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WPBeginner» Blog» WordPress Plugins» How to Boost Your Email Opt-ins with Newsletter Sign-Up for WordPress

How to Boost Your Email Opt-ins with Newsletter Sign-Up for WordPress

Last updated on July 10th, 2012 by Editorial Staff
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How to Boost Your Email Opt-ins with Newsletter Sign-Up for WordPress

Everyone wants to know how to boost their email list size. Recently, we have started using a plugin called Newsletter Sign-Up for WordPress which gives your users various ways to subscribe to your email newsletter. In this article, we will show you how to boost your email opt-ins by using the Newsletter Sign-Up plugin for WordPress.

Features

  • Add a “sign-up to our newsletter” checkbox to your comment form or register form (including BuddyPress or MultiSite forms)
  • Add a customizable newsletter sign-up form as a widget.
  • Embed a customizable sign-up form in your posts or pages by using the shortcode.
  • Embed a sign-up form in your template files by calling nsu_signup_form();
  • Use the MailChimp, YMLP API, Aweber or any other third party newsletter provider.
  • Works with most major mailinglist services because of the form mimicing feature.
  • Compatible with WYSIWYG Widgets to allow easy widget text editing.

How to Setup Newsletter Sign-Up

First thing you need to do is install and activate the Newsletter Sign-Up plugin. Upon activation, you will see a new menu option in your dashboard called “Newsl. Sign-Up”. Click on that to configure the settings. Because we are using MailChimp, we will show how to set this up with MailChimp.

We decided to use the MailChimp API, so we clicked the checkbox. If you click on the little question mark icons, it will take you to the appropriate page that will show you how to get your API Key, and List ID. We wanted to add the users to a specific interest group: weekly. This allows us to only send them weekly emails (keeping the users happy). See the image below:

Newsletter Signup Configuration

Then there is an option for Checkbox settings. You can add the checkbox to your comment form and user registration form. ost of the settings on this page are pretty self-explanatory.

Newsletter Signup Checkbox Settings

There is a forms setting and configuration extractor page. Form settings is only if you are using the shortcode feature or adding it to your sidebar (using widgets). Configuration extractor is really handy tool. If you decide not to use the API, then it gets all the configuration settings for you.

Why We Use Newsletter Sign-Up

In the past, we have done a series on how to do lead generation in WordPress (Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3). Well recently, we ran into a problem with our comment opt-in method. We made some internal changes on how our email lists were setup and combined the weekly newsletter with our main email list. This allows us to prevent duplicate signups while still keeping the group distinction. The previous plugin we were using called WP-Leads, didn’t allow us to have group signup. Meaning, it would only add users to the main list without any segmentation. We only want to send users what they signed up with. Surprisingly, none of the other MailChimp plugins offered this feature either (not even the official one). We reached out to a few plugin developers including Danny of Newsletter Sign-up with a feature request. He was very nice about the request, and he added the feature within a week.

Download Newsletter Sign-Up Now.

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23 Comments

Leave a Reply
  1. Oksana Romaniv says:
    Oct 4, 2016 at 1:13 pm

    Thank you for this article! As always – easy and useful.

    Reply
  2. anniel douglas says:
    Oct 21, 2015 at 2:36 am

    i am going to love this so just give me a little time thanks

    Reply
  3. jessie says:
    Oct 29, 2014 at 6:01 pm

    thanks for sharing this with us :)
    havent seen that the mailchimp plugin already has this function! uhhh!

    Reply
  4. Jake says:
    Jul 11, 2012 at 8:10 pm

    What are the benefits of using the Mailchimp API?

    Reply
    • Editorial Staff says:
      Jul 11, 2012 at 9:16 pm

      You get to use Groups to segment the list better. This allows us to give people the ability to sign up weekly.

      Reply
    • Danny van Kooten says:
      Aug 3, 2012 at 4:05 am

      Using the MailChimp API gives you slightly more options and is generally a safer and more reliable way to add subscribers to your external mailing list from your own server. The chances of failing are far lower compared to mimicking a regular form request.

      If you are using MailChimp I highly suggest you use their API.

      Source: I am the developer of Newsletter Sign-Up.

      Reply
      • Alan says:
        Aug 6, 2012 at 7:19 am

        Hi Danny,

        Is there an easy way to get this to work with JetPack comments?

