ActiveCampaign Feature Demo: Forms [2024]

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Using forms in ActiveCampaign is an effective way to enhance your marketing strategy and to streamline customer engagement. Forms are vital touchpoints, allowing you to capture valuable information from potential leads and existing customers. With custom fields, you can tailor forms to meet your specific business needs, ensuring you gather the data that matters most.

Not only do forms facilitate seamless data collection, but they also help automate your marketing processes. Integrating forms with your email campaigns and CRM allows you to trigger targeted follow-ups, segment your audience, and nurture leads more effectively. This saves you time and ensures a personalized experience for your audience. Whether you're looking to grow your email list, gather feedback, or drive conversions, leveraging forms in ActiveCampaign can significantly elevate your marketing efforts and help you build lasting relationships with your customers.

Let's dive in further. There are five types of forms in ActiveCampaign. The inline form is the most commonly used and versatile type. It's embedded directly into your web page, and you can gather contact data using those custom fields. Floating bar forms allow you to headline offers to visitors on the pages they land on. You can position the bar at the top or bottom of the page and collect a contact's name and email.

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Similarly, the floating box can be used for quick and easy signups, but it's more dynamic as it can be positioned to the right or left on your screen. They can pop up as you scroll or appear once your visitor lands on the page. Next, the modal popup, intended to entice quick conversions. This form is a popup that will appear on top of your web page content and can collect name, email, and phone number.

Lastly is the Preference Center, a secure place where contacts can update their consent and communication preferences anytime. Collecting your contacts' communication preferences enhances the quality of your data and segmentation, helping to personalize your customer journey. You always want to provide an option for customers to select the emails that they want to receive. This way, they'll be more engaged and you won't risk your sender reputation.

Now that we understand the types of forms available in ActiveCampaign, let's discuss a few best practices to keep in mind before learning how to build a form in the platform. Generally, we recommend keeping your forms short and sweet, thinking about the user experience and making them as easy as possible to fill out.

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It's important to leverage forms throughout the customer journey. Keeping in mind where contacts are in the customer journey when they find and fill out that form will help you determine what information you need to ask for. If you use your forms to subscribe contacts to your list, it's a best practice to configure double opt-in. Double opt-in means that after your contacts submit your form, they'll receive a confirmation email asking them to confirm their subscription to your list. This ensures contacts are intentionally subscribing to your list and that the information they provide is accurate.

We recommend using ActiveCampaign forms as much as possible and using a strategic redirect to automatically send contacts to your website as soon as they hit submit. This way, you're continually tracking your contacts and renewing your ability to collect valuable site tracking data. Finally, it's important to consider your branding and design when building forms so that each touchpoint with a contact builds brand awareness.

With that being said, let's get into the platform. To find forms, you'll head to Website in your main navigation, and from there, you are automatically directed to the Forms dashboard. For this video, we'll be using a business use case called Boon's Bandanas, an e-commerce business that sells dog products and partners with animal shelters for community events.

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In this example, we'll look at how easy it is to build a form for animal shelters interested in partnering with Boon's Bandanas. To get started, click Create New Form in the top right corner. We'll name the form according to its use, "Animal Shelter Partners Inquiry," then select the Form Style and Form Actions.

Form actions determine what will happen automatically when someone submits the form. Contacts can be subscribed to a list, a tag can be added, the contact can be added to a deal in the CRM, and you can email the form submission results to yourself or someone on your team. In this case, contacts will be subscribed to the Animal Shelter Partners list.

Once you select Create Form, you'll be taken to the builder where you can customize the basic form template provided using the drag and drop elements in the right-side toolbar. Starting with the given header, by clicking, you can edit the text on the right-side panel. Then you can do the same with the descriptive message. You are given the full name and email field. Email will always be required as it is the unique identifier of a contact in ActiveCampaign.

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But in this case, I will collect first name and last name as separate fields so that in the future, I can easily personalize my campaigns with the first name personalization tag. From the standard ActiveCampaign fields, I'll also drag over the phone number field, the image block, and the CAPTCHA.

To add an image to your form, click on the block and select the image icon. This will take you to the Content Manager where you can choose from previously uploaded images and files or upload a new file here. Scrolling down, you can select from the custom fields you created in your account. You can customize the field header and default text by clicking on the field. Finally, you can select the button to customize the text on the right side panel.

Moving from the Fields tab to Style, you can make sure that your form aligns with your branding and website or landing page. You can edit the form background or add a page background color. You can add a border by choosing a color, thickness, and style. You can adjust the form padding and corner radius here as well. Scrolling down, you can adjust the font style and color.

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Lastly, you'll be able to edit the button style. Next, under Options, you'll find the Form settings. Here, you can edit and preview the thank you message that appears after the form submission. Or to follow our best practices, you can select Open URL from the dropdown to add your website URL. Now, contacts will automatically redirect to your website.

Under Form Actions, you can add or configure the form actions that were previously selected. You can adjust your double opt-in settings by clicking the Edit pencil icon next to Subscribe to a List. Once your form is ready to go, click on Integrate in the top right corner.

You can embed your form on your website using these simple or full embed codes. We recommend using the simple embed code as it is dynamic and will reflect any updates made to the form. You can also access a direct link to the form, which is great to include in campaigns or social media to drive traffic. Finally, you can explore the steps to integrate your form on WordPress or Facebook.

Utilizing forms in ActiveCampaign is strategic for boosting your marketing initiatives and fostering stronger customer connections. Whether you aim to expand your email list, gather insights, or boost conversions, harnessing the power of ActiveCampaign forms will elevate your marketing efforts and build meaningful, lasting relationships with your audience.

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