One of the most annoying issues for our clients who use Squarespace happens if they also use MailChimp for their email newsletter delivery.
There’s a lot of context around this issue, driven largely by the reality that MailChimp and Squarespace are essentially competitive businesses that see each other’s services as threats. So, they often finger point at one another instead of working together to serve shared customers.
The biggest symptom of this issue is the continued disconnection of MailChimp forms from Squarespace. Here’s how to fix this issue.
Step One: Decide if MailChimp is truly the best solution for your Squarespace website.
Most of our clients who use Squarespace and start with MailChimp ultimately change their email marketing platform. They just don’t enjoy the user experience, nor do they like having to continually maintain the MailChimp connection to Squarespace.
We use and recommend ConvertKit, and in particular recommend using their native forms and landing pages, not the Squarespace forms.
If you’re considering leaving MailChimp, we recommend you read our guide to email marketing programs.
Step Two: Inventory all of the MailChimp (or other newsletter platform) forms on your Squarespace site so you can better manage them when issues arise.
This is a critical step, whether or not you’re using MailChimp or another service. Make sure you know what forms you have and how you’re using them. Note things like:
- is it associated with a nurture sequence
- is there a thank you redirect
- is there an upsell
This way you know exactly what you have and how they’re working for you. It will also help you better determine the relative success of your email marketing conversions.
Our inventory looks like this (screenshot below) and is housed in Notion, a flexible database app we love.
Step Three: Watch this tutorial on how to fix your MailChimp form connection problems in Squarespace.
This tutorial comes directly from our resource library we usually reserve for clients only. However, since it’s such a common issue, we’re sharing this with all of you! Simply follow these steps, and repair your MailChimp form connections.
Step Four: Monitor your MailChimp forms in Squarespace.
Our team is obsessed with analyzing achievements, a core piece of our proprietary marketing methodology. This means that even if your MailChimp forms work perfectly forever, you still cannot set it and forget it.
At a minimum, you should be tracking each form’s:
- Conversion rate
- Views
- The upsell rate (if you have upsells attached to your forms)
By monitoring your forms’ relative successes, you will be able to do more of what works and less of what doesn’t, creating a more efficient and effective approach to email marketing.
If you’re still using MailChimp on your Squarespace site, we recommend you manually test each form once per quarter so you have no surprises.
Step Five: Annually, review your email marketing tool and ensure that it’s still the right one for your business.
Returning to the first point that at times a product that serves you right now, may not serve you in the future, we encourage you to evaluate all of your business tools annually to ensure you’re still using the right ones for the job.
This doesn’t mean that you should hop on the latest and greatest innovation whenever it pops up, but instead, take a clear eyed look at what you’re using and if it’s creating or removing friction in your business. Much like our forms, we track what we’re using in a database in Notion so nothing falls through the cracks.
Want to read more about email marketing? Check out the articles below! If you’d like to see how we use email in our business, sign up for Sarah’s newsletter.
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