There are a myriad of ways to collect email addresses to communicate with your audience. Mailchimp is one of those, and, if you are not familiar with it, you should check them out. Mailchimp is an all-in-one marketing platform that provides quite a lot of features. The most basic feature is capturing emails and adding them to a list or, in their lingo, “audience”. This is what is needed to get started with other Mailchimp services, but is also important from a business perspective. Once you have an audience in Mailchimp, you can send targeted emails and newsletters and manage e-commerce.

We had previously sent some social media posts out explaining how easy it is to integrate Scrivito with third party services. One of those examples was Mailchimp. It is easy – just paste the embed code from the provider into the widget properties of a text widget. This works because the content of the text widget evaluates to HTML. Mailchimp lets you set up a signup form with many options and provides convenient embed code to add to your website. You will be collecting emails on your Scrivito website in less than five clicks. However, this is not the only way to integrate Mailchimp.

As with many things in Scrivito, there are several ways to build your application. Mailchimp integration is no different. Perhaps you prefer to not have the Mailchimp branding, forms, flows, etc. you get when embedding a Mailchimp form. Or you want to customize the input to better match your own website and visitor UX. Whatever the reason, there are other ways to get the functionality you need. Mailchimp provides a robust REST API with which one can connect to all their offerings to customize an integration.

We have put together a package you can use to add a simple signup widget to your Scrivito application. As with our Scrivito Example App, it is an example implementation. It is provided free and open source and can be used “as is”, but it is intended as an example and a starting point for your own customized implementation. As Scrivito applications are client-side single-page applications, we utilize a lambda function to submit to the Mailchimp API. This ensures your API keys are not exposed. In the form of an NPM package, a developer can easily import the widget into a project. The readme explains the steps needed to add it to your project and get started. The Github repo provides a link to the source code to start customizing right away.

We hope you enjoy the widget and that it helps to make your Scrivito application even better and more successful. We are in the process of providing more widgets as packages, and you can always release your own and share with the community.