This integration connects your Mailchimp account to the signup form on your site. People who use the form go into your Mailchimp audience.
It is self contained: the theme calls the Mailchimp API itself, so there is no third party plugin to install.
#What you need from Mailchimp
Three things: an account, an audience, and an API key.
We do not explain how to get them here. Registering, creating an audience, generating a key and finding the audience id all happen inside Mailchimp, and their interface changes without our involvement, so their own documentation is the right place for those three steps.
An API key grants access to your whole Mailchimp account.
Do not share or publish it. The setting stores it as a password and never displays it in plain text again, and if a key ever does leak, revoke it in Mailchimp rather than leaving it live.
#Connecting
Open Theme Options, the Integrations block, the Mailchimp page, and the Credentials group. Two fields: API key and audience id. Save.
That is the entire connection. No separate plugin, no second screen, no keys in two places.
#The other settings
Most are self explanatory from their labels, so this is a list rather than an essay.
Form composition: which fields to show, meaning email, name and consent, and the consent text.
Labels and placeholders: whether to show field labels, whether to show placeholder hints, and custom text for each. These are two independent switches and can both be on.
Button and messages: the button text, the message after a successful signup, and the message after an error.
Two settings deserve a sentence each.
- Double opt-in
On by default, and it changes behavior: the person receives an email and has to confirm before they enter your audience.
- Layout
Two values. Stacked puts the fields one under another, which suits a narrow space such as a sidebar or a modal. Inline puts the field and the button side by side, which suits a full width strip.
#Placing the form
Four ways, and none is more correct than the others. Use whichever matches how that page was built.
- the block in the WordPress editor
- the Elementor widget, on pages built with Elementor
- the shortcode
[jkdmc_form], anywhere text is accepted - the classic widget, for sidebars
You can have as many forms as you like, and they all write to the same audience.
Submissions are rate limited, which is what keeps a signup form from becoming a spam target.
Ten attempts per five minutes from one address, after which the form declines for a while. Both numbers are adjustable with a filter, so a developer is not stuck with them.
#Global values and per form overrides
The model is simple. Everything set on the Mailchimp page in Theme Options is the default for every form on the site. One form can deviate without touching the rest.
Overrides are not supported everywhere, and exactly four things can be overridden: the layout, the button text, whether labels show, and whether placeholders show. Those are available in the block and in the Elementor widget.
The shortcode and the classic widget take no attributes and always render the global values. Worth knowing before you go looking for shortcode attributes that do not exist.
So "labels on one form, placeholders on another, one stacked and one inline" works, and it works through the block or the Elementor widget.
An empty local value means "use the global one", not "show nothing".
Clearing a field in the block is safe: the form falls back to what the Mailchimp page says rather than rendering a gap.
Text, consent, keys and double opt-in are always global. That is deliberate: they are about the subscription itself rather than about how one form looks.
#Integrations are part of the theme
This integration is licensed with the theme, not on its own.
Integrations are premium functionality for customers running a Pro license of one of our themes. They are written against our themes and expect them, and we cannot support or take responsibility for what one does inside somebody else's theme. See how theme integrations work.
#Common questions
Can I connect more than one audience?
One audience per site, and every form on the site writes into it.
Where do the subscribers go?
Into your Mailchimp audience, since the site keeps no copy of the list itself, which is also why removing the integration does not lose you any subscribers.
Somebody signed up and is not in the audience
Double opt-in is on by default, so they sit in pending status until they click the confirmation email, and Mailchimp shows them there rather than in your subscribed count.
Can I add custom fields to the form?
The form covers email, name and consent, and fields beyond those are outside what this integration does.
Signups are not arriving at all
Check the API key and the audience id first, because a mistyped audience id fails in a way the visitor never sees, then check whether the person is sitting in pending status from double opt-in before assuming the form is broken. If the form itself shows an error, the message it prints names the cause and is worth reading before anything else.
#Still stuck
Open a support ticket with the page the form is on and the exact message it shows after submitting.
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