In this post, I’ll let you know how to create a perfect subscription popups that are both beautiful and are proven to work. You just need to have a Mailchimp account, and make some observations on your visitors’ behavior on your website. This would help you to identify the best time and frequency of your popups and maximize their effectiveness.
So, here’s how to create a subscription form your visitors will love.
The good news is that we’re not going to create it from the very scratch diving into the sea of codes and CSS. Instead I’ll use MailChimp WordPress plugin, which has the largest form customization options and is super easy to use.
To start with you can download MailChimp WD either from WordPress plugins directory, or from the plugin’s official page. After you install and activate the plugin you’ll need to to provide the API key of your Mailchimp account and you’ll be good to go.
Now let’s get to creating forms.
To create a subscription form you need to go to the forms section in the plugin admin area and click on the Add new button. A very straightforward form editor will open up, where you can start creating and customizing your form.
First you’ll have to give the form a name, and apply one of the available 14 form themes to it (more on them later).Then select the Mailchimp list you want to connect to this form and choose the form fields you want to add to it. With MailChimp WD you are not limited to the field options your lists have in your account. It allows you to add custom fields to the forms and obtain any kind of information you need. The custom fields include PayPal integration, custom select option, survey tools, time and date picker, option for multiple choice questions, and many more.
The forms can be arranged using drag and drop functionality. So, if you need to obtain any specific information or want to take your forms to the next level this option is the best way to do it.
As you create your form you can choose the form action, that is, whether the form is for subscribing to a particular list of for unsubscribing for it. Moreover, you can leave it up to your visitors, and let them choose the form action themselves. The forms support three types of captcha protection.
The most outstanding feature of Mailchimp WD which it is distinguished for is its conditional fields functionality. It basically allows you to show or hide specific fields on your forms based on the conditions you specify. This is a great way to avoid collecting unnecessary information that you don’t really need. For example, you can set a condition to display the field asking for a social security number only to the users who choose United States as their country. To the users who are not from the States the field will not be displayed. Isn’t this cool?
Now let’s get back to form themes. MailChimp WD has comes with 14 fully editable themes, and allows you to add your own themes with custom everything. You can change every parameter of the theme, set preferred header settings, adjust content and text options, pagination and button settings, and apply custom CSS for additional styling options. The best thing about customizing the themes is that you can see the changes in live preview right in front of the options.
MailChimp WD allows you to completely customize the form header and have it look exactly the way you want. You can give it a title, add a custom description, upload an image to the header part and choose an animation for it. This will give a distinct look to your forms and let you stand out from the crowd.
Now let’s get to the form display options. It’s very crucial as where and when you display your forms, so we need to take it a good deal of consideration. With MailChimp WD you can place your forms anywhere on your site with preferred frequency and loading delay. It supports popup, topbar and scrollbox form display options and lets you embed the forms in your posts and pages using a shortcode.
Popup, Topbar and scrollbox display options come with a number of customizable settings that let you set up your forms to jump in at the right moment. Each of the display options has its own set of publishing settings.In general you can define the time before displaying the form, set the frequency based on which the form will be displayed to the same user, choose the pages, categories, and posts the form is displayed on, etc. Mailchimp WD gives you full control over the display of the forms, so that you can get the most out of them.
Mailchimp WD also comes with extensive form options that let you configure every setting for your forms. You can configure settings for custom messages, after submission actions, PayPal options, conditional fields, etc.
Given the customization options that MailChimp WD comes with you can create perfect subscription forms in just a few steps. All you need to do is to make a few observations on visitor behavior and take them into consideration when creating the forms.
Here is the MailChimp WD user guide, to learn more about how it works.