Add sign-up forms to your website experience
Don’t let someone’s attention and interest go to waste. Set up a sign-up form on your website that encourages someone to submit their contact information, usually in exchange for a discount. That way, you can message them on channels like email and text messaging to keep the conversation going and eventually guide them towards conversion.
Klaviyo offers a multitude of options for building sign-up forms. Let’s run through some core best practices to follow each time you build a new form.
Kick off your email and SMS strategy within a form
As you’ve just learned, forms are a great tool for collecting subscribers and learning more about them. In particular, you can gain their marketing consent for receiving emails and text messages. If you’d like to collect both email and SMS consent at once, then you’ll need to create a multi-step form.
Let’s explore the core components of a multi-step form using an example from Hazel Village. Earlier in this course, we featured the brand Hazel Village as an example of a great brand voice. This voice goes beyond just their website page design; rather, it shines through in forms and the communications that follow. Let’s take a peek!
Step 1: Email consent
First, Hazel Village encourages people to sign up for email communications, with the incentive to receive 10% off their first order upon sign-up. In their form copy, they clearly state that by signing up for email, they will begin receiving consistent newsletter information.
Step 2: Text consent
Next, they ask site visitors to sign up for text messages that feature exclusive, text-only deals. They make it clear exactly what someone is signing up for, and if a prospective customer is not comfortable providing their phone number, they don’t have to; instead, they can proceed to the next step.
Step 3: Next steps
After someone fills out their contact information, they receive a unique coupon code in the form's success message, which they can use on their first purchase. They must also confirm their subscription via the channels they signed up for: in this case, email and SMS.
Step 4: Welcome automation
When a subscriber heads to their email inbox or next checks their phone… ta-da! They’ve immediately received a welcome message, letting them know what they can expect from this brand in the future and thanking them for joining this brand community. Hazel Village can continue building a relationship with this subscriber and urge them to shop.
Build your own forms from scratch
Now that you understand best practices for sign-up forms and have seen a successful form by a real brand, let’s walk through the step-by-step process for building your first form. Follow these steps with an online tool, like Klaviyo, to get started!
Build a list to house your new subscribers
A list will contain anyone who has subscribed to your marketing. Create this first, so that you have a place to house the names and contact information for new subscribers after they submit your sign-up form on-site.
Note: As a best practice, you should only have 1 main list of your active profiles for a specific marketing channel (e.g., an email list). This will help you stay organized and consistent in your marketing.
Learn more about lists in Klaviyo.
Collect contact information in an on-site popup
The first sign-up form you should build is a popup, which will appear in the middle of the page and will quickly capture a new site visitor's attention.
When building your form, keep the following best practices in mind:
- Have a clear, direct call-to-action (i.e., signing up for email, SMS, or both).
- Keep your form design (colors, fonts, imagery) consistent with your brand and easy to read; simple and concise is usually best.
- Update the targeting of your form to only appear to those who have not yet signed up for your marketing.
- Update the behavior of your form so that it appears either:
- After a certain amount of time spent on a page.
- After scrolling through a portion of the page.
- Before someone exits the page.
- Test your form on both desktop and mobile devices to ensure it delivers your message effectively and works as expected.
Include fields to collect additional information
While most sign-up forms ask for a site visitor’s contact information, you can also use these tools to ask more specific questions. In doing so, you will access key nuggets of information to better target and personalize your follow-up messages. In Klaviyo, this data is saved to a subscriber’s profile as a profile property.
Properties you could collect upon acquiring a new subscriber are:
- Their birthday or other product-related milestones (e.g., wedding date, due date, etc.)
- Interests or preferences regarding your brand or products.
- Who they are shopping for (e.g., themself, a child, their partner, etc.)
You can use this information to personalize your automated welcome message and further refine future communications that drive purchases or long-term retention.
Add an embedded form to the footer of your website
Embedded forms live on a specific page or section of your website; we often recommend hosting these right in your footer. They are easy for site visitors to access at any time, especially those who come directly with the intention of subscribing. We recommend reserving these embedded forms for email consent specifically.
Having an embedded form, in addition to popups, will increase your list growth opportunities. That way, you convert more interested viewers to subscribers and can propel them forward through your marketing funnel with a series of automated follow-up messages.
Follow up within automations
Create an automated series of welcome messages (we call this a flow in Klaviyo).
When building this automation, use your sign-up form’s list as the trigger. This means that as soon as someone fills out your form and enters that list, they will be sent the first message automatically.
If your sign-up form includes an incentive for signing up (e.g., 10% off their first order), then feature this incentive right away in that first message.
You can then add additional messages spaced out over a week or two to further welcome the new subscriber, feature recommended products or best sellers, and encourage them to complete a first purchase.
Monitor the success of your form strategy
Once you have your list to house new subscribers, a form to collect these subscribers, and an automated welcome message that greets them upon sign-up… what next?
Track the performance of your list growth, sign-up form engagement, and welcome automation conversions. In particular, these are a few core metrics to keep track of and what benchmarks to strive for as you ramp up with this strategy:
- Consistent list growth
List growth, which is primarily fueled by your acquisition efforts and sign-up form setup, is a great indicator of how your overall acquisition strategy is performing. According to AgencyAnalytics, a healthy list growth rate is anywhere between 1% - 3% per month. - Form submit rate
This is the percentage of people who submit your form after viewing it. While the definition of a "good" rate can vary by industry, we generally recommend aiming for 3% or higher. - Welcome series engagement
Indicators of engagement for email include opens, clicks, and low unsubscribe or spam complaint rates. Meanwhile, text message engagement comes in the form of clicks and low unsubscribes. According to Klaviyo’s 2025 email benchmarks report, a typical email welcome series sees an average open rate of 51%, and top-performing welcome emails see up to 15% click rates and 10% placed order rates.
In Klaviyo, you can track how your sign-up and welcome automations compare to other brands in your industry or those that are of the same size and scope as you (your peer group). To access this information, navigate to Klaviyo’s Benchmarks tool.
What's next?
Now that you know how to collect someone's contact information on your website, let's discuss how to actually drive new prospects there. In the next few lessons, we will cover a few key strategies to increase website traffic.