How do I customize the look of email notifications sent to followers
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How do I customize the look of email notifications sent to followers? I want the automatic email that goes out to followers of my blog to have my branding, not WordPress’s. If I purchase the custom upgrade will that also enable me to customize the look of outgoing emails (I know CSS; I just want to know if the custom upgrade also gives me access to outgoing email stylesheets as well as site stylesheets), or do I have to port the site over to WordPress.org? Come to think of it, if I purchase the custom upgrade, can I remove your brand from the page footer?
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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Hi!
How do I customize the look of email notifications sent to followers?
The design isn’t customizable, unfortunately.
If you’re looking to have readers subscribe to email updates, and you want more control over design, I suggest using MailChimp and using their RSS-to-Email feature to hook into your WordPress.com blog feed.
This way you’ll have complete control over the email branding, not to mention more control over things like subscriber segmentation.
Come to think of it, if I purchase the custom upgrade, can I remove your brand from the page footer?
The footer credits can’t be removed. They’re standard across all WordPress.com blogs (including our VIPs). The Custom Design upgrade gives you freedom to make the design your own, but we still want to give credit to the original theme developers. :)
Hope that all makes sense. Let me know if there’s anything else I can clarify or help you out with.
Cheers!
Andy
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From the looks of it, I can customize a signup form at mailchimp, but when the actual post notification shows up in my followers inboxes, it will still have the WordPress branding and “Thank you for flying with WordPress.” That’s what I want to change as much a the signup form.
If there’s no way to do that on WordPress.com, can I do it if I switch the site over to WordPress.org? How do professional sites such as Vanity Fair and MSMBC do it? They don’t have the WordPress brand going out on their email notifications. Thanks for the help.
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Two-part answer here:
From the looks of it, I can customize a signup form at mailchimp, but when the actual post notification shows up in my followers inboxes, it will still have the WordPress branding and “Thank you for flying with WordPress.” That’s what I want to change as much a the signup form.
The RSS-to-Email feature on MailChimp actually gives you full customization capabilities. Not just the signup form, but the post notifications (email messages) as well. MailChimp’s knowledge base article on the subject walks you through the steps, so you can see what kind of control you have.
Basically it works like this: the content from your blog posts would be pulled from your RSS feed at http://columbussegg.com/feed/ and dropped into the email template that you create in MailChimp.
If there’s no way to do that on WordPress.com, can I do it if I switch the site over to WordPress.org? How do professional sites such as Vanity Fair and MSMBC do it?
Large publishers like Vanity Fair or MSNBC often have in-house solutions for newsletters. More moderately-sized publishers use service providers like MailChimp, Constant Contact, Mad Mimi, and others.
Even if you made the jump to self-hosted WordPress.org, you’d still need to hook up with a 3rd party email service to handle customized email updates. For WordPress.org projects I’ve worked on in the past, we always ended up back at MailChimp for doing custom designed emails. :)
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So far, so good and thank you for your help. One last question, at least I hope so. I’ve got my campaign set up and I have all my forms customized. The final part is to import the email addresses of the people already following my blog into my mailchimp list and to direct aspiring followers to my mailchimp signup form. I suspect that WordPress’s signup widget didn’t magically attach itself to my mailchimp signup form, so how do I attach or embed it in my blog?
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Ahoy! Good question.
An embedded form won’t work (since we strip JavaScript out of widgets for security reasons), so I’m a fan of using BFB (Big, uh, Friendly Buttons) on the sidebar instead. Basically it’s a catchy call to action that tells visitors to click, e.g. “Subscribe” or “Stay Updated”.
In your situation, I’d put together a spiffy button graphic that fits your sidebar and matches the feel of your site. Link it to your MailChimp sign-up form.
Keep the image above the fold – near the top of your sidebar, so visitors don’t need to scroll down to see it.
If you’re not comfortable doing custom graphics, you can try the CSS Button Generator. This is a free tool that lets you create a button using only CSS.
Simple steps for the button creator:
- Create a button with the tool. Customize to your liking. Change “classname” to something distinct, e.g. “mailchimp-subscribe”.
- Click Get the Code on the right-hand side.
- Copy/paste the HTML code into a Text widget in your WordPress sidebar. Be sure to replace the # in href=”#” with your MailChimp form URL.
- Copy/paste the CSS code into the Custom CSS editor under Appearance > Customize in your WordPress dashboard.
The result should be a snazzy CSS button that, when clicked, takes visitors to your MailChimp signup form.
Hope that all made sense! Let me know how you make out.
Andy
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Andy,
It did make sense. So much so, in fact, that I realized I could make an awesome graphic button. I tried to use the code setup you suggested but with replacing the text with the<img src> tag but, alas, no go. Several hours and about 14 tutorials later, I noticed an image widget, which, saints be praised, can be an image link. So now my scathingly clever graphic is a link to my mailchimp sign up form. All thanks to you and your BFB idea. Thanks!
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By the by, any way to get my wordpress followers ported over to my new mailchimp post notification email. Or, rather, if I port them over manually, can they be unsubscribed from WordPress’s auto notification on my end. They’re tremendous posts and all, but being notified twice might be pushing it.
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I just did a check on your followers. Looks like you’ve got 26 following you on WordPress.com, and no email subscribers:
http://wordpress.com/my-stats/?blog=56444504&blog_subscribers&type=email&unit=1
So there’s nothing for you to port over right now.
Your WordPress.com followers are getting your updates in their Reader, so you wouldn’t want to unsub them anyway, just in case they’re using the Reader to stay on top of what you’re posting. :)
In your situation I’d create a post letting people know about the new email subscription option. Then your readers can decide for themselves how they’d like to stay updated.
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Andy, you’ve been awesome. You make a good point. No reason to confuse the folks who’re already signed up. I could send them an email asking them which way they want to receive notification, but as I think about it, if the shoe were on the other foot, I’d wonder why the blog author was making such a big deal out of nothing.
That’s if for me, for now. Gotta go find me some subscribers. Thanks again for all your help.
Ean -
Cheers!
Glad I could help, Ean. Just followed your blog as well. :)
May your subscriber count be ever-growing!
Andy
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