Simple Email Marketing for Freelance Writers (How to Grow Your Email List with Mailchimp and WPForms)
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Using email to communicate with your audience is one of the most effective ways to convert leads into clients. In fact, email marketing is a game-changer for freelance writers. In an email, the message is personalized and you talk directly to your readers, emphasizing their pain points and highlighting the benefits of your writing services, workshop, eBook, or other resources you’re offering. There’s nothing more effective than sending your audience valuable content to reinforce your authority as an expert.
That’s why it’s so important to have the best tools for your automated email marketing strategy. And using a WordPress plugin like WPForms and a platform like Mailchimp will help you grow your email marketing list and attract more clients. Keeping thousands of people engaged while managing their emails would be nearly impossible without the proper tools. When your business is small, this may be doable. But, as you increase the number of customers and people interested in your writing services, this task can become extremely time-consuming to difficult to manage.
That’s why we’ll show you how to install Mailchimp in the WordPress WPForms plugin in just a few steps so you can take advantage of these powerful tools.
Email Marketing for Freelance Writers
One of the most difficult challenges a freelance writer faces is to stand out from the crowd, and remain at the top of the list when the client wants to hire again. Maintaining regular contact with your customers and leads is fundamental for your business. And email marketing helps you reach thousands of people. Actually, this tool is so powerful that 89 percent of marketers consider email marketing the main channel for generating leads – and it has an expected ROI of 42x!
The key to an effective email marketing strategy is to provide value to your audience and give them a good reason to click. Offer free tips, include discounts, organize events, or give away free samples. The important thing is that you give your target audience something valuable. For example, if you have an email list for book promotion, you can send personalized emails to your audience, giving them tips and tricks to get published or how to write a book. Also, you can segment your emails and set up automatic emails based on their behaviors and locations, so the potential clients interested in writing tips only receive emails on how to write better. This way, your book promotion marketing campaign will achieve far superior results.
And with tools like Mailchimp and WPForms, you can boost your email marketing strategy as fast as possible.
What Is MailChimp?
Mailchimp is one of the largest email marketing platforms and a great marketing tool for freelance writers. With it, you can manage, automate, and track all the newsletters and email campaigns you send to your prospects or clients. This tool allows you to:
- Create newsletters with personalized designs and unique visual formats
- Measure the results of each email marketing campaign
- Keep track of the activity of your subscribers
- Segment your campaigns
- Perform A/B tests
- Integrate the service with other tools and platforms
- Get an image editor for advertisement
- And much more!
And best of all, the free version of the service allows you to register up to 2,000 recipients and send up to 12,000 messages per month, which is more than enough for a new small business or individual freelancer just starting out.
What Is WPForms?
WPForms is a must-have WordPress plugin. It is ideal for freelance writers and anyone who wants to make forms with no programming knowledge at all. It allows you to create forms for WordPress sites and collect your users’ emails. Its major benefit is to simplify the process of adding forms to the point of not needing any type of coding with a drag-and-drop tool. Particularly, with WPForms you can:
- Create a subscribe form, contact form, or even a payment form
- Build forms with a dynamic drag-and-drop system
- Customize form fields according to your strategy
- Integrate with other platforms such as PayPal, Stripe or Zapier
- Have many pre-made templates for the most common form types
- Get spam protection to help you keep your form submissions free of spam
- Have mobile-friendly forms on any device
How to Connect a Contact Form to Email in WordPress Using WPForms
If you already have a database of contacts or customers interested in your business, it’s time to learn how you can integrate both tools to create attractive, effective, and personalized campaigns. Just follow these steps to get started!
1. Create a Mailchimp Account and Add a Subscriber List
Simply choose a username and password. Enter your personal data, confirm your email address, and get access to the dashboard. Then, export a mailing list or create one from scratch to reach your contacts at each stage of the funnel.
2. Download and Install WPForms
Log in to your WordPress site and go to the plugin store. Download, install, and activate WPForms.
3. Add the Mailchimp Addon
In your WPForms settings, go to WPForms » Addons » Mailchimp Addon. Then, get the WPForms Pro version at $99.50 to unlock the main WPForms addons.
4. Integrate Mailchimp to Your WPForms Account
Go to WPForms » Settings and click on the Integrations tab. Then, click on the Mailchimp option. Log in to your Mailchimp account and copy your API key. You can easily find it in your Account Page » Extras » API keys.
5. Copy Your Mailchimp API Key
Paste your Mailchimp API key into WPForms to connect both platforms and enjoy their benefits!
6. Create a Form
That’s it! Once your Mailchimp addon is installed and active, just go to WPForms » Add New and build a form. Add fields by dragging them into the form and later, insert the form on your WordPress site.
With the Right Tools, You Will Boost Your Business and Reach a Bigger Audience!
Email is definitely a must-try channel to keep your clients engaged and bring more prospects to your writing site. Mailchimp and WPForms are two of the best tools to reach a bigger audience. With them, you can get the contact information of all your site visitors and keep writing them automatically.
What’s more, the friendly installation of Mailchimp in WPForms is perfect for setting up a mailing list for writers. No need to be tech-savvy. Just follow the steps above and you’ll easily be using WPForms and Mailchimp in no time.
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This is a strong article. I was wondering if you are available for hire down the road for blogging freelance? Thank you.
Hi Ross,
Can you send me an email at info@jenniferberube.com to tell me a bit more about your project? Depending on the blog topic, either I can write the content myself or I work with a few writers who are specialized in different industries. We’d be happy to help out if we can!