Email Optins / Newsletter Subscriptions

Divi has an email optin module that you can use to collect signups to your newsletter list. To use this module, you’ll need to have a newsletter service setup.  Divi works with all major newsletter service providers, including Mailchimp, and you can see the whole list in the toggle below.

If you don’t have an account yet and are just starting out, we recommend you start with Mailchimp, because  they offer a good free plan for up to 2000 subscribers… and they have a monkey as their mascotte ; )

No, just kidding. They’re an excellent choice and very popular with our clients, so we’re assuming you’re using them for your newsletter service. If you use a different email marketing provider, then you’ll find the process very similar.

Mailchimp have some really good documentation on how to work with their application and how to create newsletters, so we refer to their documentation and tutorials for more details.

Starting with Mailchimp

First you’ll need to register an account at Mailchimp.

Each email optin Module is connected to a specific Mailchimp list. In a list you collect the details of the people who have  subscribed. You can connect all your optin modules to the same list, or you can create different optin modules, for example one for an e-book give away, and one for a webinar that you run. Just create the lists in Mailchimp and connect them up in your email optin modules so that people that sign-up for the e-book end up in the e-book list, and the people interested in the webinar end up on the webinar list.

Every time someone subscribes to your list, you can send them a welcome email, this welcome email can be customized for the list, so people expecting info about, say, an e-book receive an email about that. And those signing up for a webinar you might organise receive details on how to join.  For more info on how to switch on a welcome email, see the Mailchimp documentation here.

If you’d like to offer for example a free e-book as an incentive for visitors to subscribe to your list, this is usually done through a link to the freebie that you give in the welcome email for the list. So after people subscribe they are sent the welcome email. In the welcome email you thank them for subscribing and give them the link to your freebie.

If it would be an e-book, you could upload the e-book to your media library and give the link in the welcome email. See the toggle below the media library class video to learn how to find and use the link of a media file such as a PDF. Or you could create a page in your website that you don’t add to your menu (so no-one will find it) with a welcome message and a text link or download button again linked to the e-book in your media library.

So after you’ve created a Mailchimp account, you’ll also have to create a list. Here Mailchimp explains how to do that: create a list in Mailchimp

Connecting Mailchimp to your website

After you have created your list, you’ll need to find your Mailchimp API Key and set it for your website to connect the two up. How to do that for Divi is described here – scroll down to the “configuring email accounts” heading and also “linking your mailchimp account” a little bit further below. There is also a link with instructions on finding the API key in Mailchimp. You’ll only need to set this key once in one of your email optin modules, and then your Mailchimp lists will automatically be available in each Email Optin module you insert.

Inserting an email optin module

Now insert an Email Optin Module where you’d like it to appear on your page. See the email optin module for more info on settting up the list in the module. Make sure you test it to be sure it works :)

Please note:  If you are using another email service provider already,  and don’t want to use those that are supported by Divi, please read this post from our Knowledge Base.

EU Privacy Regulations

For information on GDPR / EU Privacy Regulations and how that affects your email list building and our interpretation of how you can set up your optin forms to comply with these rules, see this blog post: EU Privacy Laws and how they affect Freebies & Newsletter List Building