How to make a MailChimp contact form with Contact Form 7

If you use MailChimp to manage subscribers for your marketing services, you can easily integrate the Contact Form 7 (CF7) forms on your website with MailChimp.

MailChimp lets you manage and talk to your subscribers by automating the process of sending emails for a group of people in your mailing lists. However, manually creating mailing lists and adding users to the lists can be a hard job, especially if you manage a large number of subscribers.

Integrating MailChimp with Contact Form 7 easily solves this problem. Once you setup the integration, a new user is automatically added to your mailing lists when they submit a CF7 form. You can also configure MailChimp to automatically choose the mailing lists and groups to which the user should be added based on the form submitted by the user.

This article will give you step by step instructions on how to create a form with Contact Form 7 and use it to add subscribers to your MailChimp lists.

What is MailChimp?

MailChimp is an email newsletter service, used by many WordPress users, that lets you maintain lists of subscribers and send out automatic emails to all of them easily and efficiently. It provides its service free for up to 2000 subscribers & is a great email marketing tool to get started with marketing.

Advantages of using Contact Form 7 with MailChimp

You can use a Contact Form 7 form to add subscribers easily to your MailChimp lists. Doing this provides benefits such as:

No need to manually add contacts to MailChimp. Provides automated addition and tagging of new contacts.
Add users to an automated email marketing campaign.
Easily design the subscription form to match your website’s theme.
Complete control over form fields. You can send any field data to MailChimp.
Show sign-up forms anywhere you want using the CF7/MailChimp shortcode.

Tip: There are many WordPress plugins that provide MailChimp integration with Contact Form 7 forms. In this article, we will see how easily we can use MC4WP to do this.

Creating MailChimp Contact Form with CF7

To create a MailChimp Contact Form with CF7, you need to:

1. Setup a MailChimp account
2. Get your MailChimp API key
3. Install MailChimp for WordPress on your WordPress website
4. Connect your MailChimp account with your WordPress website
5. Integrate Contact Form 7 with MailChimp
6. Create your Contact Form

Optional Extras

Selecting a specific MailChimp list for a Contact Form 7 form
Automatically tagging the subscribers added using the Contact Form 7 forms

1. Setup a MailChimp account

You can easily create a MailChimp account by going to the MailChimp website and selecting Sign Up Free.

After signing up, you need to:

1. Verify your account

2. Enter your organization’s information.

3. Create audience lists to add subscribers from the Audience Dashboard.

Tip: You can skip this step if you already have a MailChimp Account.

2. Get your MailChimp API key

To get your MailChimp API key:

1. Log into your MailChimp account and go to your profile.

2. In the navigation bar, select API keys under Extras.

3. Copy the desired API key.

4. Make a note of the API key & save it somewhere where you can find it easily again. You will need it to connect your WordPress website with MailChimp.

Tip: If you don’t have an API key, create a new one by clicking Create a key.

3. Install MailChimp for WordPress on your WordPress website

The MailChimp for WordPress plugin helps you manage your MailChimp lists through various methods directly from your WordPress website. One of the main advantages of the plugin is that you can use it to seamlessly integrate your Contact Form 7 forms with your MailChimp account.

To install MailChimp for WordPress:

1. On your WordPress website, go to Plugins >> Add New.

2. Search for MailChimp for WordPress.

3. Click Install Now.

4. Activate the plugin.

Tip: You can also install the plugin directly to your website from WordPress Plugin Directory.

4. Connect your MailChimp account with your WordPress website

To connect your WordPress website with your MailChimp account:

1. On your website, go to MC4WP >> MailChimp.

2. In the textbox, paste the API Key copied in Step 2.

3. Click Save Changes.

If everything goes well, you should see the Connected status.

You can also see your audience lists and their respective fields on the same page.

Tip: If you update existing audience lists or create new ones in your MailChimp account, the changes will only appear in WordPress after you click Renew Mailchimp lists.

5. Integrate Contact Form 7 with MailChimp

To integrate Contact Form 7 with MailChimp:

1. On your website, go to MC4WP >> Integrations.

2. Click Contact Form 7.

3. Under the MailChimp Lists section, select all the lists where you want to add subscribers using CF7.

4. Choose the desired configurations and click Save Changes.

Tip: Only the lists selected in this page will be integrated with the CF7 forms on your website.

6. Create your Contact Form

To create a Contact Form:

1. Go to Contact >> Add New.

2. Add the fields that you want each subscriber to enter while subscribing to your MailChimp list.

Tip: While adding the fields, make sure that you prefix the name of the field by mc4wp- and write all the letters of the field name in uppercase.

Tip: To verify that the names of your form fields match the names of the MailChimp fields, go to MC4WP >> MailChimp, click the name of your list, and verify the Tag of each field.

3. Add the [mc4wp_checkbox] tag in the form. The entered data is only sent to MailChimp if the users select this checkbox.

Tip: If you don’t want to use the checkbox and add all the users who submit the form as subscribers, add <input type="hidden" name="mc4wp-subscribe" value="1" /> to the form.

4. Click Save.

This form is made with CF7 Skins using the CF7 Skins Caspar styleStyle When you select a CF7 Skins Style the aesthetic design (CSS code) is automatically created and applied to your form..

In the form above, the provided name and email is automatically added to the configured MailChimp list if the user selects the checkbox.

Tip: We also have Free Templates available to make your form creation process quicker.

Selecting a specific MailChimp list for a Contact Form 7 form

If you have multiple subscriber lists in your MailChimp account, you may need to add subscribers from different forms to different MailChimp lists. Contact Form 7 provides an easy way for you to specify the list where you want to add subscribers in each form.

To specify the list in a contact form:

1. Go to MC4WP >> MailChimp.

2. Scroll down and copy the ID of the list where you want to send the submitted data.

3. In the contact form, add the following HTML code:

<input name="_mc4wp_lists[]" type="hidden" value="<list id>" />

Make sure you replace the <list id> with the ID copied in the previous step.

4. Click Save.

Tip: You can follow our Contact Form 7 Editor guide to quickly and easily add a specific MailChimp list in your existing forms.

Automatically tagging the subscribers added using the Contact Form 7 forms

You can automatically tag the subscribers added with your CF7 forms. To do this:

1. Go to MC4WP >> Form.

2. Select Settings.

3. Scroll down to the Subscriber tags text box.

4. Enter the tags for the subscriber added using the contact form.

Tip: To add multiple tags, separate them with a comma.

5. Click Save Changes.

Tip: Adding tags in this way helps you group the visitors of your WordPress website in a single place. You can then use the tag to send emails and promotional materials specifically to those users.