In These 5 Steps, You Implement a Registration Form for Your Newsletter

1. That's why a newsletter registration form is so important
2. What belongs in a newsletter registration form?
3. Design a form for the newsletter registration
4. What steps does a newsletter registration involve?
5. Your step-by-step guide: How to design your newsletter registration form with rapidmail

A newsletter is simply part of an online business. As newsletter senders, your goal is probably to reach as large a group of interested parties as possible with your mailings. The target design can range from increasing sales or brand awareness to acquiring new customers or strengthening customer loyalty.

However, it's not that easy to win subscribers for your digital mail. The tool that reliably supports you in achieving these goals is always the same - the striking and appealing newsletter registration form on your website. This ensures that your newsletter distribution list quickly fills with valuable leads who are waiting to read your newsletter.

We'll tell you how to design the registration form for your newsletter so that you convince as many website visitors as possible of a subscription. Let's go!

That's why a newsletter registration form is so important

But don't your readers mainly subscribe to your newsletter because of the content they expect from it? That's true. However, you first have to inform your target group that your company is sending a newsletter at all. For this reason, a registration form for a newsletter is placed on the company website or in the online shop to reach your customers where they are already located.

With the help of this form, you collect data about your target group that can go beyond the name and email address. Because the better you know your customers, the better you can implement your marketing strategy and adapt your newsletter shipping accordingly. Therefore, the data that your interested parties and customers enter in your registration form is highly relevant to your company.

In addition, with an ideally placed and structured newsletter registration form, you can win new leads before they have interacted with your company or made a purchase. By signing up for your newsletter, you have the opportunity to stay in touch with your potential customers even if they have not yet decided to register for an event or use your services. The information collected enables you to inform your website visitors about products, services, industry information or tips and tricks outside your website - so you convince them step by step and newsletter for newsletter of a purchase.

What belongs in a newsletter registration form?

First impressions count - this also applies to your form for newsletter registration. There are a few points you should definitely consider in order to make this impression as good as possible.

• Integrate your company logo: To build more trust, you can integrate a logo into a pop-up registration form. Place your logo in the best quality and suitable size in your newsletter registration form to make it clear to your interested parties that the pop-up is part of your website that they are interested in. This increases the likelihood of registration.

A pop-up registration window for your newsletter can attract the attention of your website visitors.

• Write an appealing form text: Formulate the introductory text for your newsletter registration appealingly, so that you encourage your potential customers to enter their data there. Be creative, but bring the content to the point. Highly complex formulations and foreign words are more frightening than attractive. A loose easy language that fits your company is ideal for wording your newsletter signup text. Mention within this first text how often you send the newsletter and what its main topics are.
• Use incentives: You should also include an additional motivation in the welcoming text - the advantage that registration brings for your customers. This can be, for example, a gift, a voucher, a discount code and free shipping on the first order.

Your incentive can look like a 10% discount coupon.

• Choose the appropriate form fields: For legal reasons, only the field "email address" of your leads may be a compulsory field in your newsletter registration form. However, by cleverly placing additional form fields, you create the opportunity to receive further data from your potential customers on a voluntary basis. These can include the first and last name, the date of birth and individual interests and preferences, which support you as senders in only sending relevant newsletter content to your readers. At this point, it is often asked how often your customers want to receive the newsletter, which brands they prefer or which offers, tips and news from your company are interesting for them. Asking for this information allows you to tailor your newsletter shipping to the individual needs and interests of your subscribers. This leads to more openings and clicks within the newsletter. Many inspiring newsletter ideas can be found directly on the website of the email experts at rapidmail.
• Include a checkbox: To legally protect yourself, you should include a newsletter checkbox in your newsletter registration form. By activating this privacy checkbox in the registration form your subscribers give their express consent for the newsletter to be sent.
• Label the call-to-action button: Last but not least - point out clearly in your call-to-action button in the registration form that your interested parties are signing up for your newsletter with this click.

Design a form for the newsletter registration

Now that you have learned about the important content, it is time to design your registration form. With small tricks you will quickly convince your interested parties to sign up for your newsletter.

• Color design: Design your registration form in your company colors so that your customers can relate to your company website. Match the background, font and button colors to your corporate design.
• Clear design: Use a clear and not too playful design to avoid distracting your visitors from the important form content and the incentives described in the form text.
• Corporate Fonts: Next, you should adjust the font of the form. Select the font within the newsletter tool that you have defined in your corporate design guidelines in order to create a coherent overall picture in your company communication.
• Call-to-action: Also adjust the call-to-action button so that it corresponds to your internal design guidelines. You can, for example, change its color, round off the corners or adjust its width as you like.
• Form layout: Determine in what form you want to integrate your form for newsletter registration on your website. Depending on the software provider, you can choose different layouts for this. You set these as form type.
• Form type: Usually you have the choice between a pop-up and a form embedded in the website, for example in the sidebar, in the footer or statically on a landing page. A pop-up, i.e. a form that pops up in the middle of your website after a specified visit time, has the advantage that the user's attention is now completely directed to the newsletter registration. For exactly this reason, too many pop-ups can have a deterrent effect on your customers. Therefore, you should carefully consider beforehand which form type best integrates into the respective user journey.

