How the Form Builder Works

The foundation of a great email or SMS marketing plan is an audience of contacts who want to hear from you and engage with your brand. If you don't have a lot of contacts yet, Mailchimp can help you build a signup form to grow your audience.

To get started, you'll use the form builder to design your Mailchimp signup form and signup responses. Then you'll be ready to share your form across all your online channels and watch your audience grow.

In this article, you'll learn how the form builder works.

About the form builder

The form builder is a Mailchimp tool that you can access from your audience dashboard. You'll use it to design, build, translate, and share your signup form.

You can also use the form builder to edit other emails and messages that are part of the signup process, like the confirmation thank you page and Final Welcome Email. These forms and emails guide your prospects, customers, clients, and friends through the process of becoming engaged subscribers.

How to use the form builder

The form builder is made of 3 main tabs, Build it, Design it, and Translate it, which you'll use to customize all your forms, signups, and miscellaneous landing pages. Here's a brief overview of how things work.

The Build it tab

The Build it tab is where you'll add structure and content to your signup form and responses. Use the Build it tab of the form builder to add or remove audience fields, and change field settings.

Manage Audience and Signup Form Fields

Removing a field from your signup form will also remove that field's data from your audience, so be careful when you delete.

The Design It Tab

The Design it tab is where you'll edit the style, color, font, and graphics of your signup form and response emails. You can also edit the page and body layout of your signup form and response emails here.

Any design changes you make here, like changing background color or font, will be inherited by all your other pages and email or SMS responses. This helps build brand consistency for all the pages your subscribers will interact with, and saves you some time.

The Translate it tab

The Translate it tab is where you'll translate your signup form and response emails, or customize default text. Mailchimp supports more than 50 languages.

If you don't need to translate anything, you can still use this tab to modify default text on form buttons or in error messages.

Translate Signup Forms and Emails

Share your form

After you design your signup form, you can share it across all your online channels. Just copy your Signup Form URL in the form builder, and share it anywhere you want!

Share Your Signup Form

What you can edit with the form builder

The editable items appear in four categories in the Forms and response emails drop-down menu: Subscribe, Unsubscribe, Update Profile, and Other Bits.

Subscribe

The Subscribe section shows items you can customize as a part of your audience’s subscription process. The items in this section will vary based on which opt-in method you use with your audience. If you use double opt-in, which requires contacts to verify their email address, you'll see the signup thank you page and opt-in confirmation email, which you can also customize.

• Signup form
  The basic signup form for your audience.
• Signup form with alerts
  Customizable error messages for your signup form that will display if people enter data incorrectly.
• reCAPTCHA confirmation
  The reCAPTCHA page that appears after someone enters their information into your signup form.
• Confirmation thank you page
  A webpage that thanks new subscribers for signing up, and confirms your audience address and default information.
• Final welcome email
  An optional email that you can turn on to welcome your new subscribers.

Unsubscribe

The items in this section show you what your contacts will see when they unsubscribe from your email marketing.

• Unsubscribe form
  If someone clicks an unsubscribe link in your campaign archive, we’ll prompt them to enter and submit their email address to this form.
• Unsubscribe success page
  A webpage that confirms a successful unsubscribe.
• Goodbye email
  An optional confirmation you can use to say goodbye to unsubscribers.

Update Profile

The items in the Update Profile section show you what contacts will see when they request to update their profile information like their email address, group preferences, or audience information.

• Profile update email
  A confirmation email sent to subscribers who’ve filled out the update profile form.
• Profile update email sent
  A static webpage that confirms that Mailchimp sent the profile update email.
• Update profile form
  The form your subscribers can use to update their information. Can be linked in emails using the *|UPDATE_PROFILE|* merge tag. If you publish a preferences center for your audience, it will replace the update profile form and you won’t be able to edit it from here.
• Sample update profile form
  A form contacts will see when attempting to update their profile through a test email or archive page.
• Update profile thank you page
  A webpage that confirms a successfully updated profile.

Other bits

This section displays miscellaneous forms and pages connected to your audience.

• Forward to a friend form
  A form subscribers will see when they click a Forward to Friend link in your email.
• About your list
  A static information page for your audience that contains your audience details and permission reminder. Can be linked in emails using the |ABOUT_LIST| merge tag.
• Campaign archive page
  A shareable archive page containing links to the 20 most recent emails sent to your audience.
• Survey landing page
  The landing page subscribers will see when they vote in a survey you’ve created with the survey merge tag.
• Automation landing Page
  This page shows when subscribers opt in or out of an automation series that uses join or leave automation merge tags.

Some parts of your signup forms and response emails are linked to audience information and can’t be edited in the form builder. To edit your audience name, go to your audience defaults. To update the website, physical address, or permission reminder for your audience, you’ll need to update Required Footer Content in your audience settings.

What's next?

Let's do this! Follow along with our step-by-step tutorial to create your own signup form in the form builder.

Create a Hosted Signup Form