Site Building

Introduction to Using MailChimp with Drupal 7 for Drupal 7

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This series is about integrating MailChimp with Drupal 7 using the Drupal MailChimp module. It will help site builders and content creators create awesome email marketing campaigns and grow the number of subscribers on their mailing lists.

Email marketing is a proven way of increasing the traffic to your website. Even better, it’s a great opportunity to engage with your site's visitors, your store's customers, or your application's users, and learn more about them. When it comes to email marketing, MailChimp is one of the best tools for managing emails lists and analyzing email data. Lucky for us, the Drupal MailChimp module makes integrating MailChimp and a Drupal powered application easy.

In this series we'll cover:

  • What is MailChimp?
  • Installing and enabling the Drupal MailChimp module and its requirements
  • Creating, managing, and soliciting subscribers to mailling lists in MailChimp and Drupal
  • Keeping MailChimp data in sync with a Drupal user's profile
  • Sending email campaigns in both Drupal and MailChimp
  • Email marketing best practices
  • Monitoring activity with MailChimp

And a lot more!

Our case study is the Anytown Ice Cream shop, which has three physical stores, and a website that provides its customers with info about the stores. We’ll create a mailing list for semi-regular updates, similar to a newsletter, and another that allows people to receive flavor of the day updates, optionally targeted to the stores they've listed on their profile. To keep things easier for our employees, we’ll automate the process of sending the flavor of the day emails using an RSS-based campaign. We’ll also look at collecting a customer's birthday so we can send them specials. I’ll refer back to this case-study a few times or use it to explain concepts.

Before you dive into this series, there are a couple of things you’ll want to know how to do first. I'm going to assume that you've already got some basic Drupal administration knowledge, notably how to download and install a module, and are at least familiar with Drupal’s UI for adding and editing fields as we’ll be using it a lot without going into details about the non MailChimp-specific parts. If you need to brush up take a look at our Drupal 7 site building guide for a refresher.

Finally, if you want to take your learning further look for the follow up questions in the description for each tutorial in this series. These questions are presented to help you make sure you’re understanding the material, and to encourage you to explore how what you've just learned could apply to your own use case.

Ready to learn how to integrate MailChimp and Drupal so you can create an awesome email campaign? Then you're going to love this series.

Series Sponsored by MailChimp

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