Signup forms
By Clint ParsleyLast updated
In short. A signup form adds people to one of your lists after they confirm by email. Share its link, or paste its code into your website.
How do I make a form?
Go to Forms → New form. Give it a heading, pick the fields you want besides email (first name, last name, company, phone, or any of your custom fields), choose the list people join, and write the consent line they tick. Publish it, then use the link or the website code under Share. Forms are on paid plans and trials. To send a welcome email automatically, enroll the form's list into a sequence and tick Keep enrolling people who join this list.
Why do people have to confirm by email?
So that everyone on your list asked to be there, with the address they own. A form anyone can reach can be filled in with someone else's address; the email stops that. It's called double opt-in, and every SEMAOS form uses it. Until someone clicks the link, they aren't a contact and don't count anywhere. A link works for 7 days.
What is saved as consent?
With each confirmed signup SEMAOS keeps the form, the exact consent line the person ticked, when they signed up and when they confirmed. It shows on the contact's page. Keep the consent line honest about what you'll send: it's your record if anyone asks.
What if someone who unsubscribed signs up again?
They get a different email asking whether they want your emails again. Only if they click it are they taken off your suppression list. The form looks the same either way, so nobody can use it to find out who has unsubscribed.
Who sends the confirmation email?
You do: it goes out from your sending address with your company name, and your mailing address at the bottom. It doesn't count toward your monthly sends. To protect your sending, each form accepts a limited number of signups from one place in an hour, and your account sends up to 500 confirmation emails a day (50 a day during a free trial). While a new sending domain is warming up, confirmation emails also count toward its daily warmup limit.
How to set up the popup
A live form can also open as a popup on your own website. On the form's Popup tab, turn it on, choose when it opens (after some seconds, after the visitor scrolls part of the page, or when they're about to leave, on computers only) and how many days to wait before showing it again to someone who closed it. It never opens again for someone who signed up. Then copy the code and paste it once, just before </body>, on each page of your site where it may open. Changes on the Popup tab reach your site without pasting it again.
On phones the popup starts as a bar at the bottom of the screen, which opens the form when tapped, so it doesn't cover your page. The popup sets no cookies: it remembers "don't show again" in the visitor's browser, for your site only. Each page with the code loads it, and the popup's settings, from SEMAOS.
If your site limits outside scripts with a Content Security Policy, add https://semaos.io to script-src, frame-src and connect-src. If your site requires Subresource Integrity, use the fixed version of the code shown under "Pinned version" on the Popup tab; it never changes, so it doesn't get fixes either.