Are you considering using Mailchimp to start a newsletter for your WordPress website and want to know more about it? You have come to the right place.

Below, we’ll have an in-depth look at everything the email marketing platform has to offer. We’ll discuss features, show you around the user interface, and look at the pricing options. Then we’ll show you how to easily connect Mailchimp to WordPress.

By the end of this tutorial, you’ll have a better idea of whether Mailchimp is the right option for you.

What is Mailchimp?

Mailchimp is a multi-channel online marketing platform. You can use it to promote your website and build an audience and customer base around it. Here are some of the main features:

• Email marketing – This is the core of Mailchimp’s business. The platform helps you build a newsletter, design and send emails to subscribers, and optimize the process over time.
• Automation – You can offload many parts of your online marketing by creating automated workflows and customer journeys.
• SMS marketing – A new addition to Mailchimp’s features is the ability to connect with customers via text message.
• Landing pages, forms, and pop-ups – Build landing pages and other assets to attract more subscribers.
• Branding – Preserve your business’ identity in all your communications.
• AI tools – Mailchimp offers AI-powered functionality to support your efforts in a number of ways.
• Integrations – Mailchimp integrates with hundreds of other tools and applications (WordPress being among them).

Of course, seeing a feature list is not the same as seeing it in action, so let’s do that now.

How to Use Mailchimp for Email Marketing

Email marketing is Mailchimp’s bread and butter and what it’s most known for.

Using the Template Editor

One of the standout features is the easy-to-use email template editor. It lets you create professionally designed HTML emails without coding.

For a quick start, there are 130+ existing templates for different industries and purposes.

Alternatively, you can also start from scratch or with just a layout.

Customize your choice as needed in the drag-and-drop editor. Simply pull in new element blocks from the right sidebar.

You can use text, images, dividers, buttons, columns, social sharing buttons, and more. You can also click on any element on the page to customize its content, style, and settings.

In addition, the editor includes settings to customize the global styles of your emails, such as fonts, colors, borders, text alignment, line height, and a lot more.

In short, even if you’re not a designer or developer, you can still put together great-looking emails to send out to your subscribers and customers.

Creating a Campaign

Once you have your template in hand, setting up a campaign is just as easy. First, click Create.

Then, choose to create an email.

Choose your recipients, the sender name and address, a subject and preview text, and the send time.

Then, use the drag-and-drop to configure the email content.

You can use merge tags, for example, to automatically insert a subscriber’s first name. Once ready, preview and send a test email to make sure everything is as you want it to be. After that, it’s just a matter of clicking Send and your email is out the door.

Audience Segmentation and List Management

Another area where Mailchimp shines is list management. All of it happens in the Audience section.

Clicking All contacts shows a dashboard where you can see an overview of stats like number of subscribers, growth, locations, engagement, and more.

Under Tags you can create and assign tags to audience members if you want to send them separate email messages.

The Segments menu allows you to segment subscribers. You can do that based on many different factors, such as location, sign-up source, engagement, subscription status, and much more. You can even apply several criteria at once.

All of this helps you send more individualized email messages. For instance, you can send out a discount message only to those subscribers who live in the vicinity of participating stores. This makes the message more relevant to them and increases the likelihood they will convert.

Automation Options

Under Automations you’ll find all the ways you can automate email messages and even complete customer journeys.

The simplest example of this feature is a welcome email. Whenever someone signs up to the newsletter on your WordPress site, you can automatically have Mailchimp send them an email.

But it can also be a lot more complex than that. You can create entire drip campaigns, where subscribers get several messages over time that move them towards conversion. You can even change the email content depending on their behavior and set it all up using the visual editor.

What’s more, Mailchimp integrates with many other applications that you can use as triggers and actions as well. For example, you can set up Slack alerts for new subscribers or send emails to recover abandoned carts in your WooCommerce shop.

Finally, Mailchimp supports transactional messages like order and shipping confirmations, refunds, and cancellations. Overall there are 100+ pre-built automations to help you get started quickly.

A/B Testing

A paid Mailchimp feature is A/B testing, also called split testing. This means sending two or more different variations of emails to see what gets the best subscriber response.

(image source: Mailchimp)

With Mailchimp you can try out different subject lines, images, layouts, and send times to see what’s working best for different audiences. It’s up to you to determine what metric decides the winner and you can create up to three variations at a time. Higher plans also offer multivariate testing where you can play with multiple variables simultaneously.

Reporting

Mailchimp collects data on the success of your marketing campaigns. This helps you understand their impact and fine tune your approach. All of this data lives in the Analytics section.

Among others, you have a marketing dashboard that summarizes the performance of your campaigns (although you need at least the Standard plan for this). You can see open and click rates, unsubscribes, conversions, delivery, etc. Everything is filterable and you can also compare different messages.

In Reports, you can see the outcomes of individual campaigns.

In addition, you can dive into the reports of each campaign you sent.

There are lots of details, like the number of clicks, which links subscribers clicked the most, delivery rates, tips on how to improve your campaigns, and a lot more. This allows you to dive deeply into each email to spot trends and understand your audience’s likes and dislikes.

Subscriber Preferences and Inbox

Another feature Mailchimp offers is to build a subscriber preferences center under Settings.

This is a place where members of your newsletter can control the email communication and other settings. It’s a separate page that you can either host on your WordPress website or on Mailchimp.

Finally, there’s the inbox.

