WordPress

Overview

With the MailUp plugin you can easily add a newsletter sign-up form to your Web site or blog, and then send and track email and sms with MailUp. The MailUp newsletter signup plugin for WordPress is available free of charge in the WordPress Plugin directory.

Video tutorials

Introducing the MailUp Plugin for WordPress

Settings and Configuration

Styling the plugin with CSS

What it does

The MailUp plugin for WordPress makes it easy to add a customizable newsletter signup form to a WordPress Web site.

• Visitors to your WordPress-powered blog or Web site will be able to subscribe to your newsletter using a configurable sign-up form. Their information will be saved in your MailUp account.
• You will use your MailUp platform to manage those subscribers, create and send messages to them, view statistics on sent messages, and more.
• The MailUp plugin supports the recommended 'confirmed opt-in' subscription method (i.e. subscriber receives an email with a confirmation link that has to be clicked to confirm the subscription). This method ensures that spam traps or wrong email addresses are never added to your list.
• The unsubscription process will be managed automatically by MailUp (e.g. unsubscribe link in the footer of your messages).
• MailUp supports SMS (text messaging) too, so you can choose to collect a mobile phone number as well.

How to use it

MailUp and WordPress make it easy to create a Web site and a blog, and to communicate with readers or site visitors through a newsletter.

1. Signup for a free trial (no credit card required): English /  Italiano
2. Create one or more Lists (e.g. two WordPress sites: you will create two Lists in MailUp).
3. Install the plugin in your WordPress admin area, as described below
4. Configure settings such as the header, footer, message templates, confirmation request email, welcome message, etc.
5. Visitors to your Web site will start signing up, and you will be able to track the subscription trend over time in your MailUp admin console.
6. Create and send email and/or text (SMS) messages to your subscribers.
7. Use the NEW MESSAGE FROM RSS feature to create a newsletter from RSS feeds (a list of recent articles from your WordPress-powered blog). Just select the posts and choose a template and priority. You will be able to edit the newsletter after it has been automatically created, before you send it, without any copying and pasting.
8. MailUp automatically manages the unsubscribe process and gives you access to statistics down to the individual recipient level (opens, clicks, social sharing, etc.)

Installing the MailUp Plugin for WordPress

See the video tutorial above for an overview. Here are detailed instructions:

1. Sign-in to your WordPress admin account from your website or blog.

2. View the Plugins tab and Click on “Add New.”

3. Search for the "MailUp" plugin on the search tab

4. Click on “install now.” and click "yes" to confirm.

5. Click on "Activate plugin."

6. Go to the the Appearance section and click on the widgets tab. You can see all the available widgets including the MailUp one.

7. Drag the MailUp widget into the main sidebar.

8. You can now go to your website and check that the MailUp newsletter plugin is installed.

Configuring the plugin

Authorizing WordPress to communicate with MailUp

Before you can connect your WordPress site to your MailUp account by filling out the fields on the setup page, you will need to activate the MailUp API in your MailUp account:

1. Log into your MailUp account
2. Navigate to Settings > Account settings > Developer's corner > Web services
3. Select Frontend from the drop-down
4. Check the Enabled checkbox
5. For added security, enable IP Address Validation and add the IP address of your Web site

Connecting WordPress to MailUp

After installing the plugin and authorizing an external connection to your MailUp account, access the WordPress administration panel and select Settings > WP MailUp in the left-side navigation menu to configure the plugin.

The setup page will be displayed.

Continue with the steps below, starting with adding your MailUp account credentials to the General Settings tab

Configure the settings in each section as described below. Please note that all the data required to configure the plugin is available in your MailUp console under "Settings > Codes Table". 

Use this section to configure general properties, including the MailUp account URL, form title, etc.

[1] You can change the style of the sign up form as shown here.

The last option is useful if your Wordpress site uses WPML or Polylang for multilanguage support. By checking this box, each text string configured in the MailUp plugin will be added to the Wordpress strings DB shared by all plugins. The translation plugins will retrieve the strings from this DB and allow to translate them, so that language selection made by the user at site level will also be reflected in the subscription form configured with MailUp's Wordpress Plugin.

Recipient list

Select which List in your MailUp account the new subscriber will be added to. MailUp accounts support multiple lists, but you can only add site visitors to one List (and optionally one Group within the List) using this widget.

Personal Data Fields

The subscription form can pass up to eight separate pieces of information to MailUp. Either the email or the mobile phone number must be sent to MailUp for the user to be added to the system, so you must make at least one of those two fields required. The other six fields can be associated with any of the additional fields used in your MailUp console under "Manage > Personal Data Fields". Please note that one of this six additional fields is a date picker, so this particular field can only be used to send a date (in US format, mm/dd/yyyy).

• Check "Show" to show the field in the widget 
• Check "Req." to make the field required
• The field code must match a valid field code in your MailUp console. "Email" and "sms" should not be altered. The other field codes can be any of the field codes available in your MailUp console, and they can be located under "Settings > Codes Table". For example, you could ask for First and Last Name.
• You can use as few as 1 field and as many as 8 fields. In the example below, 5 fields are used.

Here is how the plugin looks by default on customer-facing pages:

Messages

Here you can edit the error messages that are shown when the submit button is pressed, if there is an issue.

Terms and conditions

You can add up to two conditions the subscriber has to accept in order to subscribe the form. Enabling one or more conditions is optional.

In the widget panel, the submit button requires you select all the enabled conditions to proceed.

In the example below two conditions are enabled, only the for the first one an additional text is provided. Please note that basic HTML can be included in the textarea field to link to an external document

Admin panel	Frontend widget

Test connection

You can use the "Test" button to instantly verify the plugin settings you've configured, so that you are immediately aware if there is an IP addresses restriction configured in MailUp, or if an incorrect IP-based restriction set in MailUp is preventing the plugin to communicate with it.

Customizing the default CSS styles

You can customize the look of the subscription form created by the plugin in your WordPress-powered Web site by either changing the CSS style selected under General Settings as mentioned above, and/or by further editing those cascading style sheets. Familiarity with CSS is required to manually edit the default styles. Here is how to do so:

1. First, select the Plugins Editor in the WordPress administration area
2. Select “WP-MailUp” from the drop-down menu
3. A list of files will be displayed, including 4 CSS documents: “style1.css”, “style2.css”, “style3.css”, “style4.css”. They correspond to the following styles shown in the drop-down menu under General Settings:
   1. style1.css = Default
   2. style2.css = Rounded corners
   3. style3.css = Rounded black
   4. style4.css = No style
4. Select a file to modify it.
5. Click on "Update File" to save your modifications. We recommend that you backup the code before making any changes. If you don't see the "Update File" button, you probably don't have sufficient permissions in your WordPress installation. Contact your WordPress site administrator.

6. The form is identified by the selector “#subscribeForm” in the CSS document.

7. Note that the changes are immediately live in your WordPress site, if the document you edited corresponds to the style currently selected under General Settings.

FAQs and Troubleshooting