Create a subscribe form for your website 

It takes minutes to create a web form for picking up new subscribers through your site. Customization is easy, and you can make as many versions of the form as you like.

Subscription forms are great for dedicated sign up pages because they give you total design control, but they also slot nicely into a sidebar or footer. Just decide what fields you want included on the form, and we'll produce the code you need to drop into your site.

Important: Be sure to generate a separate form for each subscriber list because the code you'll get adds people only to that particular list. Similarly, if you ever delete a subscriber list or replace it, be sure to generate new form code and update your website.

Creating a subscribe form

To get started navigate to the subscriber list you want to create a form for. On the list details page click Grow your audience in the right sidebar then, on the following page, select Copy/paste a form to your site.

This will load a page like the one pictured below. If you've created custom fields for the list, they will be displayed. Just tick the checkboxes next to any fields you want included on the form.

More form customization options

If a custom field has mutliple choice answers, you'll see a drop-down menu on the left to select how the answers are displayed: either as checkboxes or a multi-select list.

example of a custom field with multiple answers:

What sort of events do you want to hear about?

  • Art exhibitions
  • Music festivals
  • Musicals
  • Food and wine shows
  • Dance

If you have more than one mailing list, you can choose to include opt-in checkboxes for one or more of them on the subscribe form. All your other lists will be displayed below the custom fields section, as shown in our example above where "Product News" is the other list available.

Note: When someone completes the sign up form and opts-in for another list, they are automatically added to the list. However, only default field data (name and email) is recorded for the additional list. This is the case even if both lists have identical custom fields.

Next, click Generate the code which will give you something like this:

13 Copy Code

We provide 3 HTML code options so you can choose the formatting you prefer:

  • Basic formatting: This is the bare minimum so you can further customize it to suit your website. If the site already has CSS styles for form elements, this code will pick them up.
  • CSS based: Gets you started with some basic (minimal layout) CSS that you can tweak to suit. Good if you don't have any existing form styles.
  • Table based: A structured form for nice, neat alignment.

Customizing the code

To create a secure, encrypted form you can manually change the form action to use https:// instead of http://

You can also change the ID labels but do not change the name parameters because it will stop the form from working. Here's an example of a name parameter:

name="cm-f-jrddhr"

Customize the entire subscribe process

Besides the form, you can also customize what happens next. Click Start customizing in the right sidebar of your "Create a subscribe form" page to edit the following:

  • Subscribe confirmation page
  • Verification email content (for confirmed opt-in lists only)
  • Secondary confirmation page (for confirmed opt-in lists only)
  • Subscription confirmation email