MailShoot : Embedding A Signup Form In Sandvox

October 19th, 2011

Sandvox users can easily add a mailing list signup form to their websites. Just follow the easy instructions in the tutorial below your MailShoot mailing list sign up form will be on your website in no time.

Video Transcript:

Keeping a mailing list is a great way to for you to keep in touch with your website visitors. It can also be a really good avenue for you to promote your product or services to people who might be genuinely interested in what you have to offer.

This tutorial is going to show you how to embed a mailing list signup form on your website. In case you are not familiar, the application I am showing you is called MailShoot. MailShoot is a mailing list manager that will allow you to easily embed your signup form on your website. You can then manage all of the e-mail addresses on the list and send them e-mails whenever you desire.

For this demonstration, we’re going to stick with the golf theme and assume I am running a golf website. The first thing I am going to do is save my document. I do this by clicking File, and going to Save As. I will them name my project and save it.

The next thing I will do is click on the Mailing List button. Currently, I have no lists because this is a brand new document. I will click on the Plus sign to add a new list.

If I double click on my list, the list editor window will appear. This is where all members of my mailing list will appear after they have been added.

So now we’re going to begin making our mailing list signup form. The first thing we are going to do is change some of the field names. These are going to be the fields for the information that we want to get from people who are signing up to our mailing list.

So here I will input just a few examples of the information I might want to collect from potential customers. (favoirte golfer, handicap, name of country club, left handed)

When I’m finished inputting the fields, I will press Done, and my next step will be to setup the Subscribe Page.

In this first step, I’ll need to give my list a name. I am going to call it Jeremy’s Golf Shop.

The List Short Name will be what is used in your signup form’s URL. This name must be unique across all MailShoot users so I’ll just add some random digits to the end of it to ensure it is unique. You can do the same if you’d like, or you can click on this Check button to see if what you have entered is unique or not.

Next I’ll enter a password for my list, followed by a list description.

In the Owner’s Details section, I will need to fill out all of these fields. The owner e-mail is especially important as this is the email address that users will see when the signup to the mailing list, as well as the email address where you will be notified of a signup.

The welcome message can be customized to your liking, or you can leave it as is.

In the custom fields section, you will need to tick off whatever custom fields you want included on your signup form. I will tick off the ones I customized earlier in the tutorial.

You can choose from four different type’s of fields you want to use. You can also input a default value for each field, as well as indicate if you want to the field to be a Required field or not.

In the links section, here is where we will get our code for embedding the form on our iWeb website. I’ll simply press the publish button, and the embed code will appear. You will also notice that two links appear. The first link will take us to the Subscribe page. The second link will take us to the unsubscribe page. When you create your form, click on these links so you can see first hand what your subscribe and unsubscribe pages look like.

Now, I’m going to highlight the embed code, and copy it.

In Sandvox, I am going to add a new page. I am going to choose the Empty Without Sidebar option. I will then go to Insert, and select Raw HTML. In the popup window, I will paste the code that I just copied in between the span tags. Now I will publish my site, and then view the signup form in my web browser. If I find that the form needs to be adjusted a bit, which in this case I do, because parts of the bottom of the form is missing, I will go back to Sandvox, delete the code from before, and re-peat the process from before. This time, I will adjust the height to a number I think will suffice, and then publish the site again. This time my form looks just the way I wanted it to.

And that is how you set up your mailing list sign up form. Remember to save your work as you go in MailShoot. For more MailShoot instructional videos, visit the MailShoot product page at ragesw.com/products/mailshoot.html


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