Add subscribers to your list from an existing form

If you or your client already have an existing checkout process, or contact form, you can easily add in to that form a check box to let people also add themselves to your subscriber list.

There are a couple of ways to do this. The first, and the one with the most flexibility, is to use the comprehensive API to send off a subscribe request from your own server. If you have the development skills available, that is the way to go.

If you can't use the API, or want to set something up quickly, then you can use the follow method, based on simple redirects.

For this example, let's say you have a contact form on your client's site, like the following:

Contact form

Now, let's jazz it up with an unchecked opt-in to join this client's monthly email newsletter list.

Contact form with subscribe checkbox

Now that the form has an opt-in option available, we need make a few changes to what happens after the form is submitted.

  • Get the address you should be redirecting to

    Head into the subscriber list you'd like to integrate into this form in your account and click on "Add a subscribe form to my site". In the supplied HTML code, you'll notice a URL for the action= address like http://clientname.createsenddotcom/t/1/s/d/. Copy that address.

  • Modify your existing form code

    Normally when you process a form, you'll redirect the user to a confirmation or thank-you page after all the processing is done (like generating an email for our example). Add a check to make sure someone has checked your list opt-in checkbox. If they have, we want to redirect them to the address specified above instead of the usual thank-you page.

  • Add the new subscriber's email address and name (optional) to the address of the page we're redirecting to

    The first thing we need to do is grab the corresponding element name from our form for email address. So, if our email input is <input type="text" name="mb-d-d" id="mb-d-d" />, it's the mb-d-d that we're after.

    Next, we add these values to the redirect URL by adding a question mark (?) followed by mb-d-d= their email address &mb-name= their name.

    The full address should look something like:
    http://clientname.createsenddotcom/t/1/s/d/?mb-d-d=name@domain.com&mb-name=John+Smith

    You will need to fill in the actual name using the data submitted in your original form.

  • Set a subscribe confirmation page in your account

    We can now redirect them back to the same old thank-you page that we always use, so just copy and paste that address into the "Subscribe Confirmation Page" for that list in the "Add a subscribe form to my site" we copied the address from. This will ensure they'll be silently redirected back to your own confirmation page after the subscriber is added to this client's list.

One last important thing to note is that these redirects will happen extremely fast and be transparent to your subscribers.