How to Customize MailChimp Embed Form

Are you tired of looking at an ugly MailChimp form on your website? If so, you’re in the right stop. We’re going to review how to customize MailChimp embed form.

Whether you’re a blogger, business owner, solopreneur or something in-between, most likely you’re collecting email addresses to stay connected with your customers or blog readers. We love MailChimp’s easy-to-use interface and the variety of customization options the service provides.

But one thing we do not like about MailChimp is the default signup form. See Below.

The importance of maintaining the aesthetics of your website design dictate that you might want this MailChimp signup form to look completely different than the default. This means that you’ll want to change the fonts, colors, input field or size.

Today, we’re going to walk you through the steps to customize your MailChimp form. Follow the steps below to customize your MailChimp embed form. You can follow each step to get it looking just like the example or just copy and paste the ending code and replace with your embed form code.

A Step by Step Guide to Customize Mailchimp Embed Form

Follow steps below to customize MailChimp embed form.

1. Get your opt-in form code

When in your MailChimp account – select the list you want to create a sign-up form for and choose the ‘Naked’ option. This form provides only the raw HTML with no styling (CSS or JavaScript). This is the best option to use when customizing your form.

2. Make the Following Changes to the Code

a) Replace:

<div id="mc_embed_signup">
with:
<div id="mailchimp">

b) Remove ALL <label> tags but keep ALL <input> tags

<label for="mce-EMAIL"> Email Address  <span class="asterisk">*</span></label>

You can also remove the extra <div> tags:
<div class="mc-field-group">
<div class="clear">
<div class="indicates-required"><span class="asterisk"">*</span"> indicates required</div>

(make sure you remove the closing </div> at the end as well)
c) Customize input field text

Inside the <input> tags is an attribute called value=””. Any text you put in between the quotes will show up by default inside the input form.

For example, if I want the input box to say “Enter your email”.

Just do this:
value=”Enter your email”

Example for Email: <input type="email" VALUE="ENTER YOUR EMAIL" name="EMAIL" CLASS="EMAIL" id="mce-EMAIL">

d) Add code to end of the input field

This code will make it so when people click inside the input field, the default text you add under the value=”” attribute will disappear, thus giving them space to enter their info into the form.

Add this to the very end of the <input> tag:

onfocus="if(this.value==this.defaultValue)this.value='';" onblur="if(this.value=='')this.value=this.defaultValue;"

Example: <input type="text" value="Enter your name" name="FNAME" class="name" id="mce-FNAME" onfocus="if(this.value==this.defaultValue)this.value='';" onblur="if(this.value=='')this.value=this.defaultValue;">

f) Adjust the size of your <input> fields

Adjust the size of your input field as you need.

size=”30″

Example: <input type="text" SIZE="30" value="Enter your name" name="FNAME" class="name" id="mce-FNAME" onfocus="if(this.value==this.defaultValue)this.value='';" onblur="if(this.value=='')this.value=this.defaultValue;">

After these steps your option form should look something like this:

<!-- Begin MailChimp Signup Form -->
<div id="mailchimp">
	<form action="Replace with your MailChimp code" method="post" id="mc-embedded-subscribe-form" name="mc-embedded-subscribe-form" class="validate" target="_blank">

		<input type="email" size="30" value="Enter your email" name="EMAIL" class="required email" id="mce-EMAIL" onfocus="if(this.value==this.defaultValue)this.value='';" onblur="if(this.value=='')this.value=this.defaultValue;">
		<input type="text" size="30" value="Enter your name" name="FNAME" class="name" id="mce-FNAME" onfocus="if(this.value==this.defaultValue)this.value='';" onblur="if(this.value=='')this.value=this.defaultValue;">

		<div id="mce-responses" class="clear">
			<div class="response" id="mce-error-response" style="display:none"></div>
			<div class="response" id="mce-success-response" style="display:none"></div>
		</div>

		<div class="clear">
			<input type="submit" value="Subscribe" name="subscribe" id="mc-embedded-subscribe" class="button">
		</div>
	</form>
</div>
<!--End mc_embed_signup-->

3. Add styling to your css file

After you added the opt-in form to your website you need to make it look nice. Copy and paste the following CSS into your website css file.

#mailchimp {
	background: #f8f8f8;
	color: #3D6392;
	padding: 20px 15px;
}
	#mailchimp input {
		 border: medium none;
    color: gray;
    font-family: times new roman;
    font-size: 16px;
    font-style: italic;
    margin-bottom: 10px;
    padding: 8px 10px;
    width: 300px;
		border-radius: 20px;
		-moz-border-radius: 20px;
		-webkit-border-radius: 20px;
	}
		#mailchimp input.email { background: #fff }
		#mailchimp input.name { background: #fff}
		#mailchimp input[type="submit"] {
			background: #115B87;
			color: #fff;
			cursor: pointer;
			font-size: 15px;
			width: 35%;
			padding: 8px 0;

		}
			#mailchimp input[type="submit"]:hover { color: #F2C94C }

If you followed all these steps correctly you should have something that looks like this. Customizing a MailChimp embed form can be a pain and it takes a couple of tries to get it to look like you want to but with a little hard work your Mailchimp form can look great.