Send website signups to your email list

Kite separates the forms where people asked for email from the forms where they didn't. A newsletter box, a waitlist form, and a webinar registration are all requests to hear from you. A contact form or a demo request usually isn't, and adding those people to your marketing list sends them email they never asked for.

So Kite connects forms one at a time by default. It gives each form on your site its own short name and edits the form so every submission carries it. That lets each form go to its own audience with its own tags. For example, a software company might connect three forms:

• The newsletter box in the footer goes to the main audience, tagged "newsletter."
• The waitlist form on a new product page goes to the same audience, tagged "waitlist" and the product's name.
• The webinar registration page goes to the same audience, tagged with the webinar's month.

The demo request form stays off the list and keeps emailing the sales team.

On a small site where every form really is a signup form, Kite can send all of them to one audience instead. It only does that after you confirm that none of the forms is a plain contact form. A form with its own setting always uses that setting rather than the site-wide one.

Kite can add a signup form to any page of the website it hosts for you. You might ask for a newsletter box at the end of every blog post, a waitlist form on a product page, or a pop-up that appears when a visitor is about to leave. Kite writes the copy, designs the form to match your site, and gives it the fields you need, such as an email address and a first name.

A new form is a change to your site, so it waits as an unpublished change until you look at the preview and publish it. Kite connects the form to your Mailchimp audience as part of the same work, so it starts feeding your list the day it goes live.

Kite checks the audience you name against the audiences in your connected Mailchimp account before it saves anything. You can use the audience's name as it appears in Mailchimp. If nothing matches, Kite tells you the names of the audiences it found so you can pick the right one. If two audiences share a name, it asks for the audience ID rather than guessing. Kite also reads whether the audience uses double opt-in, because that decides how new people are added.

Each form can carry up to ten tags. Tags are the answer to "where did this person come from?" and they decide what happens next. A Mailchimp customer journey can start when a tag is added, and Kite applies tags in a way that lets those journeys start. That means a webinar registrant can get the reminder emails while a newsletter subscriber gets the welcome email, without anyone sorting them by hand. If you're not sure which tags to use, Kite suggests a set based on your forms and the emails you already send from Mailchimp.

Every submission from a connected form reaches your Mailchimp audience within moments, through your own Mailchimp connection. Kite adds the person by email address, so someone who's already in the audience gets their existing record updated rather than a second copy. When the form asks for a first or last name, Kite fills in the audience's first name and last name fields. If your audience doesn't have those fields, Kite still adds the person with their email address. Then it applies the form's tags.

You keep getting the notification email for every submission, just as you did before Mailchimp was connected. Kite queues the Mailchimp step before it sends that email, so a problem with one never loses the other. If Mailchimp has a brief outage, Kite tries again a few times before giving up on that submission.

Kite also keeps your audience clean. When the same address submits the same form twice within ten minutes, Kite treats it as a double click and adds the person once. It also caps each site at 300 signups an hour, so a bot that floods a form can't fill your audience with junk addresses.

Kite adds new people the way your audience is set up to accept them. When the audience uses double opt-in, a new signup is added as pending, and Mailchimp sends its own confirmation email before the person becomes a subscriber. When it doesn't, a new signup is added as subscribed.

That status only applies to people who are new to the audience. If someone unsubscribed in the past and fills in your form again, Kite leaves them unsubscribed and still records the form's tags. They start getting email again only if they opt back in themselves.

Every form submission on a site Kite hosts counts as a conversion in Kite's built-in analytics. You can see how many signups came in, which pages produced them, where those visitors came from, and how the numbers compare with the previous period. On a paid plan, your website's Leads page in the Kite web app also lists every submission.

Kite uses those numbers to suggest what to try next. If the blog posts bring in plenty of visitors but few signups, Kite might propose a signup box at the end of each post. If the waitlist page converts well, it might suggest sending more traffic there. On a Kite-hosted site, Kite can test two versions of a signup form against each other and ask you before it makes the winner permanent.

A signup is the start of a relationship, so Kite can also help with what new subscribers receive. In your connected Mailchimp account, Kite writes campaigns in your brand voice, sends you a test, and sends or schedules them once you approve. It can start a customer journey for a specific contact when the journey begins with an API trigger. You design the journey's steps in Mailchimp, and the tags Kite applies decide who enters it. For a full welcome or onboarding sequence, see Set up lifecycle email for new signups.