Setting Up the Mailchimp Add-On

Where to Find These Settings

The Mailchimp settings page can be found within your WordPress admin dashboard. From within the left side navigation menu, follow the path: Forms → Settings → Mailchimp.

Connect your Mailchimp Account

To connect your site to your Mailchimp account simply follow the steps below.

1. Click the Connect to Mailchimp button.
   
2. Log in to your Mailchimp account within the MailChimp window provided.
   
3. Click the Allow button to allow the Gravity Forms app to access your Mailchimp account.
   
4. You should now be redirected back to your Settings page showing Connected to Mailchimp as: username. You will also see a Disconnect from Mailchimp button now, in case you need to undo this process.
   

Feed Settings

Note

1. Map each of the Mailchimp fields to the desired form field that will contain that information. In Mailchimp these are the fields that display in the user profile information. You can add new fields to the profile under Audience → Manage Audience → Settings → Audience fields and Merge tags.
2. Requires GDPR fields to be enabled for the Mailchimp audience. This is done under Audience → Manage Audience → Settings → Audience name and campaign defaults. Also the audience is required to have at least one member; if the audience does not have any members, add a temporary user (you can delete it after).
   

Limitations

Once a user has unsubscribed from Mailchimp, they cannot be resubscribed to an Audience through the Mailchimp Add-On and the Mailchimp API. They would only be able to resubscribe using Mailchimp’s subscribe forms. This is a limitation of the Mailchimp API.

A feed is the way you define how data is passed from your form submission to an external service. This article will step you through the process of setting up a simple feed. This article assumes that you have already setup the Mailchimp Add-on.

For details on all of the Mailchimp feed settings, refer to the Mailchimp feed settings reference guide.

Scenario

Our example here will focus capturing sign-ups for our team sports newsletter, and registering them automatically to an existing Mailchimp Audience.

Step 1: Create a Form

Firstly, let’s create the form we will be using as the basis for our Mailchimp Feed.

1. From your WordPress Dashboard, hover over the Gravity Forms icon, and select New Form in the dropdown that appears.
2. Let’s call this form “Mailchimp Form (Team Sports)”.
3. Add the following fields to the form: Email, Address, Name, and Phone. Later, we will map these fields in our feed so they can be imported into Mailchimp.
4. Click Update to save your form.

If you are following along, your form should look basically something like this.

Step 2: Create a Feed

To create a feed, hover over Settings at the top of the form and click Mailchimp in the drop-down menu. On the Mailchimp Feeds page that appears, click Add New to create a feed. The steps below show how to configure your feed.

1. Since we are creating a feed about team sports let’s Name our feed Team Sports Feed.
2. In the Mailchimp Audience we’ll choose Team Sports. The Audience must be created in your Mailchimp account first for it to show up here. 
3. Next, we’ll map each MailChimp field to the corresponding form field you want to use to populate that data. For example, we will match Email Address field to the Email field we created on our form earlier.

4. You can then select a Group for the user to be added to. We’ll select Soccer and Football and Assign to group: Always. The Group must be created in your Mailchimp account first for it to show up here. 
5. We’ll leave the Marketing Permissions blank.
6. We won’t enable Double Opt-In or Mark subscriber as VIP on this form.
7. For Tags we will be adding Sports, Team Sports, and newsletter.
8. For the Note, we will add “This user was added through our Team Sports feed.” Notes can only be seen by the Mailchimp account owner.
9. We don’t need Conditional Logic on this form. Conditional Logic allows you to add more stringent conditions as to when the feed runs. 
10. Click the Save Settings button to save your options.

That’s it! Whenever a user submits this form a new contact will be created in the Audience you specified on the feed. Of course, test it first!

Adding Mailchimp Subscriptions to Groups

When using the Mailchimp Add-On, you can add users to groups to better target subscribers. For example, if you want to send an email to all users who have shown interest in baseball, you can group users by interest so that the content can be specifically tailored to them. This differs from Audiences because subscribers can be part of multiple groups without signing up for multiple Audiences.

Here’s how to easily add users to different groups based on their form submissions:

1. Ensure that the group exists within Mailchimp. If not, you’ll need to log into your Mailchimp account and create the group.
2. When creating a feed for the Mailchimp Add-On, select the audience that contains your group.
3. If groups exist within the audience, they will automatically appear with checkboxes next to each of them. Upon enabling a group, you will be able to select if all subscribers on the form will be added to the audience or just ones that fall under a specific condition. 
4. Save your feed.

Conditional Audience Subscriptions in Mailchimp

In some scenarios, you may want different users subscribed to different Mailchimp Audiences based on their form selections. In this article, we will show you how to configure different subscriptions based on the form options chosen.

Note: This article assumes that you have already set up your audiences and have a basic familiarity with the Mailchimp Add-On.

1. Create a Radio Button field and add your audiences as choices.
   

2. For each of your audiences, you will need to create a new feed. Within the form editor, hover over Settings and click on Mailchimp.
3. Click Add New and begin setting up your feed, selecting one of your audiences. 
4. Within your feed settings, click the checkbox labelled Enable Condition to enable Conditional Logic. Using conditional logic will allow you to only use this feed when a particular parameter exists. In this case, it is the setting you want to use for this audience.
   

5. Inside the conditional logic settings, select the field that you want to use for the audience selection, as well as the selection that a user will need to select for the audience to be used. In the example below, if the user selects Team Sports from the Audience field, that user will be added to Team Sports Audience in Mailchimp.
6. Click Save Settings to save your feed configuration.
7. Now this feed will only process if the conditional logic settings are met. You can create additional feeds for your other audiences like Video Games and Hunting using these same instructions.

Any issue that occurs while attempting to add or update a Mailchimp subscriber will often generate the same generic message

Unable to add/update subscriber: Invalid Resource

The error message is also saved as a note on the entry.

How To Capture More Info

Recreate the error with Gravity Forms logging enabled. The error will be saved to the Mailchimp error log, as well as a hopefully more detailed error message from the Mailchimp service.

For some Mailchimp errors, additional information is sent if a specific field has thrown an error. These errors are also saved to the Mailchimp Add-On log.

Checking Error Codes

You can cross-check any error code captured against Mailchimp’s Error Glossary

If the logged information does not help figure out why the error occurred, a developer could add specific debug statements into the site code to try and track the error.

Example

This screenshot shows an example snippet from the error log.

Note how the log identifies what exactly was sent, and what the returned error was. In this case, it is clarifying that when using the Mailchimp Address field, Mailchimp expects that you pass a complete address, including street address and zip code (If you only want to collect the city/state, create a text audience field and merge tag in Mailchimp to map to your Gravity Forms city/state field).

Remove an Application from your Mailchimp Account