How to Create Mailchimp Custom Fields in WordPress to Personalize Your Email Campaigns

Do you want to create Mailchimp subscribe forms in WordPress with personalized, custom form fields for your target audience? By adding custom fields to your Mailchimp forms, you can gather special information for use in your email marketing campaigns.

In this article, we’ll show you how to set up Mailchimp custom fields in WordPress for creating more personalized email campaigns.

Why Use Mailchimp Custom Fields?

Personalization is a powerful marketing tool to boost your revenue.

But, it can be tough to get started if you’re not very technically inclined.

Luckily, Mailchimp gives you an easy way to personalize your email campaigns by using custom fields.

What is a Mailchimp custom field? A custom form field goes beyond the basics (name and email address) and asks subscribers for more information. You can ask your subscribers for their company name, website, birthday, and more.

This gives you an easy way to segment your email list to get better results.

One common way to use custom fields for eCommerce personalization is to ask subscribers for their birthday so you can send them an exclusive discount code on their big day.

That’s exactly what we’ll show you how to do in this tutorial, but you can use custom fields to ask for any kind of information you want.

Easy Way to Customize Your Mailchimp Forms

If you use Mailchimp as your email service provider, you probably know you can create basic subscribe forms right from your Mailchimp account.

But what if you’re looking to create more advanced forms?

With WPForms, you can:

• Accept payments, file uploads, and even digital signatures
• Add a Mailchimp signup checkbox to any form (like your contact form, order forms, and more)
• Create complex multi-page forms with conditional logic
• Reach out to visitors who abandon your forms without completing them

Best of all, you can quickly and easily create your forms using a drag and drop builder. That’s why WPForms is one of the best Mailchimp integrations on the market.

How to Create Mailchimp Custom Fields in WordPress

In this tutorial, we’re going to stick to the basics and show you how to use WPForms to create your own form with Mailchimp custom fields.

Step 1: Add Your Custom Field in Mailchimp

First, we’ll make sure to set up your Mailchimp custom field, so you can start collecting that data in your list.

To start creating your custom fields, sign in to your Mailchimp account. Next, navigate to Audience » Audience Dashboard in the menu on the left.

In the Audience Dashboard, click the Manage Audience dropdown, and then click Settings.

Scroll down to the section labeled Audience fields and *IMERGEI* tags and click on it. This is where you can add Mailchimp list custom fields to your WordPress form.

The screen that appears will now have all of the form fields in your subscribe form. To add a Mailchimp custom field, click on Add A Field.

Here, you will see all of the available custom fields you can add to your WordPress form.

Simply click on the custom field you would like to add to your WordPress form.

For this tutorial, we’ll click on Birthday so we can ask subscribers to add their birthday to their form submission.

Once you click on the custom field, it will automatically be added to the above list of form fields. Here, you can name the field. We’ll name ours Birthday.

You can also choose the date format.

Once you have added all of the custom fields you want to your form, click on Save Changes.

Step 2: Create a New WordPress Form

Now we’ll create your custom signup form on your WordPress site.

The first thing you’ll need to do is install and activate the WPForms plugin. For more details, follow this step by step guide on how to install a plugin in WordPress.

Once you have installed WPForms, go to WPForms » Addons and find the Mailchimp addon. Click Install Addon to install and activate it.

Once your WPForms Mailchimp addon is active, you need go to WPForms » Add New to create a new form. On the setup screen, name your form and select the Newsletter Signup Form template.

WPForms will create a simple newsletter signup form.

You can add additional fields by dragging them from the left column onto the form. You can also click the fields on the preview side of the form builder to customize them or to rearrange their order.

In this tutorial, we’ll be asking for the user’s birthday. So, let’s add a Date / Time field by dragging and dropping it from the menu.

Then you can click on the field to customize it. We’ll change the label to “Birthday” and add a description to tell users why we collect this information. We’ll also choose the Date format since we don’t need users to select a time.

Be sure to save your form.

Next, we’ll make sure all the information users fill out in your newsletter form goes to your Mailchimp list.

Step 3: Connect Your Form to Mailchimp

The next step is to connect your form to Mailchimp. To do that, click on the Marketing tab in the form builder.

Select MailChimp from the list on the left and then click on Add New Account.

You’ll then be asked to verify your Mailchimp account by providing the API key.

You can do this by logging in to your Mailchimp account, and navigating to Profile » Extras » API keys.

Copy your Mailchimp API key and paste it into the form builder, add a nickname to help you identify this account in your WPForms settings, and click on Add.

A popup will appear asking you to name the connection. This nickname is specific to this form, in case you want to connect it to multiple email lists. Name your connection anything you want and click on OK.

After you have verified your API key with WPForms, a new screen will appear with a dropdown where you can select the Mailchimp account you just integrated with WPForms.

After you choose your account, you can pick a specific audience from Mailchimp as well as which action you want to perform when a user submits this form. In this case, we’re going to add the user as a subscriber.

Next, select your form’s Email field from the Subscriber Email dropdown.

After that, there are several additional settings you can configure, such as adding tags from your Mailchimp account to new subscribers, marking new subscribers as VIPs, and more. Check out our Mailchimp addon documentation for all the details.

For this tutorial, we’re going to scroll past all those options to the custom fields section. First, we’ll select the custom birthday field we created in Mailchimp from the dropdown on the left.

Then we’ll choose the Date / Time field from our form where users will enter their birthdays from the dropdown on the right.

Now click Save at the top of the form builder to save your Mailchimp connection settings.

If you’d like, now is also the best time to customize your confirmation message and email notifications.

Step 4: Add Your Form to Your Site

Once you’re happy with your form, you’re ready to make it visible to your website visitors.

WPForms allows you to add your forms in several locations including your blog posts, pages, and even as a sidebar widget.

Let’s use the easy Embed option to add our Mailchimp newsletter form to a page.

Start by clicking the Embed at the top of the form builder.

Next, you need to click Create New Page.

And then give your page a name and click Let’s Go.

WPForms will create the page and embed your Mailchimp form into it automatically. Just click Publish here to go live.

Now your form is live and ready for people to sign up! We recommend submitting a test entry to make sure your custom Mailchimp field is working correctly.

Next, Level Up Your Email Marketing Campaigns

And that’s it! You have successfully added a Mailchimp custom field in WordPress that you can use to personalize your email campaigns and provide more valuable content to those who are interested in what you have to offer.

Want to customize your forms even more? Check out how to redirect site visitors after they submit a subscribe form. This way you can guide users to a thank you page or a custom landing page and keep them engaged in your content.

Plus, you might also like these other Mailchimp-related posts:

• WPForms vs Mailchimp Form Builder: Which One Should You Use?
• 5 Mailchimp Alternatives That Are More Powerful (+Better Support)

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