The example shows a pop-up form for newsletter registration on a website, which you can implement with the form editor of the email marketing tool rapidmail. The users have to deal with the newsletter registration (register or close the window) in order to continue visiting the website.

For pop-ups, you can also determine whether they should be placed centrally, as a banner or in the right sidebar.

• Form image: To draw your interested parties' attention even more strongly to your newsletter registration, you can implement a visual incentive in the form of a photo within the form.

By integrating an image into the newsletter pop-up, the registration form looks more appealing and draws the viewers' attention to itself. The images can be placed at any position in the form.

• A/B testing: Regularly test over longer periods how the registration numbers for your newsletter change depending on a pop-up or a static integration on your website.

What steps does a newsletter registration involve?

When it comes to signing up for your newsletter, creating your registration form is not the only point you should consider. The entire registration process involves various communication steps, each of which must be well thought out and sensibly designed.

• The registration form: Every process of newsletter registration begins with the entry of contact data in your registration form.
• The Double-Opt-In Email: After your customers have entered the registration form, they receive an automated double opt-in email from you. In this they give their express consent to the newsletter receipt again by clicking on a confirmation link. The double opt-in email is the legally safest way to prove the consent of your newsletter recipients if necessary.
• The confirmation page: As soon as your users have clicked on the confirmation link in the double opt-in email, this redirects them to a confirmation page. This informs your leads that their newsletter registration has been successfully completed.
• The welcome mail: You can then send your first welcome message to your newly won subscribers to establish the first personal contact. Also fulfill your promise from the newsletter form in this email and send your subscribers the promised discount code, voucher or the first free e-book.

Your step-by-step guide: How to design your newsletter registration form with rapidmail

So that you also learn practically how to create your newsletter registration form, we'll look at the individual steps using the newsletter tool rapidmail.

1. Give the form a name

Assign a suitable name for your newsletter registration form so that you can assign it correctly at all times. This can be, for example, "Newsletter subscribers start page" or "Newsletter subscribers e-book download".

2. Select the associated recipient list

In the next step, you can select a recipient list where you want to store the contacts you have won.

3. Apply the 1-click design

At rapidmail, you can use a 1-click design for your newsletter registration form. With just one click, the software takes over your company's colors and fonts into the form. It also recognizes your logo, which is built into the header of the form. So you don't have to be technology pros in order to create beautiful and appealing newsletter registration forms - rapidmail will do that for you.

In this video you can see how easily you can create appealing newsletter registration forms using the 1-click design.

4. Adjust the registration form in terms of content

Next you optimize the contents of the registration form:

• Form elements: You can keep or adjust and supplement the form fields for the first and last name as well as the e-mail address, which are preset in rapidmail. At this point you can also add various topic areas, which you can later use for the segmented newsletter dispatch. So you can send personalized birthday messages to your customers through the "birthday" field or differentiate the offers for your newsletter dispatch by specifying the gender, if you sell fashion for example.
• Ready-made components: You can also add ready-made components to your registration form. These have already been pre-designed by rapidmail and can be added to the form with one click. These include, for example, the newsletter consent (checkbox) and the GDPR declaration. With these you show your subscribers already in the registration form that you handle their data responsibly

In rapidmail, you can use ready-made components that have already been pre-designed.

5. Adjust the registration form visually

Now you can adjust the created registration form visually to your imagination. With the intuitive drag-and-drop function, you can easily drag your desired colors and elements to the appropriate places.

With an intuitive modular system you can build a newsletter according to your imagination.

• The logo: You can use the logo recognized by rapidmail's 1-click tool or you can adjust your logo individually.
• The text: Enter your creative welcome text in this field, which will make your potential customers have no choice but to sign up for your newsletter. Be creative and avoid 0815 formulations.

You always see each of your changes in the live preview on your screen.

• The colors: Check the colors of the form, fonts and buttons again so that they match your corporate design.
• The form type: Then with the form type you determine whether your newsletter registration forms should pop up as a pop-up window at a certain point on your website or should be embedded in it.

In the fine tuning of your newsletter design you can implement your design ideas
detailed.

• The form layout: In this step you define where you want to integrate your form. This can either be as a banner, in the sidebar or in the middle.
• The display conditions: If you choose the pop-up form, you can additionally determine from which point in time it should open. Here you can choose between "display immediately", "after 20 seconds" up to "when leaving the website" and many other possibilities.

This is what your finished newsletter registration form could look like.

If you are satisfied with the result, you can integrate your newsletter registration form on your website and win many new newsletter subscribers for your company in the future.