About opt-in forms

What are opt-in forms?

Opt-in forms are subscription forms that your contacts have to fill in if they want to receive messages from you. With Flexmail, you can create, customise, and share such forms. When contacts complete your opt-in form, they will receive a confirmation email. They will need to click on the link in that email to confirm their subscription. Opt-in forms, therefore, always work with a double opt-in.

How do opt-in forms work in Flexmail?

When contacts complete the opt-in form on your website, they are automatically added to your Flexmail database. These contacts end up with the unconfirmed contacts until they confirm their subscription via the confirmation email. They have 72 hours to do so. If they fail to do this within 72 hours, the link will expire, and they will need to subscribe again. If they do confirm their subscription, they will end up with your confirmed contacts, after which you can send them campaigns.

When you send an opt-in form via a Flexmail message, the status of the contacts you send it to is changed into ‘Unconfirmed’ in your Flexmail database. This means that you will no longer be able to send any messages to those contacts, until they click the confirmation link and subscribe to your messages. By doing so, their status is changed into ‘Confirmed’ in your Flexmail database.

You can use opt-in forms to get to know your contacts better by adding various fields and interests. With the various interests your contacts can indicate which information they find interesting.

Subscription form

The subscription form is the ideal place to ask your new contacts for all the important information you need via various fields and interests.

Public profile page

An update link is placed in your email messages by default to enable your contacts to update their profile from any email message. Your contacts are given the opportunity to indicate which type of communication and product they are interested in, and they can subscribe to these or unsubscribe from these.

Unsubscription form

An unsubscription link is placed in your email messages by default. Which page is displayed to the contact during the unsubscription process depends on the public interests you have added in your account.

• When there are public interests in your account, the contact can opt for unsubscribing from one or multiple interests. In this way, your contacts have the option to unsubscribe from certain interests, and not from all your messages. Your contact also has the option to unsubscribe from all communication.
• If there are no public interests in the account, the contacts can confirm they do not want to receive any communication any longer.

Interests

By adding interests to your account, your contacts will be able to indicate what kind of information they want to receive from you. In this way, you can easily ensure you send your target group only the most relevant and interesting content. You can define the interests you want to offer to your contacts via the Interests section. When creating interests, think about the interests your contacts may have and make these public so that they can be viewed by your contacts. The interests may be about all kinds of interesting information you can offer, such as events, promotions, newsletters, or specific products. After you have created several public interests, these are automatically shown to your contacts on their profile page and in the unsubscription form.

Languages

The unsubscription form and the profile page are customised to the contact’s language. Therefore, it is essential that the contact’s language is added in the account correctly.

How to share opt-in forms?

There are two ways of sharing an opt-in form:

• On the details page of your opt-in form, use the button embed form to generate the HTML code that you can copy and paste onto your website
• Your opt-in forms can be linked to your messages through a text link, an image, or a button by using the #opt-in# placeholder..

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