Say hello to Mailjet's new Form Builder

What is an email signup form and why do you need one?

An email signup form is used to capture a user’s data throughout your website, whether for a newsletter subscription, gated content, or promotional splash page. Alternatively, users could be incentivized by discount codes or giveaways for lead generation. The signup form can be embedded into a webpage or be used as a pop-up with a predetermined trigger.

A subscription form typically contains fields that aim to capture visitor data that is relevant to the website, such as name, email address, and phone number. Additionally, it is a crucial tool for gathering visitor consent and ensuring you are compliant with GDPR and other regulations.

So, why do you need an email signup form? Well, quite simply, because a signup form is one of the most efficient ways to increase the impact of your email marketing and grow your customer base. List growth is directly proportionate to the volume of email opens and traffic to your website. This achieves the ultimate goal of every marketer – to convert your audience into paying customers.

Not only that, but a signup form captures the data that you need to better target your audience. The more data you have, the easier it is to segment your audience and create personalized messages that lead to higher conversion rates.

But it’s not all sunshine and roses – signup workflows come with their own set of challenges.

The challenges with signup forms

Finding an email subscription template is fairly easy. But without proper HTML knowledge, it’s difficult to customize it to meet your requirements.

Plus, an HTML form needs to feed data back to your email service provider, otherwise you’ll be forever manually downloading and uploading CSV files from one program to another.

Finally, many subscription form templates don’t have double opt-in functionality, which ensures the person in question is legitimate and isn’t going to tarnish the quality of your hard-earned list.

Luckily, the team at Mailjet has been hard at work finding a solution to consolidate your tech stack.

Introducing Mailjet’s drag-and-drop Form Builder

Many of you already use our best-in-class drag-and-drop Email Editor and have intuitively created beautiful email designs for your audience. We wondered – why can’t that be the same for our Form Builder too?

So, we got to work applying the same Email Editor logic to our Form Builder. If only it were a simple copy and paste job for our engineers! However, like any of our updates, leveling up our product is a continuous effort involving many talented teams and individuals.

The result – Mailjet’s new and improved Form Builder, now available free for everyone.

Let’s take a look at what’s new:

Drag-and-drop builder

We’ve implemented our flexible drag-and-drop features to easily add content, images, videos, links, and GIFs to your email signup form. Plus, if you’ve got coding skills, you can insert HTML code blocks, adding unlimited possibilities.

So, if you’re already familiar with our Email Editor, you’ll know how to use Form Builder. All the features, like adjusting padding and creating pre-sets, have carried over.

Double opt-in

A healthy list means better deliverability. Rather than endlessly scrubbing your lists clean, wouldn’t it just be easier if your contacts gave you their correct address in the first place? We think so too, that’s why we added double opt-in to our Form Builder.

This means when your subscriber submits their information, they’ll immediately receive a follow-up email asking them to click a link to verify their email. When they click the link, they’ll arrive at your confirmation page, which serves as another opportunity to keep them on-site.

More customization

The buck doesn’t stop at the signup page – no. Now you can also use our intuitive drag-and-drop designer to customize your double opt-in email and confirmation page. Use your brand tool kit to create a seamless user experience from signup to the inbox and back.

Do you want to embed your form, or have it pop up on your homepage? Whether it’s a newsletter signup form, or ecommerce lead generation, you can embed all sorts of forms to target your website visitors.

Minimal workflow

There’s no need to configure convoluted automation workflows to onboard potential subscribers. Our tool features an all-in-one workflow for designing your opt-in form, double opt-in email, and confirmation page.

Everything you need to do is on one page – simply go with the step-by-step flow.

GDPR compliance

Last but not least, we have a pretty neat feature to keep you on the right side of the law. Mailjet stores users’ consensual data in our database so you can be sure every email you send is compliant with GDPR. Once a contact clicks the button in the confirmation email, their consent is stored in our database.

By sending to consensual recipients that really want to see your emails, you’ll see better engagement and positively impact your deliverability, as inbox providers like Gmail and Outlook recognize you as a legitimate sender. This translates to delicious metrics like increased open and click-through rates, and less sour stats like bounces and unsubscribes.

Head over to the Contacts tab in your account to get started.

Create an email signup form with Mailjet

You’ve now seen how Mailjet's new Form Builder is a quick and intuitive way to create a signup form. And you can directly customize the double opt-in email and confirmation page within the Form Builder workflow. Getting started is easy:

1. From the menu, select Contacts > Form Builder and click the ‘Create a new form’ button.

2. In the ‘Form setup’ screen, use the ‘Name’ section to give your form a name to identify it in your reports.

3. Select 'Form design' in the ‘Form setup screen’ to create and preview your form using our drag-and-drop tool.

4. Once you’re done, go to the 'Email details' section to define the subject line and sender information for the confirmation email.

5. Next, click on the 'Email design' section, customize the double opt-in email that will be sent to new subscribers asking them to confirm their subscription to your newsletter.

6. Go to the 'Confirmation page' section to design the page that will be displayed after a subscriber confirms their registration. You can also enter the URL of an external confirmation page on your website if you already have one.

7. Finally, go to the 'Contact list' section and choose where the subscriber data will be stored.

8. Once all sections are completed, click the 'Publish' button to publish your newly created form.

Once you hit publish, you can easily embed the HTML code into your website CMS including WordPress.

Grow your email list with Form Builder

We’re excited to reveal the Form Builder is now available and free for all Mailjet users. You can find it under the Contacts tab in your Mailjet account.

There are even more features in the pipeline for Form Builder including new components, templates, and form triggers. As always, our documentation has all the most up-to-date information on all product features.

What are you waiting for? It’s time to start growing your lists with beautiful subscription forms!