Can I import my WordPress theme into MailChimp?

Hi William,

Sounds perfectly reasonable to want your email newsletters to look like your WordPress site.

At the core, both WordPress and MailChimp themes use HTML and CSS to create the look and feel of your website or email newsletter, respectively. But that's where the similarities end.

Designing HTML email layouts is much more tricky than websites, mainly because you must embed all the CSS — Cascading Style Sheets, or the code that tells an object how to look: size, color, typography, etc. — directly within the email itself. In website design, we can save all the CSS in a separate file that gets imported when needed.

So, while an email newsletter may look like the website it represents, it's only because a designer has created a matching theme for the newsletter in email-compliant HTML with embedded CSS.

Now, there are plenty of email themes available for purchase, some of which might come close to your website's theme.

If not, your best bet will be to hire a designer to create a matching MailChimp theme. You might first reach out to our friends at Codeable, since they connect you with hundreds of coders who can tackle this task at the best prices around.

You can also hire a MailChimp expert to create a custom HTML template for you, based on your WordPress site's theme.

If you don't want to hire a professional, you can create your own custom email template using the tools furnished to you from MailChimp. Here's an article on their website explaining the tools and options:

http://kb.mailchimp.com/templates/basic-and-themes/options-for-creating-templates

And this article tells how to import a custom HTML theme, once you have created (or purchased) one:

http://kb.mailchimp.com/templates/code/how-to-import-a-custom-html-template

Hope this helps!