Feb 4, 2013

Unbounce Form Integration With MailChimp

MailChimp offers a built-in form editor to take the pain out of coding your own signup forms. While this may work for most people, some users need a bit more than what’s offered inside our application. For that, we’ve got a variety of options available in our Connect Directory. We’ve blogged about several of these options in the past, like Wufoo and CoffeeCup‘s Web Form Builder. Another great option is Unbounce, which allows users to create beautiful landing pages/signup forms with no HTML or CSS experience needed.

Unbounce is a great fit if you want your signup form to be a little bit more like a landing page, with information about you and your newsletter. Unbounce also makes it easy to do more sophisticated stuff, like A/B testing two different signup form designs or creating multiple signup forms for a single list. Plus, their integration with MailChimp helps you do some pretty sweet stuff.

Integrate With MailChimp

To connect an Unbounce landing page to MailChimp, from the Page dashboard (the one with the reports and conversion rates), choose MailChimp from the list of Leads & Form Integrations.

integration

From there, you can connect to a MailChimp account by either entering an API Key or using your MailChimp username and password.

oauth

In addition to email addresses, Unbounce will allow you to match up fields in your MailChimp list with any fields that were added to the signup form. By default, they’ll also send over information about which Unbounce page and form were used for the signups.

fieldmapping

So, how might you use an Unbounce landing page and the MailChimp integration to do more with your signup form? Here are some ideas.

Updating Subscriber Information

Let’s say you operate a gym that’s getting ready to roll out some new programs (yoga, pilates, bootcamp) targeted at a specific subset of your members. You want to let all of your members know that you’re adding the new programs, but when it comes time to send out more detailed info, you don’t need to bother your members who just want to get on the elliptical machine and be left alone.

Technically, you could send an email to your subscribers with a link to sign up to another MailChimp list. But that’s a bit clunky, and creating new lists isn’t always the best option. Instead, you can send them to a landing page with more details on the new programs, and a form allowing them to indicate if they’re interested in getting more info when the programs launch.

Here’s how to do it:

First, using MailChimp, send your subscribers a campaign letting them know about the new offerings.

campaign

Within the campaign is a link to an Unbounce landing page, where subscribers can get more details and indicate if they’re interested in receiving more information about those programs.

landing

After that, their subscriber profile is updated as a merge field or as an interest group, with no new double-opt-in confirmation needed.

segment

Now, you can send out an email targeted to the segment of subscribers who expressed an interest in specific classes without having to bug the entire list.

segmentcampaign

Triggering Autoresponders

Speaking of merge fields, with our 7.7 release, we made some big changes to the way they function.  As a result, you can now trigger an autoresponder based on a merge field’s value (groups are a bit different and won’t currently trigger autoresponders).

Since you can use Unbounce’s integration with MailChimp to have existing subscribers update their profile (and thus, a specific merge field’s value), you can create a series of autoresponders that are triggered when new or existing subscribers visit your Unbounce landing page and update their information.

For example, let’s say you run a yoga studio and you’ve heard from some members that they really want to learn more about the history of yoga. You could develop a short, introductory autoresponder series on yoga that would be triggered when a subscriber’s merge field changes to “Yoga.”

autoresponder

Then you could create a campaign letting them know about the special “History of Yoga” email series and point them to your Unbounce landing page where they can sign up if they’re interested in receiving those emails. Just like before, instead of creating a new list, their profile is simply updated, adding the merge field ‘Yoga’ which will trigger the autoresponders. You could even use this as a non-spammy incentive for new people to subscribe to your list. Just point them to the Unbounce page and of course make sure they know what they’re signing up to receive.

If you’d like to learn more about getting started with autoresponders, check out this short video and article:  How do I create an autoresponder? or read a blog post about the power of autoresponders.

Segmenting by Signup Source

If you’re connected to Unbounce through OAuth (the “username and password” way), another neat feature is that they pass information to MailChimp about where a new subscriber signed up.  This means you can drill down even further in your list and see how many and, more importantly, who is coming from an Unbounce page.  The benefit here is that it allows the user to see what their most popular signup points are.  Having a subscriber’s signup source allows you to send specific, targeted content to the subscribers based on that information.

signupsource

One thing to note here is that Unbounce will only pass over information for new subscribers.  If a subscriber was on the list previously, their profile will not be updated with a signup source.

There are also other ways to track signup location, even when an OAuth connection that passes signup source hasn’t been implemented. You can manually track a subscriber’s signup location using hidden fields in a form. As Cass mentioned in a previous blog post, matching a hidden field with a pre-determined value to a field in your MailChimp list will help collect that information as well.

Other Options

MailChimp integrates with several form builders, giving you lots of options outside for creating signup forms. Unbounce, Wufoo, FormStack, and Coffee Cup all allow the user to create hidden fields within their list for passing this information over.

FormStack offers users a 14 day free trial, where you can collect new subscribers or update existing ones through a custom form. Wufoo offers a free plan. CoffeeCup Form Builder stands apart in that it’s software that needs to be downloaded, as opposed to the previously mentioned web apps. You can buy it for a flat fee of $69.

