Are you someone who offer something of value but doesn't have a website? Maybe you're running your business through Instagram or Facebook page. But that shouldn't stop you from building an email list of you customers or followers.
You can build an email list without a website too! All you need to have is a Flodesk sign up form.
If you are serious about building an email audience for your business, you must at least have a sign-up form. If you are serious about growing and nurturing that list, you should have Flodesk next.
Check out this post for how flodesk offers a flat rate for unlimited contacts and unlimited email marketing features which includes the landing page forms.
So let's learn how to set up your first landing page sign-up form using flodesk, in this step by step guide.
If you're asking what exactly is a landing page sign up form, here is the answer. Simply put - it is a sign up form on a web page which you can share using links just like any other website url.
Even if you don't have a website, you can still share this link through your social media profiles and people can join your email list. You can then stay in touch with your supporters through a marketing platform that has the highest ROI among all other marketing platforms - through email marketing.
Since landing page sign-up forms can't match the flexibility of websites, consider it just as a stepping stone to bigger and better things. If you're serious about offering your services, you will need a website sooner or later.
By keeping those things in mind, lets get started with creating our first flodesk full page sign-up form.
Sign in to your flodesk account. (Sign-up if you haven't created an account and try it for free for 30 days!)
Click on to 'Forms' and 'New form'
It will open up a new window where you have to select your form type.
Currently there are three types
The type we are focusing right now is the Full page Forms which can also be called as landing page forms as it can be used as a landing page. This is the feature that will help us to use this form as an alternative to having a website.
So click on 'Full Page' type to select one of the Form template that suits your requirement. There are forms with image, without image, with full background image, with solid background colour and so on. Most of the basic requirements are covered by flodesk with their form templates.
We have selected a simple full page template. Now it is time to see how to customise it. But before that Flodesk will ask you to select a 'Segment'.
A segment is a group of people in your email list based on a certain criteria.
For example, a segment marked as 'Australia' could be your followers from Australia. If you have a special announcement to make very specific to your Australian followers, you can send out an email to the segment you've created as 'Australia'.
If you haven't created a segment, you can do so by start typing in the field. Here we have given it a segment called 'from full page form' so that we would know from where we acquired these contacts.
You can name it whatever you want, as long as it makes sense and you can use it effectively for your email marketing campaigns.
Once we select/create a segment and click 'Save', we will be ready to edit our form to make it our own.
Almost all the elements you see on the screen can be edited or customised.
When you click anywhere on the form background, the global settings for the form will open up. You can see the "Form" tab on top right side of the screen.
If you choose to turn the "Preference" on, you will have the option to create further segmentation using this form.
In the image above you can see the checkboxes with the title "What piques your interest?" This options appeared because the 'preferences' is turned on. If you turn it off, these options will disappear.
If you click on the heading and the short text box, you will be able to edit the content of the text, change its colour, font and so on.
When you click on any of the form fields such as first name or email, options to edit these will appear. From here you can change what appears on the form field, form field style and more.
You can also decide if you want to make the form field 'Required' or not from here. It also gives you an option to add your own custom field.
If you want to add a field other than first name, last name and email, you can use "Your new field" option. When you do that, you have to map it to a current contact field or create a new mapping field.
For example you can create a new field as "Where are you from" and you can create a backend mapping as 'country'.
You can add a maximum of 6 custom fields in one flodesk form. Currently (As on June 2022) custom form fields accepts only text values. So you wont be able to capture a date or any similar numerical field. They will all be stored as text strings.
For most signup purposes, a simple name and email would suffice. The easier it is to sign up, the better will be the conversions. So keep it simple.
You can achieve super focused customer segmentation through 'Preferences' which will then help to serve hyper personalised content that are super relevant for your customers.
In the above screenshot you can see 4 preference options : "Insider news, Special offers, Business tips, In-person events"
If someone selects only Business tips, you can send them emails related to business tips. They might not be interested in In-person events. Hence you will be doing them a favour as a email marketer by not sending them emails they are not interested in.
Adding the preferences is optional. If you have created an email marketing content strategy, you will be easily able to identify various preferences you can include in the form.
If you want to edit or add new preferences, click on the preferences and make required changes from the right side edit column as seen in the above screenshot.
For each preference, you will have to select an appropriate segmentation. If it is not created yet, you can create one from this window itself.
Just like all the other elements you can edit the Button too. Just click on it and the options to edit will appear.
You can change the style, make it rounded, change colour, font and more.
We are about to finish the process of finishing our first form. But we need to set the 'Success message' - the message shown when someone successfully submits the form.
You can edit that by clicking on the anywhere outside the content area of the form. Then it will open up the global settings which we have seen in the first step.
Go to "Messages" tab on the top right.
You can select pre-written success messaged by clicking on the options shown on the right side of the screen or by clicking on the 'custom' option.
Once that is done, we are on our way to finishing the form.
When we click 'Next' after finishing with our form edits, we will be taken to a window where we have to choose if we want to set double opt-in or not.
Double Opt-in is the process in which we get explicit permission from users to send promotional emails. When they sign-up by filling out the form, they will get a confirmation email asking them to confirm their choice to join our email list. The people will be added to our list only when they click on the confirmation link. (In some systems, the people who didn't confirm will be added to a that part of the email server which has less delivery rate.
In short, double opt-in ensures higher deliverability. It also ensures that the doble-opted contacts are super interested and super engaged customers which means they mean business.
Depending your email marketing strategy and business goals, select either yes or no to enabling double opt-in.
If you have selected YES to enabling double opt-in, then you will have to customize your double opt-in email and Thank you page where they will be redirected after opting in.
In order to do that, click on the "Customize opt-in" button. It will take you to a opt-in settings page.
You can edit the content of the email and thank you page from there and make it on brand.
When you finish doing that, you can get back to finishing the form. You need to select if you need a notification when someone new joins your list.
If you are starting new and want to get excited every time a new contact joins your list, you can enable it. If you are growing the list by hundreds in a day, maybe you don't want that many notifications!
Now is the time to decide what you want to do once the form is submitted. You can either show the success message or redirect to another url.
If you want to redirect them to your social media profiles or some other relevant places, you can do that here.
Once you set that, you are all set.
Once you click finish, your form is ready and it is published. You can copy the link to your finished landing page sign-up form.
When you visit the link, you will see the finished sign-up form. It is now ready to accept your email followers!
