If you’ve ever wanted to give visitors a way to subscribe to your posts by email and, at the same time, use MailChimp to send the emails, this is a nice way to do it.
You will need WordPress, a MailChimp account and the WPChimp plugin.
Create a MailChimp list to capture emails
The first thing you’ll to do is create a new MailChimp email list that you can use to gather emails from your readers and, later on, to send your campaigns.
If you do not have a MailChimp account yet, it’s easy to create one. They offer a decent free plan.
To create your new list, you can follow this short tutorial.
Setup your blog to capture emails
Next, you need to add a signup form on your blog. You could do this either by getting a HTML snippet from MailChimp and copy-pasting it either in your theme or in a text widget or, you can use the WPChimp plugin.
To install the WPChimp plugin you can follow this short tutorial and, after that, you can add the signup form to your site by following another short tutorial.
Create a RSS-driven email campaign
The last step is a little more involved. You will have to create a special MailChimp campaign that gets posts from your blog’s RSS feed and sends them to your email list.
Don’t worry if it seems a little complicated, you can follow yet another tutorial and you’ll have your RSS-driven campaign up in no time.
That’s it
It may seem a little complicated and there might be other ways to let readers subscribe to your posts, but with MailChimp you get a better chance of your emails reaching the inbox, and you can track opens and click-throughs.