Note
The Wistia and Mailchimp integration is not compatible with audio files.
Mailchimp is one of our favorite email marketing systems, and we’ve made it easy to connect to your Wistia account. With this integration, you can send your Wistia-collected leads to your Mailchimp list to launch your next email campaign.
Read on to learn how the integration works from start to finish.
Connect the integration
Note
You must be an Account Owner or Manager to connect the Mailchimp integration in Wistia.
On the “Integrations” page in your account settings, locate the Mailchimp integration in the “Email” tab.
Click “Connect” and enter your Mailchimp credentials in the pop-up modal, then click “Allow” to authorize the integration.
Once authorized, Mailchimp will be listed in your connected integrations.
Collect leads with Turnstile
Configuring a Turnstile form is one option to funnel leads from Wistia to your Mailchimp list.
First, open the media page for the video you’d like to share and open the “Turnstile” tab in the “Customize” menu.
Check the “Mailchimp” integration option and select your desired audience from the dropdown menu. Remember to click “Save” when you’re done.
Once a Turnstile is enabled on your video, you can embed or share it to start collecting leads. All names and emails collected through that Turnstile will then populate in your selected Mailchimp list.
Head here for an in-depth overview of the Turnstile functionality.
Create an email merge tag
Another option to gather and nurture leads is to share your video through a Mailchimp campaign. First, navigate to the Wistia video you want to share, then select "Embed."
In the “Email campaign” tab, select Mailchimp from the “Email Provider” dropdown.
Tip
Our thumbnail default size of 450px is ideal for Mailchimp and most email platforms. If you’d like to test a different size, click “Preview” in the Mailchimp email builder after pasting in a revised merge tag. All thumbnails in Mailchimp will include the play button, which gets its default color to match your video’s settings.
Paste your merge tag in Mailchimp
Once your merge tag is ready, click “Copy Tag” and paste it into the body of your Mailchimp email. You can add the code to a code or text block.
Note that the video thumbnail will not be visible in the campaign builder; click “Preview” to see how your embed looks.
Tip
As a best practice, we recommend you send a test email to make sure everything works correctly.
However, note that your email may not be captured if you watch the video while logged in to Wistia. Open your test email in an incognito window to ensure you're captured as an "anonymous" viewer.
View leads in Mailchimp
Once you’ve started collecting viewer emails through your Turnstile or merge tag, those contacts will automatically be added to your selected Mailchimp list. To view these leads in Mailchimp, open the “Audience” tab.
Tip
If you would like to keep the email campaign separate from other embedded viewings of the video, create a separate folder specifically for the email version of the video.
For more information on managing your audience, refer to Mailchimp’s documentation.
Center your Mailchimp email embed
Centering your merge tag in your email campaign requires some simple code work. We’ve outlined an example below.
Copy your Mailchimp merge tag and take special note of the width (you might have it set up as the default, 450px)
Before pasting the merge tag in Mailchimp, we’ll create a <div> tag to wrap it in, like this:
<div style="width: 450px; margin: 0 auto;"> *|WISTIA:[$vid=6v180w5at9,$max_width=450,$watch_url=https://mkc.wistia.com/medias/6v180w5at9,$title=N,$border=N,$trim_border=N,$play_button_color=636155e0]%7C* </div>
Note the styles included in the div wrapper:
widthis set to the width of your merge tag.marginis set to 0 (vertically) and auto (horizontally). This will center the thumbnail.
Give this a shot with your next Mailchimp merge tag embed!
Troubleshooting
Thumbnail and link are not updating
If you’ve updated your merge tag, but the Preview and Test emails are still the same, it might be a caching issue. This can impact thumbnails and links, so if you can’t get those to update, try adding the merge tag to a fresh campaign. If that works, then Mailchimp cached it. Use a fresh campaign to make sure all the changes are in effect.
Contacts not appearing in Mailchimp audience
In our experience, there are a few reasons why this may happen:
If you have previously had this email included in one of your lists in Mailchimp but have since deleted it, Mailchimp will not allow the email to be included in a list again. This is something that we often run into with test emails!
Mailchimp may cache old thumbnails if you’ve previously used a different video in the same template. You can create a new campaign to solve the problem.
Mailchimp uses a double opt-in system. If the viewer who watched your video hasn’t yet confirmed their opt-in to your email list, Mailchimp will not populate their email. Viewers should check their spam folders if they have not received the email. For more information, refer to Mailchimp's double opt-in documentation.
Happy embedding!