The ability to integrate directly with a Content Management System (CMS) is key for marketers. The Dotdigital for WordPress sign-up form plugin allows you to convert your WordPress blog or website visitors into sign-ups for your newsletter and email marketing campaigns. The plugin ensures that your new email subscribers are added directly to your Dotdigital lists.
Before you start
Things you need to know:
The plugin can be installed on the self-hosted version of WordPress (WordPress.org), or on WordPress.com-hosted sites using a Business Plan.
Learn more about WordPress.com plans.The plugin is compatible with PHP 7.4+
If you prefer to add a Dotdigital survey or form to your site, you can do so with the Surveys, pages and forms widget.
Learn more in Use the Dotdigital Surveys, pages and forms widget in WordPress.
Features
Features of the plugin include:
Adding email addresses into multiple lists.
Capturing additional information to store in your contact data fields.
Reordering lists and contact data fields.
A new look: native WordPress design with tabbed navigation
Resubscribe unsubscribed email addresses.
Install the plugin
If you already have a previous version installed, a message pops up in the admin area of your WordPress account informing you that a new version is available. You can follow the steps to update from there.
We recommend you back up your site before performing any updates.
If you don’t already have a previous version, log into your WordPress account and:
Go to Plugins in the left-hand menu.
Select the magnifying glass icon.
Search for Dotdigital for WordPress.
Select Install.
When installed, select Activate Plugin.
The plugin appears as Dotdigital in your left-hand menu.
Setup
When you select Dotdigital in your left-hand menu, you have access to tabs for:
API credentials
The plugin integrates through our API, so you need your Dotdigital API credentials.
Learn more in Set up an API user.
Enter your API username and API password in this tab, then select Save Changes. You see a summary of the account details, allowing you to confirm that the form is connected to the correct account.
Your API credentials are not stored if you deactivate the plugin at any point. If you deactivate, you must re-enter the credentials when you reactivate the plugin.
My lists
This is where you can select which of your Dotdigital lists your visitors are added to when they sign up. To choose a list, select the check box to the left of the list name. You can select one list or multiple, depending upon your requirements.
To make a list visible to visitors, select the Visible? check box to the far right. Once selected, you can edit the value in the Change label field. This allows you to edit how the name of the list appears to your site visitors.
Hide a chosen list
Leave the Visible? check box for a list unselected to prevent this list from displaying to your visitors. For example, you might have a Website sign ups list you use as a record that you don’t want visitors to be able to remove themselves from.
Reorder lists
Your sign-up form isn't dictated by the fixed order of your lists in your Dotdigital account. You can reorder the display of your lists if you want to.
Hover over a list to highlight it in pink, and a drag-and-drop handle appears on the far left-hand side of the row.
Drag and drop the row to the new position you want. The other rows shift up or down accordingly.
To save your selections and edits, select Save Changes at the bottom of the page.
My contact data fields
This is where you choose which of your Dotdigital contact data fields your visitor fills in upon signing up, which gives you the chance to enrich your contact data.
Select a data field to make it visible to your site visitors. Edit the value in the Change label field to manage how the data field name displays. For example, for the LASTNAME field, you could display the label Please enter your last name.
On the far right-hand side, select the check box for a data field to make it a required field. This displays on your sign-up form as an asterisk against the field label.
To change the display order of your contact data fields, hover over a field to highlight it, then drag and drop it to your desired position.
To save your selections and edits, select Save Changes at the foot of the page.
Messages
This allows you to customise your sign-up form messages. For example, if you don’t send out a newsletter but are asking your visitors to sign up for a different kind of communication, you won’t want the form header default message to read Subscribe to our newsletter.
There are seven fields that you can customise:
form header
invalid email error message
required field missing error message
submission success message
submission failure message
no newsletter selected message
form subscribe button.
Make any edits you want, then, to save your customised messages, select Save Changes at the foot of the page.
Add a signup form to your site
To do this:
In the WordPress left-hand menu, select Appearance and then Widgets. This displays all of your available widgets.
Select Add block from the top left of the screen.
Search for Dotdigital and select Dotdigital Signup Form.
The widget is now available on your site for your visitors to use.
Insert a Dotdigital signup form into posts and pages
Edit the post or page where you want the signup form to appear.
Alternatively, you can create a new post or page to add the signup form to.Select the Add block icon.
Search for Dotdigital, then select Dotdigital Signup Form.
Send the user to a custom thank you page after subscription
From plugin v3.4, you can find the redirection options on the Redirections tab in the plugin dashboard. Here you can set up three options:
No redirection (default) - the user stays on the same page where a short message will be displayed about the result of the subscription.
Local page - you can select a page from your website that to be your Dotdigital sign up thank you page.
Custom URL - you can redirect your user wherever you want to. If you choose this option, you must use a valid URL starting with
http://orhttps://.
Insert a signup form into posts and pages with dotdigital-signup short code
An alternative method for inserting signup forms into your posts and pages that don’t use the WordPress editor, is to use the [dotdigital-signup] short code to show the form inside the post’s content.
Short code parameters:
showtitle
Hide the title of the widget (this defaults to 0).showdesc
Hide the description under the title (this defaults to 0).with_ajax
Submit form without reloading page (this defaults to 0).redirection
Redirect the user to a custom URL after successful submission.
Example short code
This short code:
[dotdigital-signup showtitle=0 showdesc=0 with_ajax=1 redirection=”http://www.example.com”]
Makes the form behave in the following way:
there is no title
there is no description
the form submits without a page reload
the user is redirected to http://www.example.com on submit
Integration Insight data tracking
From v7.0.0, we have introduced a daily cron that gathers data from your Dotdigital for WordPress plugin settings, and posts it to Dotdigital.
To view this data in your Dotdigital account, go to Connect > Account insight data > Integrations.
Sharing your configuration and widget usage with us helps us tailor the product to meet your needs. However, if you’d prefer not to send this data, you can stop the process by running the following CLI command:
wp option add dotdigital_for_wordpress_integration_insights 0