        Reply
      • Johnnie Beeman says:
        Sep 19, 2014 at 9:51 am

        wow! what about aweber, how do i get the api key and how do i add subscribers to my external mailing list from my own server???

        Reply
  5. Ahmad Awais says:
    Jul 11, 2012 at 1:25 pm

    How to setup Weekly, Monthly daily options to our Email Subscription Widget?
    Would like to know more about its setup with Mail Chimp and Aweber.
    Also about manual integration tutorial if you can do it will be great :)
    Nice post.

    Reply
    • Editorial Staff says:
      Jul 11, 2012 at 1:49 pm

      We are only using this plugin to add a checkbox in the comments. For the sidebar widget: daily, weekly option in Aweber or MailChimp is done by using segments/groups. Both have different UI’s but they also have documentation on it. Both Aweber and MailChimp will give you the HTML code to paste in your sidebar. Then simply customize it using CSS.

      Reply
  6. tafazal says:
    Jul 11, 2012 at 9:32 am

    Hi, How does this fair against Emailbuddy (by the Plugin Buddy guys)?

    Thanks

    Reply
    • Editorial Staff says:
      Jul 11, 2012 at 10:18 am

      Not sure about that. Never used that plugin.

      Reply
    • Nathan says:
      Jul 15, 2012 at 7:31 pm

      @TAFAZAL

      Email buddy is great at organizing your subscriptions into groups and allows you to place specific sign-up/suscribe widgets and locations throughout you site easily.

      However, I am here after buying email buddy due to the fact email buddy doesn’t support html
      email and i don’t think they have fixed the duplicate email issue – This issue is when someone signs up and they sign up to a group ( call it “whatever” for this example will will say it is a subsribe button on a group fitness page the group is named “groupfitness” you can send emails to this group and schedul emails and so forth but if you send an email to the group on tuesday then have 30 people sign up and want to send same email to the 30 new subscribers you can’t – you have to send it to the entire group – needless to say I did a poor job explaining but the lack of html email and inability to send same email to same group but not to past receipients is my reason for seeking a new plugin – I’m looking at newsletter sign-up now! Good LUCK!

      Reply
      • tafazal says:
        Jul 17, 2012 at 11:49 am

        @NATHAN

        Thank you for the comprehensive insight. I suppose for the smaller projects email buddy could work. With newsletter sign up package, it is the recurring costs that would have to be a serious consideration.

        Thanks

        Reply
  7. Lars says:
    Jul 10, 2012 at 2:20 pm

    Sounds great. Does it work with Campaign Monitor?

    Reply
    • Editorial Staff says:
      Jul 10, 2012 at 7:51 pm

      It probably can. If it doesn’t, then write to Danny. He is very responsive.

      Reply
      • Lars says:
        Jul 11, 2012 at 6:20 am

        Hi again
        Just installed it, and its pretty easy to setup with CampaignMonitor. You just need to know the newsletter form action and name/e-mail identifier. Things you can easily find in your CampaignMonitor account.

        Reply
  8. Mairaj Pirzada says:
    Jul 10, 2012 at 11:54 am

    Am Already using it!

    Reply
  9. Alan says:
    Jul 10, 2012 at 11:03 am

    Does this work with JetPack commments?

    Reply
    • Editorial Staff says:
      Jul 10, 2012 at 7:52 pm

      Not sure about that. Haven’t tried it with that.

      Reply
      • George says:
        Mar 8, 2013 at 8:17 am

        Hmmm… Seems that it’s not working with Jetpack comments. Could be a REAL bummer. Or maybe there’s a MailChimp integration problem since their interface has includes name/value fields which you don’t address above, and I suppose they could be causing my problem too. Any interest in addressing those? As always, much thanks!

        Reply
        • Willem says:
          Apr 24, 2013 at 9:48 am

          I use it with normal comment form (just like her on WPBEGINNER), doesn’t work with Mailchimp. This is second time I test this plugin. On support page plugin author is not around :-(.

        • Danny van Kooten says:
          Nov 15, 2013 at 11:46 am

          Hi George (and Willem),

          I realize this reply is a little late but this still might be of use to some people. When using MailChimp, I highly suggest you use my newer and improved plugin called MailChimp for WordPress.

          It gives you the same options as Newsletter Sign-Up (so you can add a sign-up checkbox to your comment form or contact form) and is much easier to configure, better coded and less error-prone.

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