Legacy: About opt-in forms
If your account already works with interests instead of with interest labels and preferences, you can find more information here.
What are opt-in forms?
Opt-in forms are subscription forms that your contacts must fill in if they want to receive messages from you. With Flexmail, you can create, customise, manage and share such forms. When a contact fills in your opt-in form, they will receive a confirmation email. They will need to click on the link in that email within 72 hours to confirm their subscription. This is called double opt-in.
How do opt-in forms work in Flexmail?
When you send an opt-in form through a Flexmail message, the status of the contacts you send it to will be changed to inactive in your Flexmail database. This means that you will no longer be able to send any messages to those contacts, until they click on the confirmation link and subscribe to your messages. By doing so, their status would be changed to active in your Flexmail database.
You can use opt-in forms to get to know your contacts better by adding different fields and preferences. With the different fields you can ask for some personal information. With different preferences your contacts will be able to indicate which information they find interesting. On the second page of creating an opt-in form you can indicate which fields and preferences will be present in the different pages and messages your contacts will see during the opt-in process.
Subscription form
The subscription form is the first step of the opt-in process. This is the place to ask for all the important information you need from your contacts via different fields and preferences.
Confirmation email
After submitting the subscription form, your contacts will receive a confirmation email where they can confirm the subscription within 72 hours. Here you can ask for additional information via fields and preferences.
Screen after confirmation
This is the screen your contacts will see after they confirm their subscription. This will reassure them that everything with their subscription is ready and in order.
Update form
By default, an update link will be placed in your email messages. This will enable your contacts to update their profile from within every email message. You can indicate the fields and preferences they would be able to change.
Screen after update
This is the screen your contacts will see after they submit an update form. This will reassure them that their information has been successfully updated.
Unsubscription form
By default, an unsubscription link will be placed in your email messages. You can add preferences to the unsubscription form. That way, your contacts have the option to unsubscribe just from certain preferences, not from all your messages.
You can further customise the messages and pages on the third step creating your opt-in form.
Why must opt-ins be confirmed within 72 hours?
Endlessly keeping email addresses of which the opt-in has never been confirmed, is inconsistent with these principles.
What will happen after 72 hours?
To help you manage your data in the best way possible, any unconfirmed email addresses will be deleted automatically after 72 hours. The opt-in link in the confirmation email will no longer work from that moment on. If a contact wants to confirm his registration after this time frame he will first need to subscribe through the opt-in form again.
In the confirmation email, include a link to the subscription page on your website so that contacts can easily subscribe again when the opt-in link no longer works.
Preferences
By adding preferences to your opt-in form, your contacts will be able to indicate what kind of information they would like to receive from you. That way you can easily make sure to send out only the most relevant and interesting content to your audience. You can define the preferences that you can offer to your contacts via the Preference Center. When creating preferences, think about what preferences your contacts may have. The preferences could be about all kinds of interesting information you can offer, e.g. events, promotions, newsletters, ... After you have created some preferences, you can indicate to include them in the opt-in form while creating the form.
How to share opt-in forms?
There are two ways of sharing an opt-in form:
- In the last step of creating your opt-in form Flexmail generates an HTML code that you can copy and paste on 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.
When you send a Flexmail message containing an opt-in form to contacts in a segment, you need to link the opt-in form to that segment first. If you don't link the desired opt-in form to a segment and you send an opt-in campaign to that segment, the contacts in it will receive the default opt-in form.