How to Create an Email Signup Form with Elastic Email

Every email list starts with a signup form. It's the point where a website visitor decides to hear from you, so it needs to look like your brand, ask for only what you need, and keep bots out. Elastic Email's web forms creator handles all three in a drag-and-drop editor, with double opt-in and reCAPTCHA built in. Here's how to build your first one.

Let us walk you through how the new form creator works, what new elements you may expect to find there, and how to set up and publish your forms. Join us on this journey and see how smooth and user-friendly attracting new subscribers can be.

TL;DR

To create an email signup form in Elastic Email, open the Audience section and start a new web form. Pick whether you want to create an inline or pop-up form. Then, decide if you want to choose a ready-made template or start from scratch, then drag a Form block onto the canvas and choose your fields. Email is the only required field; name and last name are optional, and custom fields like Birthday and Country are available on the Pro plan. Choose which contact list receives submissions, switch on Google reCAPTCHA v2 to block bots, and keep double opt-in enabled so every subscriber confirms their address. When you're done, publish the form as a shareable link or embed the generated HTML on your website.

How the drag-and-drop form designer works

In the forms creator, you start with naming the form and choosing whether you want to select a form from a gallery of the pre-made templates, or you want to create a web form from scratch.

Our new form creator is based on a convenient drag-and-drop editor, just like our email designer. It means that you have different content blocks available in the left-hand side menu to drag and drop to your form. You can choose from Form, Heading, Paragraph, and Image. The Form block is available to be used only once in every form.

Once you're collecting contacts, you can build a matching landing page in the same drag-and-drop editor - see our landing pages creator.

Which fields can you add to a signup form?

When editing the Form block, you can add the input fields, customize their style, and choose the audience your contacts should land in.
As for the fields, the Email input is always there, and it is marked as required by default. You can also add other fields like Name and Last Name. If you are on the Pro plan, you can also add custom fields like Birthday, Country, or Company, depending on what details you want to obtain from your leads.

How to add reCAPTCHA to stop bot signups

When collecting new contacts, we all want to prevent bots from spamming our sign-up forms. That’s why it’s so crucial to add reCAPTCHA. In our new form creator, we added the option to enable Google reCAPTCHA v2 with the “I’m not a robot” checkbox in your forms (Pro plan).

Where your new contacts go: lists, segments and mailing preferences

Last but not least, you need to choose where your freshly collected contacts should be added. Select the list(s) you want to add your leads to. You can even give them a chance to choose which list they want to be added to by enabling the Mailing preferences option. Your web form will include lists you provided and your leads can check to which of them they want to subscribe.

Remember, that you can only add contact to your lists, not segments. But, all contacts will be automatically added to the “all contacts” segment. At the same time, if you choose to collect information about, e.g., Country, and you already have a segment devoted to a certain country, contacts meeting this criterion will be added to that segment.

How to set up double opt-in and a confirmation email

Once the form design is ready, it’s time to manage its settings. Please note that double opt-in confirmation is set by default on each form. In this section, you choose what screen should be displayed after a new subscriber submits the form. You also select what activation email template will be sent to them and what screen will be displayed once they activate via email. In case someone has already subscribed to your list, you can choose what screen will be shown to them. Don’t worry if you don’t want to design or choose anything. You can always choose the “Default” option, and all the pages and templates will be provided by our system. 

You can set up notifications to be sent to you when someone signs up for your list. All you need to do is provide us with the email address to which you’d like to receive notifications.

How to embed a signup form on your website

We’ve reached the final part of the new web form creator - publishing. You will have two options to choose from:

• Form link
• Scripted code to embed

The form link can be shared, for example, on your social media channels. You just need to copy and paste it. The second option is a script, working just like an HTML code, that can be copied and embedded in your website’s code.

Start building your signup form

Collecting new contacts and building email lists is crucial for your business growth. That is why we hope our new web forms creator will make this process easy, effortless, and enjoyable. Discover our new form-building flow, see how smoothly our drag-and-drop editor works, and create forms tailored to your needs. Remember you can always use one of our ready-made form templates from the gallery in your account.