How to Create a MailChimp Popup for Any Website [2024]

You’ve set up your MailChimp account.

You’re ready to send emails and attract tons of traffic to your website!

Time to grow your email list!

That’s when website popups come into play. Mailchimp popups, to be exact.

With a 4.01% subscription rate (that’s the average popup CVR), they’re the most powerful way to capture emails and turn your visitors into subscribers.

Let’s see how you can make the most of them.

How to make a Mailchimp popup

Follow these steps to create a Mailchimp popup sign-up form for your website:

• Choose Mailchimp segments

• Prepare the offer for visitors

• Write an engaging copy

• Create a popup design

• Prepare display rules

• Configure Mailchimp

For starters, though—

Get an easy-to-use popup app.

Consider Wisepops (rated 4.9 stars on Shopify and Capterra).

Wisepops integrates with Mailchimp and has helpful features like syncing leads with Mailchimp groups.

You can use it to make a Mailchimp popup for free:

Unlimited free trial, zero commitment. See who uses Wisepops.

Here's a look at how you can create popups and forms for Mailchimp—

Everything is in drag-and-drop + you get plenty of popup templates to start with:

Step 1: Choose Mailchimp segments

Before trying to get more email subscribers, it’s important to set your strategy first.

To do so, these questions can help:

• Do I have different segments of visitors? (If you already created multiple lists or groups in MailChimp, the answer is probably yes)

• Your visitors’ interests? For example if you’re a SaaS, you might want to segment your visitors by the type of product they’re interested in

• Their country? If you’re working for an international ecommerce website, you might want to segment by country.

• Their language? Most of the time, you need to adapt to the local language.

• Their gender? If you’re selling shoes or clothes, it would make a lot of sense to segment by gender.

Step 2: Prepare the offer for visitors

To convince your users to fill in your popup form, you’ll have to find a convincing offer.

Here are some options—

First, a discount coupon. Coupons are still one of the best ways to seduce a customer. According to research, 39% of customers use them.

Get one of these 20 discount code ideas and examples to get started.

The next idea—a free shipping coupon.

Free shipping offers can be very convincing as well. Actually, 9 out of 10 consumers say it’s the most convincing incentive to shop more online:

Next—product giveaway.

See this example below?

17.5% of the users who saw it entered their email to participate in the giveaway. Grab these giveaway ideas and get started.

Also—a lead magnet like this one below:

MailChimp makes it very easy to send a welcome email containing that kind of freebie (or any lead magnet example, really). In other words, it’s easy to implement and given the results, it’s worth trying this kind of offer.

Step 3: Write an engaging copy

Start by picking the right headline. It will be key to getting your visitor’s attention.

In short:

• Make sure it highlights a benefit of subscribing to your newsletter

• Use power words to make it more appealing

• Keep it short, its aim is to drive your user’s attention to the popup in itself

Here's a good example:

ou can also draw inspiration from the 6 popup headline formulas.

Once your headline is ready, let’s focus on your optin popup main content:

• Make sure it’s easy and quick to understand

• Detail the benefits of subscribing (“exclusive offers”, “10% off your next order”, etc)

• Use words which reflect your brand’s tone of voice

If you want to take it further, you can read our 8 tips to write popup copy.

Step 4: Create a stunning design

When designing your popups for ecommerce, we recommend you to keep the following rules in mind:

First rule: design mobile

Prepare two designs, one for mobile and the second for desktops. It will display better on each type of device and will prevent an SEO penalty.

Here's how to create mobile popups in Wisepops:

Second rule: keep your design coherent with your website

Work on a design that matches your website style and your brand. The visitor must feel like the popup is part of the navigation experience.

You can draw some inspiration from your MailChimp email templates: what colors do you use in your newsletters? What kind of visuals? Call-to-actions? Can you reuse some of these elements?

Third rule: use visuals

Images can help get your visitors’ attention. See how this popup contributes to helping focus on their message?

Step 5: Prepare the display rules

The first option you’ll have to think about when preparing your display scenario will be the Mailchimp popup trigger.

Here are some of the most common options:

• On landing: as soon as the user loads the page (often you can add a delay)

• On exit: when the user is about to leave your website

• After X pages: when the user has browsed through more than X pages

• On scroll: when the user has read X% of your page

• On click: when the user clicks a specific link or call-to-action

 There’s no universal rule for triggers. The results you’ll see will depend a lot on your type of business. To make sure you pick the right option, we recommend you AB test the different triggers.

Here are how these triggers perform, according to our study of 1.1 billion popup displays:

Once you’ve chosen a trigger, you can select who should see your popup. Remember when we discussed your segments at the first step? Well, let’s use them now.

To make sure your Mailchimp popups reach the right visitor segment, you can rely on the following targeting options:

• Visitor type: you could distinguish between new visitors and returning visitors

• Pages viewed: you can trigger a different popup depending on the category of your website the user visits

• Device: this option will help you serve a different popup to mobile users

• Geo-location: if you’re an international business and want to target users from a specific country or region, etc.

Step 6: Configure MailChimp

Get ready to roll!

You’ve built your list-building machine. Now we need to configure MailChimp properly so you can make the most of these new subscribers and adapt the emails they’ll receive to the segment they belong to.

Segment your lists

MailChimp provides a few options to segment your lists:

• Lists: MailChimp lists are the highest level of segmentation available in MailChimp. Usually they group contacts from the same country, or those interested in the same product, etc. A given email can be only sent to a given list or a subset of a list.

• Groups: Groups allow you to create subsets of subscribers inside a given list. They’re useful when you have recurring segmentation needs (you can also sync your leads from Wisepops to Mailchimp groups)

• Other segmentation options: You’ll find tons of other segmenting options.

In general, we recommend keeping things simple and starting with a unique list that you later segment using groups or field values.

Once you’ve chosen a structure for your account, it’s time to prepare the automations.

Set up your automations

By default, MailChimp offers a welcome email option. Once activated, this option will trigger an email for any new subscriber you get, whether it comes from a signup form or an opt-in popup.

This email is a good opportunity to:

• Share a welcome coupon or a freebie if you advertised one in your opt-in popup

• Drive your visitors back to your store:  to do so, it can be as simple as adding links to your main website categories. Or featuring your best sellers.

• Reinforce your branding: the welcome email can also be a good opportunity to communicate on your brand’s story or on your main services (free returns, money-back guarantees, etc.)

But this default welcome email might not be adapted if you have different segments of subscribers and need a different welcome email for each.

So, you’ll need to deactivate the default welcome email and create a specific welcome email for each group.

In your Mailchimp account:

1. Go to Automations

2. Select “Get started"

3. Click "Welcome automation"

4. Click "Use this Journey" and "Continue" in the next window

5. Click ‘Edit segment’

6. Check “Edit" in the first step of the automation (the three dots)

7. Choose "Get more specific about who can enter this map" in the window that opens

8. Choose the segment you'd like to target by choosing different subscriber behavior-related events

The last thing to do is to create your welcome email, of course. And your campaign should be ready to go!

MailChimp x Wisepops

MailChimp default popup forms are quite limited.

With Wisepops, you could:

• Easily design unique and beautiful pop-ups which match your brand identity.

• Reach the perfect audience for your campaigns thanks to 30+ targeting options

• Track the impact of your campaign on your sales and revenue

• Integrate your popups easily on Shopify, WordPress, Magento and any other kind of website