MailChimp: How to Automatically Add New Subscribers to Hidden Groups

Do you want to group your e-mail subscribers based on the page they have subscribed from? For example, you may want to know if the subscriber signed up using your newsletter popup or from one of your product pages. In the latter case, you may want to place them into a dedicated group for that product category.

To add a subscriber to a hidden group automatically, follow these steps:

Step 1: Create your MailChimp Group

1. In MailChimp, go to Lists, and select the list you want to work with
2. Select Manage Subscribers – Groups
3. Click Create Groups
4. Select “Don’t show these groups on my signup form”
5. Fill out your group details and click Save

Step 2: Find the name of the MailChimp group

1. Go to Signup forms – General forms
2. In the form preview, find the section containing your hidden group fields:

   

3. Place your mouse over one of the checkboxes, right-click, and select Inspect. You will see the source code for that element. Find the nearest <input> element, and locate the name attribute. Make a note of the value, for example, group[1234][1]. That is the name of your group.

   

4. Repeat the process for any other groups

Step 3: Add a hidden form field to your signup form

1. Open up your signup form HTML in the editor
2. Add a hidden field inside the <form> element (make sure to replacegroup[1234][1] with your group name):

   <input type="hidden" name="group[1234][1]" value="1"> <!-- "Blog" group -->

3. If you want to subscribe your users to multiple groups, just add more <input> fields: one for each group.