How to Create A Mailchimp Popup

Creating a Mailchimp popup is a straightforward process. You can either use Mailchimp's own basic tool, or a third-party solution that integrates with your Mailchimp account for greater control and functionality.

In this post, we’ll show you how to do both by covering:

• How to create a basic popup in Mailchimp
• The limitations of Mailchimp's popup tool
• How to create more advanced Mailchimp popups

How to create a Mailchimp popup (basic)

Mailchimp does have its own very basic popup functionality. You just need to create a new signup form campaign in Mailchimp and choose to display it as a popup.

To do this, login to your Mailchimp account and go to Audiences >> Signup forms down the left. Then select “Subscriber pop-up” from the options:

From here, you’ll be able to design your popup with some basic layouts, text, images, form fields, and buttons. The “Settings” tab also gives you a few display and trigger options:

Once everything looks how you want it to, click “Save and publish.” If you’ve already installed the Mailchimp pixel on your website, your popup should now start showing.

Limitations of Mailchimp popups

There are a number of limitations to creating your popups in Mailchimp, as described above. The main ones being:

• Lack of design options and templates
• Cannot set to appear on specific website pages
• Cannot target visitors based on site behavior
• Can only create one popup per Mailchimp list/audience
• Limited to a single step form + thank you step

These limitations mean Mailchimp’s native popup builder is best suited only to extremely small blogs and side hustles. Serious businesses will likely need something more powerful in order to roll out a successful popup strategy. 

How to create a Mailchimp popup (advanced)

If you want to do more with your website popups without running into the limitations listed above, you’ll need to use a third-party tool that integrates with your Mailchimp account.

This means you can:

1. Create more engaging, eye-catching popups in a separate tool
2. Utilize advanced targeting and personalization functionality
3. Still send all the lead data through to your Mailchimp account

To do this, we’ll be using ConvertFlow’s popup builder tool and Mailchimp integration.

Step 1: Choose a template

The best place to start is choosing a design template that aligns with the desired outcome or end-goal of your product.

ConvertFlow has a wide range of customizable popup templates for all kinds of needs—newsletter signup, cart abandonment, cross-sell, coupon code, webinar registration, demo request, and more. Check out our template library to see them all.

For this demonstration, we’ll just go with a simple discount offer popup:

Step 2: Customize your template

Once inside ConvertFlow, select to launch your chosen design as an “Overlay popup template” and give your CTA a name. You’ll then be taken straight to the drag-and-drop builder.

This is where you can start customizing the design of your popup.

We don’t want to give the 40% discount suggested in the original template, so let’s change that headline text to say “10%” instead:

Imagine our hypothetical store has a nice green as its primary brand color. So, let’s switch up the button color and top section background to match:

Next, scroll down in the builder to reach Step 2 of your popup.

Make sure all the coloring and styles align with any changes made to your first step. Then, add your coupon code (if applicable):

Note: You can add multiple steps to your popups from inside the builder, but we’ll just keep it at two for the sake of this guide.

Step 3: Set your popup trigger

Next, we’ll need to choose a trigger in order to set how/when the popup is displayed.

Head to the “Settings” tab in the builder’s side panel and scroll down to the “Popup Trigger” section. You’ll then be able to choose from:

• Exit-intent
• Scroll-point
• Time delayed
• Upon click only
• On-site message

We’ll choose “Time delayed” and set it to 10 seconds:

We also don’t want to annoy our visitors with this offer. So, let's change the “Trigger Suppression” from “Always trigger” to “Hide for X days after close” and set this to three days:

This means our popup will show after 10 seconds. But, if someone closes it without submitting the form they won’t be shown it again until three days has passed.

Step 4: Connect your popup to Mailchimp

We’ve designed our popup to look the way we want it to. Now it’s time to hook it up to your Mailchimp account so lead data gets passed over.

While still in the ConvertFlow builder, scroll back up to the original step that has your form field(s) on. Then click on your form’s submit button and choose “Confirmation Actions” in the side panel:

A modal window should now appear on your screen.

At the top of the window, select the “New Integration +” button to start connecting your CRM or ESP (in this case, Mailchimp):

Note: If you’ve already connected an integration to ConvertFlow previously, you’ll instead see a button that says “Manage Integrations.”

In the next window, find Mailchimp from the list of options and click the “Connect” button. Login to your Mailchimp account and follow the steps to verify the integration with ConvertFlow.

Step 5: Push data to Mailchimp

Now that Mailchimp is connected to ConvertFlow, we can set up an automation to pipe the data from any form submissions into your Mailchimp account.

You should be brought straight back to the “Confirmation Actions” window after authenticating the Mailchimp integration. From here, ensure that your default action sends visitors submitting the form to the “thank you” step displaying the coupon code.

In our case, it’s “Step 2” we need:

Then, click “Add Automation” underneath and scroll to the Mailchimp options.

You can choose to run whichever automation(s) you like. We’ll simply add form submissions as contacts in a Mailchimp list:

Click “Done” once you’ve set up all desired automations, then “Save” and “Publish” your CTA and we’re almost ready to launch!

Step 6: Set up your Mailchimp popup targeting

Hit “Preview” in the top right of the builder and you’ll be taken to the next screen where you can check the look and test out the functionality of your popup.

Once you’re done previewing, select the “Launch” button to go through to the final step:

Here, you can add a range of targeting conditions to ensure your popup is only seen by the right website visitors.

Let’s set ours to only show on product pages and if the visitor is on desktop:

Those on a paid ConvertFlow account will have access to more advanced targeting conditions—like IP location, site activity, or even contact data you have in Mailchimp.

We’ll make sure to exclude showing this offer to anyone who’s already a customer:

Try out this advanced targeting with a 14-day trial of ConvertFlow Pro.

Step 7: Launch the Mailchimp popup to your website

All that’s left to do now is set your popup live on your site! Just flick the toggle to activate:

If you’ve already installed ConvertFlow’s one-time script on your website, your popup should now appear on relevant pages. If not, you’ll be prompted to add this script to your site first.

Alternatively, you can connect without needing to touch the code at all via WordPress plugin, Shopify app, Google Tag Manager or Segment. Instructions are all there as soon as you toggle that launch button the first time 🙌

Start creating Mailchimp popups today

This guide should hopefully have given you clear instructions on how to create a Mailchimp popup—both at a super basic, and a more advanced level.

Mailchimp itself has the functionality for really simple popups new marketers and bloggers can use. But most businesses will need the more capable solution of a third-party software.