Your First Integration

Estimated reading: 5 minutes

This is the fastest path from a fresh AFI install to a live integration. By the end you’ll have a Contact Form 7 signup form on your WordPress site that automatically subscribes every submitter to a Mailchimp audience. We’re using Mailchimp here because it’s the easiest receiver to connect — paste one API key and you’re done. The same flow works for almost every sender/receiver pair AFI supports, so once this clicks, the other 200+ integrations follow the same pattern.

Time required: about 5 minutes. Cost: free — AFI’s basic version and Mailchimp’s free tier (up to 500 contacts) cover this scenario.

What you’ll need

  • A WordPress site (self-hosted, with admin access).
  • Contact Form 7 installed and activated. Any form plugin works — we use CF7 here because it’s the most popular.
  • Advanced Form Integration installed and activated.
  • A Mailchimp account with at least one audience (Mailchimp creates a default one on signup).

Step 1 — Build the form

  1. In WordPress admin, go to Contact > Add New.
  2. Name the form Newsletter Signup (or anything you like).
  3. Paste this minimal markup into the form body (or use CF7’s tag generator):
<label> First name
    [text* first-name] </label>

<label> Last name
    [text last-name] </label>

<label> Your email
    [email* your-email] </label>

[submit "Subscribe"]
  1. Click Save. CF7 prints a shortcode like

    Error: Contact form not found.

    .
  2. Drop the shortcode onto any test page. Open the page in another tab and confirm the form renders.

Step 2 — Grab your Mailchimp API key

  1. Log in to Mailchimp.
  2. Click your profile (top-right) > Account & billing.
  3. Open the Extras drop-down > API keys.
  4. Under Your API keys, click Create A Key. Give it a name like AFI WordPress.
  5. Copy the key — it looks like 1a2b3c4d5e6f7g8h9i0j-us21. Mailchimp shows it only once, so keep this tab open or stash the key somewhere safe.

Step 3 — Connect Mailchimp in AFI

  1. In WordPress admin, go to AFI > Settings.
  2. Open the Mailchimp tab. If it’s not listed, scroll to Activate Platforms on the General tab, tick Mailchimp, and save.
  3. Paste your API key into the API Key field and click Save Changes.

That’s it — no OAuth flow, no developer console, no redirect URIs. AFI now talks to your Mailchimp account.

Step 4 — Create the integration

  1. Go to AFI > New Integration.
  2. Trigger > Sender: choose Contact Form 7.
  3. Form: choose Newsletter Signup.
  4. Action > Receiver: choose Mailchimp. Task: Subscribe To List.
  5. List: pick the Mailchimp audience you want new subscribers to land in. AFI fetches the list directly from your account using the API key you saved.
  6. AFI now shows the list’s merge fields. Map them:
  • Email Address → your-email (required by Mailchimp)
  • First Name → first-name
  • Last Name → last-name
  1. Give the integration a name at the top of the page so you’ll recognise it later — e.g. CF7 Newsletter → Mailchimp.
  2. Click Save.

Step 5 — Test it

  1. Open the test page with your form in a new tab.
  2. Fill in a first name, last name, and a real email address you can check. Submit.
  3. Switch to Mailchimp. Open the audience you chose > Contacts. Your new subscriber should appear within a few seconds with the values you typed.

If the contact appears, congratulations — your first integration is live. Every future submission of this CF7 form will be added to your Mailchimp audience automatically.

If it didn’t work

  1. Open AFI > Log. The most recent entry should be your submission.
  2. If the status is green, AFI thinks it succeeded — refresh the Mailchimp contacts page and search by email (Mailchimp can take 5–10 seconds to surface new contacts).
  3. If the status is red, click the row to see the API response. Common causes: invalid email address, the contact is already in the audience with an unsubscribed/cleaned status (Mailchimp blocks re-subscribing those), or the API key was pasted with extra whitespace.
  4. See the Log doc for the full troubleshooting walkthrough.

What to try next

  • Add a tag. In your AFI integration, you can pass a tag to Mailchimp so every contact from this form gets labelled (e.g. website-signup). Useful for downstream segmentation.
  • Add conditional logic. Open the integration, scroll to Conditional Logic, and add a rule like your-email Does Not Contain @yourcompany.com to filter out internal test submissions. See Does Not Contain.
  • Stack receivers. Create a second integration on the same CF7 form with a different receiver (Google Sheets, Slack, your CRM). AFI fires them both on every submission, so the same signup can populate Mailchimp and notify your team in Slack.
  • Capture UTM attribution. Enable Send UTM Variables in General Settings and map {{utm_source}} + {{utm_campaign}} to Mailchimp merge fields. Now every contact carries their original campaign attribution. See Smart Tags & Field Mapping.

Related

Getting Started - Previous Change Domain Next - Getting Started Smart Tags & Field Mapping