Adding a Location to your Mailchimp Signup Forms

Tutorials
4 min read

Add a Location to Mailchimp Signup forms

This simple guide will teach you how to add a location field to your Mailchimp Signup forms that will visible only to you.

Why would you want to do this? If you are anything like me, you might want to keep your subscribers from getting overwhelmed with the amount of content you pump out on a daily basis. For example, I write about a lot of different topics such as book reviews, mobile gaming, technology, etc. I can’t expect that my readers will also want to know about the latest events on the Sims FreePlay or the latest technology rant. Why not separate subscribers by lists so that everyone can enjoy your content as it was meant to be enjoyed?

This tutorial applies to self-hosted blogs as well as blogs powered by WordPress.com. 

Prerequisites

You will need to have a Mailchimp account. Mailchimp offers a free service for up to 2,000 subscribers and 12,000 emails per month. This is great for those that are just starting to build their subscriber list and are looking for ways to move away from Tumblr, WordPress.com, etc. 

You will need to have a list created.

Mailchimp Form Builder

The first step is to create a form. Navigate to Lists > Your List Name > Stats > Signup Forms.

You will be presented with a list of options but we’ll be concentrating on ‘ Form Builder – Build, design, and translate signup forms and response emails. ‘ Click Select

Delete a Field from the Form

Scroll down and you’ll be presented with the default form template. If you would like to strip away unnecessary fields, here is where you would do so. To remove a field such as address, you would click on it and select ( – ) icon when it presents itself. Type DELETE and confirm deletion. 

How to delete a field in Mailchimp form Builder

Once you are satisfied with how your form looks, it is time to add a hidden field tag. 

Add a Hidden Field Tag

Beside your form, you’ll be presented with options such as Add a Field / Field Settings. Click on Add a Field > Text

Field Label can be anything but for this tutorial we will name it Signup Location and for the Field tag, we’ll label it as LOC (which is short for Location). Field visibility > Hidden. Remember, this is a field meant to be read by us, not your subscribers. Click Save Field

Add a hidden text field to Mailchimp Forms

Create an Embedded Form

Navigate to Lists > Stats > Signup Forms > Embedded Forms – Generate HTML code to embed in your site or blog to collect signups. Click Select and we’ll stay in the Classic tab. We are able to make some basic customization such as Include form title or Show only required fields but our main interest will be the code found in Copy/paste onto your site.

Copy and paste the code into the text editor of your choice. I’ll be using Notepad since I am on Windows. Select [CTRL] + [F] at the same time to bring up the Find text window. You need to look for form action 

The text string will look something like this

< form action=”https://your-url-list-manage.com/subscribe/post?u=10z5899595af222e5dc8082f9&id=59ef96d044″

You will need to append the following to the end of the form action URL:

< form action=”https://your-url-list-manage.com/subscribe/post?u=10z5899595af222e5dc8082f9&id=59ef96d044&LOC=home“

Remember LOC was my chosen Field tag but you will need to replace it for the tag you chose. For example, if you chose ‘ SIGNUP ‘ as your field tag, your code would look like &SIGNUP=home. Note: You can replace home for anything you want. If you were using the code on your shop pages, you might want to have &SIGNUP=cart, etc.

For every location you want to embed the code, remember the name needs to be different. Common places and locations would be the home page > &SIGNUP=Home or a category page > &SIGNUP=Category Name. 

Verify the Form Location

You can easily verify if the code is working by creating a new post/page, adding a custom html block and pasting your code in there. Hit preview

Navigate back to Mailchimp > Lists and click on your list. Under Signup Location, you will see the custom location name you chose. Congratulations! It means that everything is working as it should and now you’ll be able to see exactly where your subscribers come from.