Integrate Ghost with Mailchimp to keep your members and email subscribers in sync and deliver email campaigns efficiently
The most popular ways to integrate Mailchimp with Ghost are to sync members in Ghost with your email list, embedding custom email subscription or signup forms and creating an RSS driven newsletter.
Let’s run through a few of the different ways you can use Ghost and Mailchimp together:
Export a CSV from Mailchimp
When using the members feature in Ghost, you might want to import an existing list of subscribers from your Mailchimp account. This is entirely possible using CSV imports.
In your Mailchimp account, navigate to the Audience tab, and apply any filters necessary to locate the list of emails you’d like to import to Ghost members. Once you’re done, click “Export audience”. Read more about exports in Mailchimp in their help docs.
Imports in Ghost
In Ghost, you can import a CSV file from the member dashboard, and the only required field is email. However, if you have additional information it’s recommended to add it now using the optional headings available. Read more about formatting your CSV file here.
Once your CSV is good to go, login to your site’s admin and click the settings icon in the members dashboard to import your file.
That’s it. All of your email subscribers have been imported as members of your Ghost site. You can now let your Mailchimp subscribers know that they can head to your website and enter their email address to access members-only content on your site, or upgrade to a paid plan.
Sync Ghost members with Mailchimp
If you’re running a membership publication with Ghost, it’s possible to link this with your Mailchimp account using Zapier to ensure everything stays in sync. There’s a few common use case examples for this:
- Automatically sync subscribers in Mailchimp and Members in Ghost
- Notify Ghost when someone unsubscribes from email in Mailchimp, or vice versa
- Send new Members in Ghost an automated campaign, like a welcome series
This saves tons of time manually updating members and email lists, ensures everything is fully in sync and secure, and allows you to send custom email flows to your members.
Once this integration has been setup it’ll run in the background and make sure that your member lists are always up to date.
Embed an email subscription form
If you’d like to use one of Mailchimp’s own subscriber forms directly, that works too! You can use absolutely any of the form builders, popups or other embed options provided by Mailchimp within Ghost.
First you’ll need to create a new signup form for your Mailchimp list and copy the code provided:
Add the form to a single post
If you just want to add the signup form to one particular post or page on your site - you can add a new HTML block within the Ghost editor and paste the embed code there. Hit publish. And you’re all set.
Add the form to multiple pages of your site
On the other hand, if you’d like to add a newsletter signup form to multiple pages of your site - then you’ll need to add the embed code to your Ghost theme.
Locate the template file where you want to insert the signup form. It’s usually post.hbs - right after the content. In Ghost’s official themes, add the newsletter signup form after the line that reads {{content}}.
After editing, save the file, upload a fresh copy of your theme, and (if you’re self-hosting) restart Ghost. The form’s now visible on every post!
Setup an RSS to Email campaign
It’s also possible to use the Mailchimp RSS-to-Email feature to generate automated newsletters of your latest content on Ghost, directly to your subscribers!
Once you’ve created a new campaign, enter the RSS feed which you’d like to use to populate your newsletter content. Don’t forget: You can add /rss/ to most URLs in Ghost to get a custom RSS feed. Here are some demo examples:
- Main post index - https://demo.ghost.io/rss/
- Author archive - https://demo.ghost.io/author/lewis/rss/
- Tag archive - https://demo.ghost.io/tag/fiction/rss/
Mailchimp will then automatically read your RSS feed at the time interval you specify and email your subscribers all of your latest posts automatically!
Do more with Zapier automation
It’s possible to connect Mailchimp to many more of your favourite tools and align all of your processes using Zapier with lots of commonly used Zaps already pre-built, or if you can’t find what you’re looking for you can build your own:
