About Signup Form Options

Signup forms are a powerful way to extend the reach of your email marketing and grow your audience. Mailchimp offers a number of options to attract subscribers on your website, social channels, and other platforms.

In this article, you'll learn about Mailchimp's signup form options so you can choose which type of form is best for you.

Signup form types

Here's an overview of Mailchimp's available signup form types.

Forms for sharing

Forms for your website

*Create as many forms as needed per audience to personalize your marketing and grow your audience.

Form integrations and plugins

Form API

About the signup process

Mailchimp audiences are single opt-in by default. That means, each time someone submits your signup form, we'll immediately add them to your Mailchimp audience as a subscribed contact. Single opt-in makes it easier for people to join your audience.

We also offer the double opt-in signup method, which requires email verification. If you've received a high volume of bounces, unsubscribes, or complaints, double opt-in is recommended.

A subscribed contact is associated with their original signup source. If an existing subscriber attempts to sign up for your audience again with a different type of form, their original signup source and contact profile will stay the same.

You can change the opt-in settings for an audience at any time. If you want to update the opt-in method for an individual audience, change the form settings. If you have multiple audiences, you can make global changes on your Opt-In Settings page.

To learn more about the signup process, check out these articles.

Single Opt-in vs. Double Opt-in
About Double Opt-in
About Subscriber Engagement

If your primary contact address is in the European Union, some of your audiences may be double opt-in by default. Find out which method you’re using on the Opt-In Settings page.

About GDPR

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a privacy law that regulates how organizations treat or use the personal data of people located in the EU. You can design signup forms that are consistent with your brand and compliant with the GDPR requirements.

Collect Consent with GDPR Forms

About reCAPTCHA

To help protect your audience from spambots, Google reCAPTCHA is required for our hosted signup forms. You can also choose to enable this option on other form types in Mailchimp.

About reCAPTCHA for Signup Forms

Forms for sharing

We offer shareable form options that are published and maintained on our servers.

Regular hosted form

We automatically generate an easy-to-use, shareable signup form for each audience. Customize the form and share the URL on your website, or with potential subscribers across your digital channels. Use this form if you want to work with HTML code.

Create a Hosted Signup Form
How the Form Builder Works
Share Your Signup Form

Advanced hosted form

Accounts on a paid plan can use custom code with their hosted form in advanced form mode. This feature is recommended for users familiar with custom coding and HTML.

Advanced Form Customization

Landing page signup form

Design a shareable landing page to collect new contacts as part of a specific marketing goal. For example, boost your audience growth by collecting addresses in exchange for a free download or other limited-time offer.

Use the Signup Form content block to create a simple form with the email address field from your audience. Then, choose to include more fields from your hosted form as needed.

Create a Landing Page
Use Signup Form Content Blocks

Forms for your website

If you have a Mailchimp website, you can add a signup form to any page with the Signup Form content block or the pop-up signup form. If you built your website with another service, use the pop-up signup form or the embedded signup form.

Embedded form

With our embedded forms, you choose the overall design of the form, and we give you the code to use. Enable and disable form fields, rearrange the field order, use custom display names, and add optional help text to create a custom signup experience for your website. If you're comfortable with HTML, edit the form code further to fit your organization's style and brand.

Add an Embedded Signup Form to Your Website

Pop-up form

This form appears inside a pop-up on your website, based on the criteria you set. Create and design the form in Mailchimp, then add it to your Mailchimp website or another platform.

Add a Pop-up Signup Form to Your Website

Form integrations and plugins

If you need to set up your form through an integrated platform, check out our integration and plugin options. Here are some resources that can help you get started.

• Facebook
  Add Subscribers with Zapier's Facebook Lead Ads
• WordPress
  Connect or Disconnect List Subscribe for WordPress
• Squarespace
  Using Mailchimp with Squarespace
• Other integrations
  Mailchimp Integrations Directory: Signup Forms

Form API

For complete control over your signup form process and opt-in settings, code your signup form from the ground up and pass subscriber information back to Mailchimp through our API.

This is an advanced feature and is recommended for users familiar with custom coding. Contact your developer, or hire a Mailchimp Expert if you need assistance.

Manage Mailchimp Subscribers with the API
CSS Hooks for Customizing Forms

Next steps

Not sure what form is right for you? Try a few to test them out.

After you set them up, wait a couple of weeks and measure the performance of each form. To do this, create an audience segment by signup source, and see which form generates the most subscribers.