Fret not, international users! All these form designers support international characters.

Posted By

Nate

Discussion

  • MaAnna

    Very cool! I’ll be playing with the Unbounce integration very soon. I used CoffeCup software back when they had a super FTP program, before FileZilla came along. They build some excellent apps, and I’m betting there are a few of my design buddies who will want to know about that too. I’d also like to know more about the built-in form editor. Can you point me to the blog post on it?

    02.04.2013

    reply

  • Craig

    Oh yes the no HTML or CSS knowledge needed. A none coder’s dream. Looks pretty intuitive. I personally like to tweak everything I can without the WYSISYG

    02.13.2013

    reply

  • gary john stevenson

    When building a form for my website is it posible to change the actions after the form. For example your form does not seem to allow people to signup again with the same email or it stops them and ask for more info & then it asks them to verify they have already filled in a form (seems like too much hassle for my clients), also would it not be a good idea to send a copy of the new enquirey subscriber to my email so I can see I have new clients. Also how can I alter the width of a classic form in order to embed it? Does it have to be 600 pixels wide?

    04.14.2013

    reply

    • Nate

      I see you’ve got a couple of concerns, so I’ll try to address them in order, here.

      Because an email address can only exist on a list one time, when someone tries to sign up with the same email address, we’ll let them know they’re already a part of the list and include a link to update their profile if they want to change some information (which is generally why someone would sign up, again). As far as the ‘confirmation’ step is concerned, all of our forms have double opt-in enabled by default. This helps cut down on the bad guys signing up with bogus email addresses getting added to your list (we actually blogged about a case study, a while ago). Double opt-in also ensures that there aren’t any typos or misspellings in email addresses, leading to a bounced email later on down the line.

      If you wanted to disable this feature, there are some options. You could either use the MailChimp API to code your own form and disable the double opt-in option, or if writing a bunch of code isn’t your thing, you could use an integration. This posts covers a couple of options, but feel free to use any of the options available in our Connect Directory. Unbounce, Wufoo, FormStack, and CoffeeCup are all some popular options.

      For getting notified of when a new subscribers signs up for your list, you can totally do that! Just add your email address to the list’s notifications area, and you can get an email every time a new subscriber signs up or a daily digest of new subscribers/unsubscribes.

      04.15.2013

      reply

  • RN

    How do you change the “You may also contact us at:” email in the “Welcome” email? It defaults to the MailChimp login account email address.

    04.25.2013

    reply

    • John

      When you’re logged into your account, you’ll just need to go to Lists and then click on the little “gear” icon for the list you’re working with. Choose “Required Email Footer Content” and then change the email address there. Keep in mind, you may need to verify the email domain if the domain name is changing, but once it’s changed and verified (if needed) you can save and you should be good to go. To double-check you can just go “Create Forms” and select the final welcome email to see your change.

      04.25.2013

      reply

      • RN

        Thanks John. I really appreciate it.

        04.27.2013

  • Chris Morales

    We have different people that hande different kinds of email requests. We would like to have emails routed to different email addresses based on items checked or drop down form choices. Is there some instruction on how to build a form to do that?

    05.15.2013

    reply

    • John

      Hi Chris, That sounds like it might actually have to do a bit more with how Unbounce works than the actual MailChimp integration. You might want to check in with them over at: http://unbounce.com/support/contact-us/ to see what they have to say.

      05.20.2013

      reply

    • Georgiana Laudi

      Hi Chris,

      It sounds like you’re looking to use MailChimp groups to target your subscribers in different ways. You can absolutely do that using this integration. Unbounce allows you to target groups within your lists to add your landing page leads to, directly from the page integration window, so that you can do exactly that.

      If you have more questions about this, be sure to get in touch with our uber friendly CS team over at support@unbounce.com

      05.21.2013

      reply

  • Roland

    Is it possible to populate the email field on the Unbounce page with the email address of the recipient? In other words, list member received email with call to action. They click that and are sent to an Unbounce page, where they need to fill in a few fields, including of course email address. Ideally, this email field should be have the users email in it already. Please help – thanks!

    06.04.2013

    reply

    • Nate

      Hey Roland –

      Something like this is technically possible, but it’s a more advanced feature. If you have the name of the field in your Unbounce form, you can pass in a value through a query string. If you wanted to do it in a web browser, it’d look like this:

      http://unbouncepages.com/yourlink/?email=examples@domain.com

      However, if you were sending a link to a form to your MailChimp subscribers, you could use the *|EMAIL|* merge tag as the value and create a dynamic link for each of your subscribers. The link would then look something like this in your MailChimp campaign:

      http://unbouncepages.com/yourlink/?email=*|EMAIL|*

      You can also check out our Knowledge Base article for more information.

      Can I create a different link for each recipient using the Merge tags?: http://eepurl.com/hcXm

      06.04.2013

      reply

      • ling

        wow, it is too technical for me, even with a technical background. in this age and technology, it is most important to make tools and functions more human – really straight forward with clicks and drag drop here and there.

        06.10.2013

Comment