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Transcript of How to Create MailChimp Opt-in Forms – Custom Confirmation Pages

So this is the next thing that we need to talk about. We’ll click “Sign me up”. Now, as you can see, this is fine, but that’s really – it’s not on my site so it’s not self-hosted and it’s not very well branded, to say the least.

First thing I want to do is customize some pages. And so I don’t want to confuse you, I’ve got two pages open right now. What we want to do is let’s go to a new page and create the thank-you that we saw before, when we clicked on the button. So let’s say “Thanks for signing up”.

And, just so you know, MailChimp also, in their documentation, refers to this first thank-you page as the thank-you page. And then I’ll get an email very soon and when you click on the link in that email, you’ll see another page and that’s called the confirmation page. And so that’s a name that I’m going to remember.

Now we just need to write a little bit of copy. Hey there. So this is what I wrote. “In a moment or two you’ll get an email that will ask you to confirm your request to join our list. Click the big blue button on that email and you’ll be subscribed. Sorry for the extra step, but this helps us control spam”. This could have a bit more personality. So now it has a little bit more personality.

And notice I wrote these, each sentence, on one line. That makes them easier to read and that’s really important.

So we’re going to click “Publish’. And we’re going to “View page”. And we’re not viewing page, really, because we care so much what it looks like. What we want to do is copy that, that URL. And then we’re going to go over to this and we’re going to change the settings so that our sign-up form sends people to the right page.

And so let’s go to “General forms” again. And here where it says “Forms and response emails”, right there. “Signup ‘thank you’ page”. We’re going to paste that in here. Let you see the whole thing. Click “Save”. That’s great. And so the next one we want to do is the opt-in “Confirmation ‘thank you’ page”. I’m going to leave that as it is for right now and go to – “Thanks for signing up”. And we’re now going to create another new page and this is the email confirmation page. And we’ll say in the title “You’re confirmed!”. We’re going to try and trigger the URL. I’m hoping I could get it to populate here, but – here it is.

And so what we want to do is just make this really simple and say “email confirmation”. And that way MailChimps language lines up with our language and it just helps while you’re zooming through pages, so you don’t get confused. “Thanks for taking that extra step”. And we’ve used enough exclamation parts. And we’re going to do a new line. “You’re subscribed”. Now we’re going to click “Publish” and view.

One thing you should know is that if you were doing an incentive, which we’re all going to be doing, you would want to have this be the download page. Let’s keep it simple for you. I could add it right now and if you have your incentive right now, or you even have a rough draft of it, that will save you work later because you won’t have to go and edit your sign-up opt-in boxes, but it’s really not that hard and I wanted to get you started before you took three days to add it in. So it’s up to you.

Some people even put in a placeholder of their draft and that gives you a big incentive to finish your opt-in. So if you want to make sure that you don’t wimp out and not finish your incentive, put your draft of it or your notes for it in here right now as the final opt-in. And that way you will know that in three days, if you haven’t finished your incentive, people are going to be seeing your ugly draft and that’s embarrassing. And so that can be a really good way to push you. It’s kind of like in the same sense that there’s no better way to get ready for a webinar than to announce the date like thirty days out, because then you’re committed, it’s out in the world.

But I’m going to leave that alone for right now and just click “Publish’. And now we’re going to do the same thing, we’re going to “View Page” and we’re going to copy this URL into the form. And then we’ve got one more step after that. “View Page”.

And here’s my email confirmation page. This is another great place to include a lot more information. If you’re on the free program you don’t get access to auto-responders and so that means you can’t really send a welcome email in a nice automated way. And so, if you’re on the free plan, this page can kind of become your default welcome page. So you would want to include, basically, the five minute walkthrough of everything that’s on your site. Maybe your three columns here, each one with an image and a little teaser copy for your three most popular articles. This would be where your, kind of your dummy welcome page would be.

So we’ve got our email confirmation, let’s go back and try to stay focused on finishing this. Click “Save”. We’re on the “Confirmation ‘thank you’” and so that’s great. It says “Saved”, which is good. Now we’ve got one more thing to do, this “Opt-in confirmation email”. This is all good. What we want is here. We would like to say something a little bit more engaging than “Please confirm subscription”. “Hey”. Okay. So that’s a closer version of snazzy, popping with personality. It’s big, I think I would probably resize this. And I do want Verdana. And I’m worried I’m not going to get – yeah, it has to all be selected. So let’s try that. Alright, so that’ll do. I can remove this. Hopefully that will help. And so this is good as I’m going to get it, for right now.

The next thing to do is to go back over to one of the pages and try this out  again. You know, it’s kind of redundant to do the test. And so let’s do “Pam” at this address. That’s why it’s handy to have like three or four different email address while you’re setting all this up because that way you can see it action. So “Sign me up”. And, rats, I’m already on that. So we’re going to have to be creative and go back and think of an email address that I have not used before. So let’s see if Pam at – that looks good.

See? So that’s the right page. And I’m going to go into that email client and find the confirmation email. Hold on. So here I am, in this email inbox. And I’ve got “Start A Bakery: Please Confirm Subscription”. Looks pretty good, actually. And I’m going to click “Yes, subscribe me to this list”. And there it is, I’m confirmed.

That is the basic version of getting this done. The thing that we do, because we want to optimize our opt-ins, is we’ve got, you know, one basic opt-in box working. We can dress that up later. The next thing I want to do is to add one to the bottom, to the footer, of every page.