You already know about some of the ways that you can use Wufoo to capture subscription information and connect a form to your list. You’ve also already heard about one of the ways we’ve been using it for a short survey for our email campaigns and givaways. Well, here’s one way you can build upon the method described in the second link for the specific instances where you’re linking to a form in Wufoo from within your MailChimp campaigns. The idea is use Wufoo’s URL modifications to create your own specialized links to help your subscribers out.
Repeatable Sections in the Template Language
Posted by Cass on
A little while back, we launched our email template language which gives you the power to craft emails so that you can edit them in the MailChimp application. In that was included the ability to set editable images, editable content blocks for text, repeatable regions, and even a way to change CSS for the entire document (which, thankfully, gets inlined automatically so you don’t have to worry about certain programs stripping out your beautiful styling).
Here’s a short mini-tutorial where we show you how you can jump in and get started using the template language to turn either our basic left column or right column templates into multi-section templates via the mc:repeatable tag.
Using groups to manage your lists
Posted by Cass on
With the release of MailChimp v5.1, there are a few new features for groups, including the ability to have multiple groups fields, hide your groups, and even import into groups. What I’ll try to do is introduce you to the concept of groups with a specific example.
Groups give you a powerful way to segment your list based on user preferences. It is at its core a segmenting tool; use it with the guiding idea that you’ll be using it to manage your campaign sends. There are plenty of powerful segmentation features and groups give you one more way to target your subscribers and the additions to the latest release make the set up process even easier.
One thing that we’ve seen users try to do is track the signup location of your subscribers. This is useful for several reasons, mostly analytically. Perhaps you want to see if where they signed up has some sort of correlation with subscriber engagement. You could even set up personalized messages depending on this information with our conditional merge tags. Or maybe you just want to track where most of your subscribers are coming from so you know what your target market is.
Whatever the reasons, it’s certainly possible to track this data with a little setup within your MailChimp account and some knowledge about html form elements. We’ll show you how to add a hidden field to a list within your MailChimp account and then how to modify your embedded signup form so that you can start tracking.
Sometimes you’ll find that you want to guide potential subscribers’ preference or options, just to point them in the right direction. You may have noticed this about the MailChimp hosted forms, but here’s an option to try out if you’re linking to your sign-up forms. (Warning: not for those who get queasy at the site of raw html code.)
(Edit: this method will actually only work with visible items on your form. If you’re using hidden forms, it won’t work unless you put those hidden inputs on your form via the advanced designer. Using the embedded form, you can certainly track that way.)
Basically, the hosted forms are pretty versatile in the fact that they can capture and extract query strings and then pre-fill the form based on values that you can define. This gives you the ability to put in text or pre-select certain items on your form.