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How To Integrate Mailchimp Into Your Magento Store

Posted Mar 05th, 2010 at 01:54 AM and seen 951 times

mailchimp magento integration

Are you looking to integrate Mailchimp email subscription within your Magento powered store? If yes then you are at right place. There is a sudden rise in Magento stores but some store owners are disappointed with Magento’s default email subscription and newsletter handling capabilities. Basically they face the following problems:

  1. They can not send the newsletter right away because their local time is not the same as of server time. Eventually, their newsletter campaign will be sent few hours later than the intended time. Although, this can be adjusted with a little tweak.
  2. They can not send large number of emails in one go. Magento limits how many emails should be sent at once.
  3. Managing CRON is a pain.

Most of the problems i have mentioned above can easily be managed by installing our Magento’s email subscription extension. Many customers are adding third party email subscriptions i.e. Mailchimp, Feedburner, Nurture etc. to manage their email lists and send out mass email newsletters or promotional emails. I will cover how to integrate feedburner email subscription & how to add nurture emails subscriptions later. In this article i will cover how to integrate Mailchimp email subscription within your Magento powered store and how to create html newsletter in Mailchimp.

Adding Mailchimp Email Subscription Form In Your Magento Store

There are two ways to integrate Magento email subscription into your store:

  1. Install existing extensions e.g. Advanced Newsletter (aheadworks), MailChimp Synchronization (ebizmarts) or E-Commerce 360 (mailchimp).
  2. Manual Install

You can read the installation instructions of the above extension from their Magento connect list but if you looking to install Mailchimp newsletter manually then read on.

Steps:

  1. Log on to your Mailchimp account.
  2. Click on “Lists” tab. You will be shown a list of all available Newsletter (If not please create one for your particular store).
  3. On your list there is a link called settings, just click on that.
  4. Click on the secondary tab called “for your website”
  5. Now, let’s click on “Signup Form Embed Code” link.
  6. It will open up your Signup form designer with options like “Design Form Structure”, “Form Colors” & “Form Enhancements”. Modify the form and once all done click on “Create Embed code”. Copy the embed code from the text area at the left.
  7. Your Mailchimp signup code is ready, simply add this code to your Magento store and replace the existing signup code. You can change the code by editing app/design/frontend/default/theme/template/newsletter/subscribe.phtml You may have to make the necessary CSS adjustments for look and feel.
  8. All done.

Now, as you have replaced the default Magento Email subscription with Mailchimp email subscription. Next step is to draft a nice looking email newsletter template. Please watch Mailchimp videos and setup a newsletter design.

Please leave me a comment and let me know if you face any problems installing Mailchimp Signup Embed form in your Magento store. Don’t forget to subscribe our RSS to receive latest updates.




View Comments to “How To Integrate Mailchimp Into Your Magento Store”

  1. ScreencastWorld Says:
    March 5th, 2010 at 1:48 PM

    Great tutorial. There are quite a few EMail Marketing, EMail Newsletter, and Autoresponders around. AWeber is one of the more popular ones. Whilst AWeber might have more features that MailChimp, I find MailChimp much easier to use. Another advantage of MailChimp (for me at least) is the give you 500 subscribers for free, especially for startup and small businesses.

  2. MagentoMagik Says:
    March 7th, 2010 at 11:53 PM

    Personally i like Mailchimp over AWeber but if you are looking to integrate AWeber as your Magento subscription then you should perform the following steps:

    1. getting the users from the “Newsletter” signup-form or
    2. from a sign-up in your copy.

    Edit /app/design/frontend/default/your_theme/template/newsletter/subscribe.phtml
    and replace the following subscription code by the code you generate via AWeber.
    <form action=”<?php echo $this->getUrl('newsletter/subscriber/new') ?>” method=”post” id=”newsletter-validate-detail”>

    <legend><?php echo $this->__('Newsletter') ?></legend>
    <?php /*
    <?php if( $message = $this->getErrorMessage() ): ?>

    <?php echo $message ?>

    <?php endif; ?>
    <?php if( $message = $this->getSuccessMessage() ): ?>

    <?php echo $message ?>

    <?php endif; ?>
    */ ?>
    <label for=”newsletter”><?php echo $this->__('Sign up for our newsletter:') ?></label>
    <input name=”email” type=”text” id=”newsletter” class=”input-text required-entry validate-email” />
    <button type=”submit” class=”button”><?php echo $this->__('Subscribe') ?></button>

    </form>

  3. MagentoMagik Says:
    March 8th, 2010 at 7:53 AM

    Personally i like Mailchimp over AWeber but if you are looking to integrate AWeber as your Magento subscription then you should perform the following steps:

    1. getting the users from the “Newsletter” signup-form or
    2. from a sign-up in your copy.

    Edit /app/design/frontend/default/your_theme/template/newsletter/subscribe.phtml
    and replace the following subscription code by the code you generate via AWeber.

    <form action=”<?php echo $this->getUrl('newsletter/subscriber/new') ?>” method=”post” id=”newsletter-validate-detail”>

    <legend><?php echo $this->__('Newsletter') ?></legend>
    <?php /*
    <?php if( $message = $this->getErrorMessage() ): ?>

    <?php echo $message ?>

    <?php endif; ?>
    <?php if( $message = $this->getSuccessMessage() ): ?>

    <?php echo $message ?>

    <?php endif; ?>
    */ ?>
    <label for=”newsletter”><?php echo $this->__('Sign up for our newsletter:') ?></label>
    <input name=”email” type=”text” id=”newsletter” class=”input-text required-entry validate-email” />
    <button type=”submit” class=”button”><?php echo $this->__('Subscribe') ?></button>

    </form>

  4. Leah Says:
    April 2nd, 2010 at 6:22 AM

    Hi, this looks promising, but what happens for unsubscribing e.g. if a logged in user decides to unsubscribe from the newsletter in Magento's My Account section? Would this feed back to magento?
    Thanks,

  5. Mike Says:
    April 29th, 2010 at 3:08 AM

    Someone answer this mans question..lol

  6. MagentoMagik Says:
    May 12th, 2010 at 12:42 PM

    The point of integrating Mailchimp as your email subscription is that you are replacing default Magento subscription with Mailchimp Email Subscription. Now, if someone decides to unsubscribe from the newsletter the request will be handled by Mailchimp itself and they will be removed from the subscription list automatically.

  7. MagentoMagik Says:
    May 12th, 2010 at 12:43 PM

    I have answered Leah's question. Thanks for reminding us.

  8. Mark Haller Says:
    May 30th, 2010 at 1:10 PM

    Hi there

    I could use some help – the code generated by the sign-in form designer on MailChimp's site uses jQuery and there's no choices.

    Most (or all) Magento's sites use Prototype.

    How can we implement this? I don't want to use jQuery on my site for one sidebar sign-up form, if the rest of my site already has heaps of JS loaded for prototype and scriptaculous.

    Any ideas?

    I've started coding it up in prototype, and got stuck on the Ajax submit – I'm getting a positive result each time :-(

    Thanks in advance

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