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Advanced Form Customization

by Intuit•7• Updated 3 months ago

Use advanced mode to customize Mailchimp-hosted signup forms. You can send recipients to your brand of thank you pages and error messages. Add hidden fields to gather data to segment your audience.

In this article, we’ll show you how to switch to advanced mode, and tell you which forms you can edit. We'll show you how to redirect people to your thank you pages and error messages, and how to add hidden fields to your custom form.

Before you start

Here are some things to know before you begin this process.

  • This feature is included with the Standard plan or higher.
  • This is an advanced feature. We recommend it for people who are familiar with custom coding. Contact your developer or hire a Mailchimp Expert if you need help.

Switch to advanced mode

To access advanced mode, follow these steps.

  1. Click Forms, then click Other forms.
  2. Scroll to the Form builder tile, then click Manage forms.
  3. On the Forms builder page, scroll to the end of the page and click advanced mode.
  4. In the Are you sure? pop-up modal, click Delete to confirm that you want to start from scratch on a new advanced form.

If you use advanced mode to custom code your forms, use the Audience Settings page to send a final welcome email, send an unsubscribe confirmation email, and let subscribers pick an email format.

You can customize most Mailchimp audience management forms, emails, and confirmation screens.

  • Signup form
  • Signup thank you page
  • Opt-in confirmation email
  • Confirmation thank you page
  • Final welcome email
  • Update profile form
  • Update profile thank you page
  • Unsubscribe form
  • Unsubscribe confirmation page
  • Goodbye email
  • Campaign archive page
  • Survey landing page

When you customize, make sure you don't alter the unique Form tags, field names, and merge tags, because they're connected to the audience and need to stay the same. The following image shows highlighted areas of what you can and shouldn't edit.

HTML sample.

Custom thank you pages

You can set up a meta redirect to send people to custom thank you pages on your website. For more information about thank you pages, check out Design and Host Your Own "Thank You" Pages.

Here's the meta redirect code you'll want to use. Make sure to replace http://www.yourwebsite.com/ with the URL you want to redirect to.

<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;URL=http://www.yourwebsite.com/"/>

Here's how to set up the meta redirect.

  1. Click Forms, then click Other forms.
  2. Scroll to the Form builder tile, then click Manage forms.
  3. If you’ve already set up an advanced form, the page should display links to your code views.

    If that's not the case, scroll to the end of the page and click advanced mode. In the Are you sure? pop-up modal, click Delete.
  4. Click the link for the Signup thank you page or the Confirmation thank you page.
  5. Copy the meta redirect and paste it in the <head> section of the thank you page's code.
  6. Click Save Changes.

Custom signup form error messaging

If you prefer to handle signup form errors on your own instead of having Mailchimp manage them, use a meta redirect to pass signup form data back to your domain using this code. 

<meta http-equiv="Refresh" content="0;url=http://www.domain.com/newsletter.phtml?EMAIL="*|EMAIL|*"&FNAME="*|FNAME|*"&LNAME="*|LNAME|*"">

The URL should be a full path to your newsletter subscriber page. To include the audience variables' names, navigate to your audience settings and view the fields and associated merge tags.

To complete this process, you'll need to know how to process GET variables in your site and make sure your audience ID is a part of any form you submit back to our domain.

Instead of using a meta redirect, you could also use our API. You'll still most likely want to add a meta redirect on the final confirmation screen to make the sign-up process feel totally seamless to your subscribers.

Hide fields in advanced forms

To add a hidden field to your advanced form code, follow these steps. For more information about adding hidden fields, check out Add Hidden Fields to a Signup Form.

  1. Click Forms, then click Other forms.
  2. Scroll to the Form builder tile, then click Manage forms.
  3. If you've already set up an advanced form, the page should display links to your code views.

    If that's not the case, scroll to the end of the page and click advanced mode. In the Are you sure? pop-up modal, click Delete.
  4. Add an entry for your new field, as you normally would.
  5. For the input type element, change the value to " hidden."
<input type="hidden" name="FNAME" value="*|FNAME|*">
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