MailChimp Tutorial: How to add MailChimp to your WordPress blog

This is my first how-to post about MailChimp.  And why did I choose this? As a blogger, you always want to stay connected with your visitors and to do that you look for automated services using which this connection is maintained and strengthened.  MailChimp is a free email service which helps you to get connected with customers, subscribers, and clients. This is a boon for newbie bloggers and small business owners who work on a tight budget. One of the attractive features of MailChimp is sending an email to your subscribers the moment your new blog post is up. And in this MailChimp tutorial, we are going to learn that.

But before doing that let us find out why MailChimp is the front-runner among all other email marketing automation services out there.

1. Free Service: What does the MailChimp cost? You will be happy to note that it provides free service till you attain 2000 subscribers and send out at least 12,000 emails per month. This is a great relief to many of us who are looking for a service which is not going to cost us a lot.
2. Large user base: There are millions of people who use MailChimp and they send at least 1 billion emails every day. That is some statistics you can rely on.
3. Ease-of-use: Mailchimp is very user-friendly and incredibly easy to use. You can use it to send automated emails, set up a campaign.
4. WordPress Integration: Mailchimp integrates very well with WordPress. So, if you are using WP as your blogging platform, MailChimp will be easy to use and manage.
5. Mobile app: it also has a number of mobile apps which you can use to create and send campaigns on the go.
6. Analyze: It helps you to manage and analyze the performance of your campaigns. You get to know how your campaigns have fared.

 MailChimp Tutorial: Integrate with Your WordPress blog

Now for the Mailchimp tutorial. It is all very good to know what all this service can do for us and how we can tune it to use for our benefit. But to access these, we need is to create our MailChimp account. How do you set up a MailChimp account? Let us head over to MailChimp and create it. Creating an account is simple and is like any other email service.

And now you have created your free account.

The next step in this Mailchimp tutorial is to add it to your WordPress blog. How to do this? This is quite simple.

Follow the steps outlined here.

1. Log in to your blog
2. On the left panel choose “Plugins”
3. Click “Add New”
4. On the right-hand side click on the “Search Plugin” box and type “Mailchimp”.
   
5. Click on “install now” and follow the necessary instructions.
6. Go back to Dashboard, click on “Plugins” and choose “installed plugins” to be sure that MailChimp is successfully installed.
7. Click on “activate” to start using MailChimp.
8. This will add a new option “MailChimp for WP”, below “settings”.
9. Log in to your MailChimp account (You created a MailChimp account at the beginning, remember?). Ok. Now log in to that account. I will tell you next why you should do that.
10. Click on “MailChimp for WP” and under the MailChimp API settings area, you need to enter the API key. This is needed to connect your MailChimp account with your WP blog. So before you click on the “Get your API Key here”, ensure that you are logged in to your MailChimp account. Now you know why you need to log in to your account.
    
11. Enter the API key (which is a combination of numbers and letters) into the appropriate box. Click save changes. This will connect your MailChimp account with your WordPress blog.

Set it up and now you are ready to rock with your MailChimp account. Was this tutorial useful to you? If yes, please subscribe to my blog and get to know how to create a campaign using MailChimp in my next blog post. Stay tuned.