Lessons

Lesson Info

Creating Forms

let's create a new form because we have a list, which is great, but no one is on it. So we need to find a way to get people onto the list. I'm going to click into lists. Now we can see the previous list that we create is right here, new newsletter, subscriber Chicago and there's a little button that allows you to create a sign up form and there's multiple ways to do it. I'm going to show you a couple. The first is an actual form builder. So I'm gonna select that and in here, Super great. You can just choose different fields, make them required or optional for the users. The trick when setting up a form is to select the proper amount of fields for the user type. What I mean by that some users are very hesitant about giving out their information where others feel a little more comfortable with it. So what you need to consider is the user's comfort level. And in addition to that, you need to consider what they're getting in return. Email marketing in general is bargaining with user when t...

hey give their email address to you. They generally have a value set in their mind for what they're willing to give it away for. So primary examples are like an event. If they get access to an event, then it's worth giving their email address. Content downloads are very similar like e books, if they know that they're going to get an e book, they're more willing to give their email address. So here we have email address, first name, last name, whole address and phone number might be a little much to ask the user for. But again, it depends on what they're getting in return. So that's all up to you. There's way too many situations and scenarios for us to look through this. All right now. But let's go back to the functionality because the building part is done now, what does the design actually look like? This is where you can type in your text code or you can just select different color options. It's a very easy builder because mail chimp knows that you don't have too much time and you may not be a designer yourself. So they make it as easy as possible. Great. So this is how we create a form. Now. We actually need to take the form and put it somewhere. So I'm going to go back actually and show you the embedded a form functionality. If we choose this, for example, we are able to see a line of code right here, copy and paste on your site if you have your own website and it's not on a website, builder. Usually you either have access yourself as a marketer or you have access to the developer who has access to the code. Very meta but someone needs direct access to the code for your clients. Usually this means they've already given you permissions to access the website or they've given you an introduction to a developer and you can just forward this along what I like doing. And I think this is where a lot of your clients may lie. They will have what's called a website builder, such as Squarespace or Wix or Wordpress. What's great about these website builders is that they have pre built integrations with a lot of these tools and they know the common use cases. So I'm showing you my personal website which is squarespace and we are going to go in better form. It's going to go to my blog. Sorry, you are staring at my face for a little bit. So here you can see already have a form embedded. It's going to go edit that and I'm gonna delete it. Great. So we're all blank right now and now when I repast the code that we just got from our mail chimp dashboard and see the actual form is populated and we had to apply, I'm going to save, then I'm going to go to my content site and there's a form is super duper easy. So now every single time someone fills out this form and hit sign up, they will be immediately added into our new list. So the connections already made and that's why this code and this snippet is absolutely necessary to be copy and pasted as is otherwise it's going to break. So now we are going to operate a little bit outside of that top navigation bar. We created the list, which is still absolutely necessary for everything else. And now we want to create a campaign campaigns allow you to have multiple options such as emails, advertisements, landing pages, postcards and sign up forms. Again, you can access a lot of these same features across multiple parts of the actual dashboard. I want to create a landing page. This is a fairly new feature for male chimp, which is great. Um and one thing you should know and I think I've said this before is that male chimp is great for beginners and organizations that have moderate to small list sizes as well as moderate to small send sizes. And eventually like all email marketers, you'll have to upgrade to a larger tool, but um it's going to be just fine because things like landing page creation also exist in those larger tools and it'll be something that you need to assess as you go along. Each client depending on their size will have different needs. Unfortunately, that's just the situation that we're in as email marketers and that's how the email marketing industry works. But there's really cool tools out there for you to graduate into right now though, we will look at this male chimp landing page design, I'm gonna call it fiber test again actually, I'm going to say for awesome people, which is all you and now we select a list. This is why it's so important to set up the lists first because now as we create anything in the platform, we will be required to associated with a specific list now, choose newsletter and we'll begin great awesome