Here you can receive and respond to replies from subscribers to your email newsletter, surveys, etc.

Other Mailchimp Features

Besides its email features, Mailchimp offers a range of additional functionality to improve the marketing of your WordPress site across multiple channels.

AI Tools

Like many providers, Mailchimp has fortified its services with AI features. Most of them are reserved for paid plans and focus on improving your email marketing. Here’s what you can expect:

• Content Creation – Generate on-brand email copy, subject lines, preview text, and other written content, including entire emails.
• Creative Assistant – Automatically create branded content and other resources for your campaigns.
• Content Optimizer – Analyzes top-performing campaigns and makes suggestions for how to improve future emails. For example, it automatically shows the best day to send messages to your audience in the content calendar.
• Dynamic Product Recommendations – Gives you the option to include blocks in emails that include recommended products from your online shop based on customer behavior.

SMS Marketing

On paid plans, you can combine your email messaging with text messages. Capture phone numbers with your sign-up forms, then send text messages at important points of the customer journey, such as special sales or when merchandise ships. Mailchimp offers templates, reporting, and A/B testing for this as well.

Integrations

Mailchimp works with more than 300 other apps and services. Among them are Stripe, Zapier, Zendesk, and many more.

For example, you can pull Shutterstock and Canva images directly into Mailchimp emails. Or, if you run an online WooCommerce store, you can import your order information, send product recommendations and abandoned cart reminders, and include your shop in your automations.

Surveys

Another Mailchimp option is to create surveys to gather customer feedback. This helps you improve your offer and other parts of your business.

Landing Pages and Pop-Ups

Mailchimp includes a landing page and pop-up builder to help with lead generation and growing your email list.

Both come with pre-made templates and are customizable with the same editor as email templates.

Content Studio

Here, you can store your brand assets like images, logos, colors, etc. directly in Mailchimp to easily use in your campaigns.

It can even do work for you. Under Content → Brand Kit, you can enter your website URL and it will automatically pull brand colors, fonts, and other assets from there.

Mailchimp also has editing features like image cropping. This helps keep campaigns consistent and deliver a cohesive brand experience.

Website Builder

There is also a website builder powered by Wix with Mailchimp features integrated.

Mailchimp Pricing

Mailchimp offers different pricing plans that can accommodate a wide range of needs. Below is a breakdown of their base pricing at the time of this writing (up to 1,500 contacts, except for the Free plan). Rates increase with the size of your list and all paid plans have a 14-day free trial:

• Free Plan: Includes up to 500 contacts, 1,000 email messages per month, and basic email marketing tools. Good for bloggers and small websites. Automation options are limited.
• Essentials Plan ($13/month and up): Adds A/B testing, basic customer journey automation, and 24/7 support. You can use it for up to 50,000 contacts.
• Standard Plan ($20/month and up): Includes custom-coded email templates, multivariate A/B testing, enhanced customer journeys, predictive segmentation, and behavioral targeting. for up to 100,000 contacts.
• Premium Plan ($350/month and up): Designed for larger businesses and working with a team. Use it with unlimited contacts and benefit from priority support.

This is only for email marketing. If you want additional features like the ability to send SMS or transactional emails, check the detailed pricing page.

Mailchimp and WordPress

Besides its ease of use, powerful features, and fair pricing, one of the main selling points of Mailchimp is how easy it is to connect it to your WordPress site and start collecting subscribers. You have several options for that.

For one, Mailchimp itself lets you create signup forms, pop-ups, and landing pages you can embed on your site.

But if you’re already running a WordPress website, you can use a plugin like Gravity Forms and go beyond basic email collection.

Gravity Forms provides a native WordPress integration with Mailchimp that enhances both platforms. When you’re already using WordPress as your content management system, this creates an effortless workflow within your own familiar ecosystem.

Key Benefits of Using Gravity Forms with Mailchimp

• Enhanced Data Collection – Unlike standard newsletter signup forms, Gravity Forms allows you to collect comprehensive user information beyond just email addresses.
• Flexible Form Creation – Create advanced, customized forms for any purpose on your site while still capturing leads for your Mailchimp lists.
• Custom Field Mapping – Easily map form fields to your Mailchimp custom fields, ensuring all your valuable data transfers correctly.
• Tagging & Segmentation – Automatically tag and segment new contacts based on form submissions for more targeted email marketing.
• Conditional Logic – Set up smart rules that determine when and how contacts are added to specific Mailchimp lists.
• List Selection – Allow users to choose which mailing lists they want to join directly from your forms.

For WordPress site owners who want powerful marketing automation, the Gravity Forms-Mailchimp connection gives you enterprise-level features right in your WordPress dashboard.

Mailchimp: The Beginner-Friendly Email Marketing Solution

Mailchimp is popular for a reason. It has a clear user interface and is powerful without being overly technical. In addition, the service offers a fair free plan and competitive pricing, making it an attractive option especially for bloggers, small businesses, and smaller online stores.

What’s more, Mailchimp integrates well into your marketing workflows due to its sheer number of integrations. You can use data from many other tools to automate your marketing processes.

If you are a Gravity Forms customer (or thinking about becoming one), you can easily use the Mailchimp Add-On as your all-in-one email marketing solution. Feel free to test drive it with a free demo website.

When you are ready, come back to purchase your Gravity Forms license. The Mailchimp Add-On is available with any license, so all you have to do is compare the plans and decide which one is right for you.