MailerLite’s WordPress plugin is a convenient way for you to publish webforms on your website.
It’s certainly good to install if you have a WordPress site, however many users are confused at first about what the plugin’s capabilities are in the first place.
This post aims to clear the air around how MailerLite’s WordPress plugin works, and how you can use it effectively.
What does MailerLite’s WordPress plugin do?
MailerLite’s WordPress plugin, formally called The Official MailerLite Sign Up Form plugin, is made for growing your email list through your website.
With this plugin, you can either build forms in WordPress, OR you can add existing forms that you have created with the MailerLite’s web platform.
You may use the plugin to publish embedded forms and pop ups.
How to use MailerLite’s WordPress plugin
To build a form in the WordPress platform, you would simply go to the MailerLite plugin in the sidebar of your WordPress interface, click “Signup forms” and then click “Create signup form” and then “Create form”. From here, you can give your form a title and brief description such as “sign up for my websites newsletter!”. You may also type out a brief success message such as “Thanks for signing up!”.
Next, you can check out off form fields that you would like to incorporate in your forms such as email, name, last name, phone and many more. You may also check off specific lists if you want your subscribers to be added to your preexisting MailerLite email lists.
To add an existing form you have created with MailerLite, you would again go to the MailerLite plugin in the sidebar of your WordPress interface, click “Signup forms”, and then “Forms created in MailerLite”. From here, you will be able to select the specific webform you want to use. Once you select your desired form a preview will pop up of what the form looks like.
To publish a form you have created directly in a post, simply go to the post you want to publish your form in. Click the line in the post where you would like to publish your form, and then click the MailerLite icon in your toolbar. Select the signup form you would like to include and then click “add shortcode”.
Alternatively, to publish your form in the sidebar of your website, in your WordPress interface, go to appearance, then widgets, and then drag the MialerLite sign up form into your desired spot in your sidebar. You can now select the specific form that you want and then press save.
Types of forms the plugin can work with
As previously stated, the plugin can work with embedded forms, and pop ups. To publish embedded forms you would follow the steps above, but the process is a bit different for pop ups.
To have MailerLite pop ups on your WordPress site, you would simply build out your pop up on the MailerLite web platform. You may change the settings as you wish here. Once you are ready to show your pop up in your WordPress site, you can go to the plugins setting and click “enable” next to MailerLite popups.
The plugin, however, is not at the moment compatible with landing pages. If you want to publish landing pages under your domain, you will have to do so through the MailerLite web platform.
Is the plugin necessary?
Ultimately, you still can publish your Mailerlite embedded forms on WordPress quite easily without the plugin.
To insert an embedded form in a post or the sidebar of your WordPress site, you may simply go to the form in the MailerLite web platform, and click “get embedded code”. Once you have copied the code you go to WordPress. If you want to put your form within your post, you can go to the text editor and paste your code here. If you want to put your code in the sidebar of your site, go to widgets and drag the HTML code widget in the sidebar where you can paste the code.
As for popups, you to your popup in the MailerLite platform and copy the universal tracking snippet. From here you can go into your WordPress editor and paste this tracking snippet right before the </head> tag of your site’s code in the WordPress editor.
Ultimately, I don’t think that putting forms on your site this way is that difficult to do. In my opinion, it is just as easy to incorporate your MailerLite forms in your WordPress site as it is with the plugin. That being said, if you just want to upload one or two forms on your site and just leave it at that, the plugin might not be worth it. However, if you anticipate constantly changing your webforms or constantly adding new webforms, you might find the plugin to be convenient.
Form builder WordPress plugins that integrate with Mailerlite
If you would prefer to use third party tool to build forms from WordPress to collect email subscribers, you can do so. The following are a few form building plugins that integrate with MailerLite.
Gravity Forms
Gravity Forms is a plugin that allows you to create a wide variety of forms. You can create simple email opt-in forms, user registration forms, polls, surveys, custom order forms and more.
This plugin is known for its conditional logic for fields. Conditional logic means that that you can create rules to dynamically display or hide fields based on values put into another field. This advanced features can be helpful if you are in need of more advanced form building capabilities.
Optin Monster
Optin Monster is a powerful form builder that allows you to build forms easily with its drag-and-drop interface. One of the greatest benefits of Optin Monster is that you can build a wide variety of form types including pop ups, floating bars, fullscreen overlays, slide-ins, and more.
Ninja Forms
Ninja Forms has numerous templates to choose from and 27 field types as well. Not only that but the drag-and-drop builder makes it easy to customize the look of your form as you see fit. Additionally, Ninja Forms is known to be good for accepting payments and donations through its forms designed for this purpose.