stuff going on here because we have so many different options. So right now, as I'm hovering over, it actually shows different boxes from now on. We will refer to these as modules. So the very top I'm hovering module one, module two, module three, module four. And this is kind of how they think about landing pages. And I really agree with it because landing pages are not supposed to be these gigantic experiences for your users. Landing pages are specific to a user journey, you know, where they're coming from, you know, where you want them to get to. So this is essentially just a very small part of getting them from Point A to let's say point C. Because this is point B here, so a good landing page is brief and to the point and doesn't have a lot of options for them to do things. Conversely, the real opposite of a landing page is your homepage homepage oftentimes has the lowest conversion rate because it's the entryway to a brand has tons of options. They can click on, really anything that they want and that homepage is necessary, but it is not there for users to convert like a landing page right here. So what you need to do first and foremost, knowing that it has a very specific objective here is collecting email addresses. How will you then convince the user to give you their email address the very top I'm going to add in a logo of a few design files already uploaded, so I'm going to choose one of them. This is an actual logo and it's there if you ever want, you can also edit the image if you're a designer, this is not a very robust design tool and it doesn't need to be. Again, everything in male chimp is meant to get to the campaign deployment as quickly as possible with the fewest mistakes. So you can do things like vignettes, you can do overlays at stickers and so forth. I'm just going to keep it as is because um it's something that we've pre designed at IBM Next, a big enticing headline goes here, think of it this way the user lands on the page and then you need them to one. Just not leave immediately. So because this landing page is specific to part of the user journey, you should know where they're coming from and then remind them why they're here. So the default text says a big enticing headline goes here in this sense, remind them why they are here, such as Welcome to our sales page. Welcome to our back to school page. Welcome to the thing Next, the body text here. So assuming that they love your headline and they love your logo. They'll read a little bit more. I actually really like using bullet points in this situation because again, we're going right to the point. So if we are using bullet points we can use this handy dandy editor and it looks like most editors where you have a bullet point little tool. I'm hovering over it right now. I'm selecting it so I'm using value Prop one, value, prop two and value prop three such as best customers, most data, omni channel of course elaborate however you want. I'm just for the sake of time. I am just for the sake of time being a little brief and then you have the form so we can form creation exists in so many different places. And this is the third time we've actually seen an option to create a form. I'm gonna leave it as is just because I think it looks fine. We are asking an email address and this is a page we want to do before we exit them is look at the preview. So if they click preview, this is what the user will see. It is very minimalist but it's kind of what we want. This is the mobile version. Just so you know, it's not going to break if you want to get fancier. There are so many options on the side here such as dividers and all I have to do is drag and drop these, we can make it very, very strong divider, we can add additional images. So I'm navigating away from my initial recommendations for a landing page but that's just to show you the functionality. Now we have this picture of my dog, anything that you want preview again, we can see how the changes are affected. But while we're here, let me explain why this is not a good landing page. There's something called above the fold. This actually originated from newspapers because when you buy a newspaper, half of the information is folded and not on the front page in that sense, landing pages use the same language because above the fold means it's all of the information that the user sees without them scrolling down. And as I scroll down that's below the fold. Best practice for creating a landing page actually has at least part of the form information above the fold so they know what to do. Otherwise when they land here it looks like maybe I should scroll down to see an image but that's about it. Exit out. Stephen close every single time someone signs up using this landing page, they will automatically be put into this list. And that's why you selected it. Now we can add your realm. I'm gonna call this five test again. Sorry for the redundancy and save all right at a page. Title is also good for search engine optimization purposes. It's eve great. I'm going to publish it and now this page is live. Um we can link to it from whatever you want. But if anyone actually uses this U. R. L. They will go to this page by the time you take this course, I will probably have unpublished this page because it's not a great representation of my personal brand or IBM. So just letting you know, um if you go to the CRL and it's broken, it's not because the functionality does not work, it's just because probably making a better landing page at this point. Great. That is how you create atlantic page.