If you have already set up your blog or website, you may now be looking for additional ways to market to online visitors.  One such way is by adding email marketing to your site.   With email marketing, you can customize to whom you wish to market and segment your email lists.  After careful review of several email tools out there, and ones that work for both websites and WordPress blogs, I decided to use MailChimp.

For anyone new to the blogging or the website scene, MailChimp is a FREE email plugin (on WordPress) and can easily be implemented for a website by logging into MailChimp.com and creating an account to retrieve the Formmail coding.

To simplify for this post, I will share how easy it is to add email to your WordPress blog.  First, go to your WordPress Dashboard.  There, select Plugins and Add New.  You can then browse for the MailChimp plugin and Install directly from within your Dashboard.  After the Plugin is installed, “Activate” the Plugin.  Next, on your Dashboard, Select Settings and you will see a new addition for “MailChimp Setup”.  You will need to create your FREE MailChimp account to input your Logon Information during the Setup.  Minor tweaks within the Plugin Setup are preferential.  Next, go back to your Dashboard, select Appearance, then Widgets.  At this point, you can drag/drop the MailChimp email widget to the place you would like to see it on your blog (I recommend the top, right-hand corner for best visibility).

Now that you have configured your email collector for your blog (or website), have an interesting offer that entices visitors to signup.  This email collection can be a goldmine for your marketing opportunities.