One of the most important parts of email marketing is your list of subscribers. Creating and growing that list can be one more task a busy small business owner has to do, and sometimes you need a little help. To make it easier for you to grow your list we offer forms that you can use on your website, blog, social media or your email.

In just a few steps you can create a sign up form that coordinates with your website and helps your business grow.
 

Design your form

To start creating your form, go to the Contacts Tab in your account and click the Create Signup Form button.

You can also also create a signup form by clicking Create New Form under the Forms Tab.

You'll then see a box to start the process.  First, choose which list you'll subscribers will be added to. You can also select to start a new list.  

You then have two different options to choose from when thinking about how you'll distribute your sign-up form. 

Option 1: Hosted Sign-up Forms - This option is hosted within your account and includes a link that you can distribute to your email lists, across your social platforms, etc, to encourage customers to sign-up for your list. Hosted Sign-up forms feature three different steps:

Step 1: Design your form - pick a template, then add the fields you wish to collect.
Step 2: Design your thank you page - add some thank you text or redirect to your website.
Step 3: Configure the email your subscriber will receive to confirm their subscription. 
Step 4: Share your sign up form - copy the URL or HTML and share as you please.

Option 2: Embeddable Sign-up Forms - By adding a few values to a form, you'll be able to generate an HTML code that can be embedded into your website or blog, allowing customers to sign-up for your list. Embeddable Sign-up Forms feature three steps:

Step 1: Design your form - Add the fields you wish to collect.
Step 2: Configure the email your subscriber will receive to confirm their subscription. 
Step 3: Copy & Paste your HTML

Contact info collected from a signup form will be marked as opt-in so you know how the address came to be on your list. But if you want to keep track of when people are signing up, create a list just for your signup form. That way you’ll know the source of all the addresses on the list, and the date they signup.

Editing a Hosted Sign up Form 

Step 1: Hosted Sign-up Forms - Themes

At the top of the form example you’ll see different themes. We’ve designed them to work with the email templates in your account, or you can select a plain one that doesn’t conflict with your website design. You can click through the different templates to find the one you like the best.

To get started you will first need to choose which form fields you would like to include in your sign up form. Here you also have the option to add or remove a headline, sub-headline, details or a footer. 
On the left side you have the option to collect lots of different information from your subscribers. Email address is already select and is a requirement for the form. But you can select any number of fields from the left, just keep in mind the less you ask of your subscribers, the more likely they are to fill in the form. The following are the fields you can collect in your form, each are added in the order you see in the list here:

• First Name
• Last Name
• Marital Status
• Gender
• Email Address
• Work Phone
• Home Phone
• Website
• Mobile Phone
• Fax
• Title
• Company
• Address 1
• Address 2
• City
• Postal Code
• State/Region
• Country
• GDPR Consent 

You can add or subtract fields as you like, you’ll notice they get added right away. Remember, it’s easier to ask for more details after someone has signed up then to collect all the data at the initial sign-up. If you ask too much on your form people will wonder why you need so much for an email and not fill in the form.

Once you have all the fields you want in your form, you can edit the text.  You are also able to change the order of your fields. Use the up and down arrow toggle buttons, located on the left side of each field to re-order them as you please.

Once you like the way the form looks, click Next in the bottom right corner. You’ll see a preview of what the form will look like, and if you want to add a URL for a page your subscribers will be sent to once they finish entering their info, add it in the box in the top left.

Step 2: Design your thank you page - Hosted Sign-up Forms

Once you’ve designed your hosted sign-up form you’ll move to the next step, the Thank You page.

There are two options here. You can have a thank you page, one that matches the template you selected in step one, or you can have your new subscribers redirected to a website that you choose. So if you’ve already created something specific on your website or you have a landing page, you can use that instead.

To use the redirect option just add a URL to the box in the top left of the page. This will then be the only option your subscribers see, they won’t see the thank you page. You can always delete the URL if you decide you want to use the thank you page instead.

To edit the thank you page, click any of the text boxes and make your changes; use the menu to the right if you need to. We have some suggested text for you on this page, but be sure to change it since it’s not complete.

We suggest you add your company name and postal address to the footer, to let your subscribers know they have the right form and to be in compliance with some spam laws.

When everything looks the way you want, click next and your changes will be saved. If it all looks good, click Next in the bottom right to customize your opt-in form. 

Step 3: Customize your Opt-in Email 

After the subscriber submits their form information, they will not be automatically added to your list until they confirm that was their intent. They will be sent an email that you can customize where they will be required to click on a link to confirm.  You may want to consider giving your subscribers a heads up on the  Sign Up or Thank You page that they will be receiving a confirmation email.  

For the opt-in email, you can customize:

• From name
• From address 
• Subject line
• Greeting/Message
• Confirmation button text 
• Closing/Signature
• Option:  you can specify what page the subscriber will land on after they click the button.  

Once you have configured those fields, you can select the Preview button in the bottom right side to see what your subscriber will see. Here's an example:

Step 4: Share your sign up form - Hosted Sign-up Forms

You're nearly there! At this point you've created and edited both your sign up form, your thank you page and customized the opt-in email.  This is the last step! Remember that you can link or embed hosted sign-up forms depending on your preferences or business needs.

You can copy the URL you see in the Share the Link box and share your form anywhere you like - your blog, website, or social media. Since it’s a URL, you can include it in emails if you like, or even tweet it.

Instead of sharing your link, you also have the option to embed your form into your website or blog. To use this option click the button that says “Generate Code” in the Embed Code box. We’ll give you the code you need to use the form on your website or blog, you just need to copy it and then paste it into the HTML code of your site. If you have someone who manages your website for you, you’ll just need to give the code to them.

Editing Form & List Names

On this page, you can also edit the name of your sign-up form and the list that will receive it.  To edit the name of your sign-up form, click the ' Edit Name' link on the page.

In the lightbox that appears, type the name you'd like to use for your form and select a list for the contacts to be added on. You can create a new list or use an existing list.

If you want to see the form in action, click the View form on the web button in the bottom right corner. This page will also let you test out the form to make sure it's working the way you want it to.

Embeddable Sign-up Forms

The embeddable form will not have images from any of the templates, it will only show the boxes for the fields you’ve selected. The template images are used only for the hosted URL option, since there is nothing else on that page.

Fields

Although there are no designed themes for embeddable sign-up forms, you'll still need to select the fields that you would like to include. To re-order any of the fields, simply toggle between the arrows located to the left of each field.

Step 3: Customize your Opt-in Form 

After the subscriber submits their form information, they will not be automatically added to your list until they confirm that was their intent. They will be sent an email that you can customize where they will be required to click on a link to confirm.  You may want to consider giving your subscribers a heads up on the  Sign Up or Thank You page that they will be receiving a confirmation email.  

For the opt-in email, you can customize:

• From name
• From address 
• Subject line
• Greeting/message
• Button text 
• Closing message/Signature line
• Option:  you can specify what page the subscriber will land on after they click the button. 

Once you have configured those fields, you can select the Preview button in the bottom right side to see what your subscriber will see.

Copy & Paste Your Form

Once you've selected the fields you'd like to include in your embeddable sign-up form, you'll be ready to copy and paste the html to your blog or website. You can click directly into the html box and copy the code or simply use the green 'copy' button, located underneath the code box.

If you need to make changes you can do that at any time, your forms stay live as you edit them and can be updated at any time.