5 Sign-Up Forms That Increase User Engagement

Forms are an important part of any website: whether they’re your main call to action or just part of your “contact” page. In this article, we’ll discuss sign-up forms that help you increase your subscribers and leads. Sign-up forms are especially crucial for blogs. They allow you to continue to engage with readers who found your content interesting and create lucrative email marketing campaigns to sell your products and services. Utilizing an effective signup form will result in more conversions (subscribers) to your site, which can have a significant impact on long-term growth for your website.

How do you create a contact form?

Contact forms can be built from scratch using code, but this requires hiring a web developer and is usually recommended only if you are building your entire website from scratch. If you’re building the site yourself on a website builder or platform, you have many tools at your disposal that allow you to easily create great-looking forms without any coding or design experience.

Many site builders, like Wix and BoldGrid, have app stores that let you choose from many different types of form apps and plugins. Each one will have different features and capabilities, and some even allow additional control over editing using CSS. Other site builders, like Strikingly, don’t have app stores; instead, they have built-in contact forms that you can quickly and easily add. While the editing and design features there are limited, the basic form looks pretty good, and you can use a service like MailChimp to simply add a form with HTML.

Sign-Up Forms That Convert

If you’re looking for ideas for your own form, here are 5 different sign-up forms that can help you increase your subscribers list.

Popup Forms

Popup forms are very popular, specifically “exit” popups, because they convert. The idea is that when a visitor is on your site and moves their cursor to hover over the tab to leave the site, a popup appears asking them to subscribe. This usually includes a very appealing incentive, like downloading a helpful e-book, getting a significant discount, or joining a free webinar. There are a number of WordPress plugins that allow you to do this, which means that you can use a site builder like GoDaddy and still benefit from a WYSIWYG interface (“What you see is what you get”).

A good example of this type of form is on influencer Neil Patel’s website. This full-screen sign-up form (seen above) pops up when you try to exit out of the window. It offers you an incentive to stay and sign up – a “cheat sheet” to improve your online marketing.  It’s way more enticing than just a box that says something like, “enter your email address to subscribe” with no freebie thrown in. Remember that the offer provided will also make a difference to your conversion rates, so make sure that it’s a good one! Furthermore, in order to exit, you must click “No thanks, I don’t want more traffic.” This kind of exit button makes you think twice about leaving the site.

Minimalist

Sometimes, a simple and straightforward form is all you need. The form below, from the Ted Baker fashion site, says it all. The title is straightforward and you only have one field to enter. Usually, companies prefer to add the “Name” field so that they can personalize their emails, but since most marketing emails have personalized greetings nowadays, it is less effective. In this case, the personalization is in the button. By choosing “Women” or “Men”, users tell the company what types of emails they’re interested in, and they get more targeted content. Minimalist forms can be created with nearly any website builder that supports email marketing, even if they don’t have an app store. Many site builders have professional website templates with sign up forms that require very little editing and customization.

Below is another great example of a sign-up form by Fizzle.co. The title is very clear and enticing, and they’ve added another two lines so visitors can get more info on the benefits of signing up. In general, a sign-up form with fewer fields to fill out will result in more conversions than one with an overwhelming number of fields of required information. Subscribers want something quick and easy, otherwise, they’re likely to decide to put off signing up – possibly, for good.

Standard Name and Email

The most popular type of form used is the standard MailChimp form with two fields – Name and Email. MailChimp isn’t necessarily the most popular provider, but they stand out when it comes to ease of use and design capabilities. They are also easily added on-site builders like BoldGrid and Wix.

Social Media Examiner gets subscribers on their homepage by offering an industry report in return:

Social Triggers simply tell it like it is and let visitors know that subscribing will be very worthwhile for them:

Sign-up forms are a big part of your website and growth strategy, so before you make decisions on how to create a website and what site builder you’ll use, think about all of the factors and details so that you can choose the platform that is right for you in terms of features and capabilities. Remember that each target audience behaves differently, so there is no “one form suits all”. You need to see which types of design appeals to your audience by looking at other websites that they engage with and then testing out a few options before choosing the one with the best results. Email marketing can be incredibly effective, but your website needs an outstanding signup form to convince users to subscribe!