How the Form Builder Works

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The foundation of a great email or SMS marketing plan is an audience of contacts who want to hear from you and engage with your brand. If you don't have a lot of contacts yet, Mailchimp can help you build a signup form to grow your audience.

To get started, you'll use the form builder to design your Mailchimp signup form and signup responses. Then you'll be ready to share your form across all your online channels and watch your audience grow.

In this article, you'll learn how the form builder works.

About the form builder

The form builder is a Mailchimp tool that you can access to edit some of your System forms, which are accessible from Forms Settings. The forms that can be edited here are the unsubscribe form, update profile form, and miscellaneous pages.

You can also use the form builder to edit other emails and messages that are part of the signup process, like the confirmation thank you page and Final Welcome Email. These forms and emails guide your prospects, customers, clients, and friends through the process of becoming engaged subscribers.

How to use the form builder

The form builder is made of 3 main tabs, Build it, Design it, and Translate it, which you'll use to customize all your unsubscribe and update profile forms, and miscellaneous landing pages. Here's a brief overview of how things work.

The Build it tab

The Build it tab is where you'll add structure and content to your form and responses.

Manage Audience and Signup Form Fields

Manage Audience and Signup Form Fields

Note

Be careful when you consider the removal of an audience field. When a field is removed from your signup form and responses, it also removes that field's data from your audience.

The Design It Tab

The Design it tab is where you'll edit the style, color, font, and graphics of your signup form and response emails. You can also edit the page and body layout of your signup form and response emails here.

Any design changes you make here, like changing background color or font, will be inherited by all your forms and email or SMS responses. This helps build brand consistency for all the pages your subscribers will interact with, and saves you some time.

The Translate it tab

The Translate it tab is where you'll translate the Mailchimp-owned text in your forms. Mailchimp supports more than 50 languages.

If you don't need to translate anything, you can still use this tab to modify default text on form buttons or in error messages.

Translate Signup Forms and Emails

Share your form

After you design your signup form, you can share it across all your online channels. Just copy your Signup Form URL in the form builder, and share it anywhere you want!

Share Your Signup Form

What you can edit with the form builder

The editable items appear in four categories in the Forms and response emails drop-down menu: Subscribe, Unsubscribe, Update Profile, and Other Bits. The editable items from the Subscribe category are only the Opt-in Confirmation Email and the Final Welcome Email. Other items related to subscribing have been moved to the Basic Subscribe Form builder (available in Forms Settings). We recommend using a welcome automation and not the Final Welcome Email for a better experience.

Subscribe

The Subscribe section shows items you can customize as a part of your audience’s subscription process. The items in this section will vary based on which opt-in method you use with your audience. If you use double opt-in, which requires contacts to verify their email address, you'll see the signup thank you page and opt-in confirmation email, which you can also customize.

• Opt-in confirmation email\ An email that is sent if your Audience is set to email double opt-in.
• Final welcome email An optional email that you can turn on to welcome your new subscribers.

Unsubscribe

The items in this section show you what your contacts will see when they unsubscribe from your email marketing.

• Unsubscribe form If someone clicks an unsubscribe link in your campaign archive, we’ll prompt them to enter and submit their email address to this form.
• Unsubscribe success page A webpage that confirms a successful unsubscribe.
• Goodbye email An optional confirmation you can use to say goodbye to unsubscribers.

Update Profile

The items in the Update Profile section show you what contacts will see when they request to update their profile information like their email address, group preferences, or audience information.

• Profile update email A confirmation email sent to subscribers who’ve filled out the update profile form.
• Profile update email sent A static webpage that confirms that Mailchimp sent the profile update email.
• Update profile form The form your subscribers can use to update their information. Can be linked in emails using the *|UPDATE_PROFILE|* merge tag. If you publish a preferences center for your audience, it will replace the update profile form and you won’t be able to edit it from here.
• Sample update profile form A form contacts will see when attempting to update their profile through a test email or archive page.
• Update profile thank you page A webpage that confirms a successfully updated profile.

Other bits

This section displays miscellaneous forms and pages connected to your audience.

• Forward to a friend form A form subscribers will see when they click a Forward to Friend link in your email.
• About your list A static information page for your audience that contains your audience details and permission reminder. Can be linked in emails using the |ABOUT_LIST| merge tag.
• Campaign archive page A shareable archive page containing links to the 20 most recent emails sent to your audience.
• Survey landing page The landing page subscribers will see when they vote in a survey you’ve created with the survey merge tag.
• Automation landing Page This page shows when subscribers opt in or out of an automation series that uses join or leave automation merge tags.

Note

Some parts of your signup forms and response emails are linked to audience information and can’t be edited in the form builder. To edit your audience name, go to your audience defaults. To update the website, physical address, or permission reminder for your audience, you’ll need to update Required Footer Content in your audience settings.

What's next?

Let's do this! Follow along with our step-by-step tutorial to create your own signup form in the form builder.

Create a Hosted Signup Form

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About Double Opt-in

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