New Perch MailChimp App

We have had a MailChimp Dashboard Widget for some time, displaying stats about your list on the Perch Dashboard. This release turns that simple widget into a fully featured Perch App, with useful functionality both in the admin and on the front-end of your site.

Installing the MailChimp App now runs an import using the MailChimp export API for subscriber data and the regular API to pull in campaign data for your list. At the same time we set up Webhooks – these are scripts on your site that MailChimp can call to update your subscriber and campaigns list as people subscribe and unsubscribe and campaigns are sent.

Having this data locally means that you or your client can get a quick overview of list activity without needing to log into MailChimp. It also means you have an up to date copy of that data stored locally. We don’t expect that MailChimp is going anywhere, but it is always good to know you have access to that all import email list, and that it is up to date with unsubscribes.

Displaying List Archives on your Perch site

You can have a MailChimp hosted archive page for your emails, but it is fairly basic. In addition, if you are happy to make your emails public then all of that content is going to be indexable by search engines – you want to benefit from that on your own site. Having an archive of list emails on your own site may also help people to discover your list.

Displaying the archive is as simple as adding the line:

<?php perch_mailchimp_campaigns(); ?>

To the page on your site where the archive should be displayed and then configuring a page to display the HTML email which we import from MailChimp at setup. As with everything in Perch there are ways to customise the template used to display your archive and you can see an example live on my own site.

Subscribing users from Perch Forms

You can also use the MailChimp App to create subscribe forms that add subscribers to your MailChimp lists right from your Perch site without needing to submit to the MailChimp site. Subscribers are added via the API. You can even create a form that submits to the Perch Forms App and pushes data into MailChimp – perfect if you just want to add a checkbox to your existing contact form to get permission to add the person making contact to your list.

A free add-on to Perch

As with all of our first party add-ons, the MailChimp App is free for anyone with a Perch license. We don’t believe in hiding the cost of using Perch by charging for every little thing you might want to add to your site.

We hope that this App will give you another way to offer more options to your clients when developing their websites. Let us know how you get on – and if there are other features you would like to see added in future.

Download the App
Read the documentation
See an example in action on rachelandrew.co.uk