After testing tons of different kinds of lead forms to boost conversions, I can tell you that a well-crafted submit button can make all the difference in catching your visitors’ eye.

In this article, I’ll share some tips and best practices based on my experience optimizing lead forms for conversions. Let’s dive in.

Basic Submit Button Styling Tips in WPForms

WPForms gives you different ways to style the submit button in your form. I prefer using the Form Style options in the WordPress block editor. It’s the easiest way to customize pretty much every component of your form.

The button style customizations are available in all versions of WPForms. But I recommend using WPForms Pro to unlock the full range of style options including ready-made form themes as well as settings for your form background and containers.

You can find the settings for submit button styles on the right-hand panel of your form options inside the block editor.

These settings let you control the submit button size, border, and colors without any code.

Submit Button Size

WPForms gives you three presets for button size: small, medium, and large.

All 3 options are perfectly viable from a design standpoint. You won’t be violating any best practices by picking any size of the button here.

What’s more important here is design consistency. For example, if you’re using small field sizes and large buttons, your form might look a bit disproportionate in places.

For the best balance, try to use consistent sizing for all elements in your forms.

Our guide on form styling using the block editor explores the different customization options for each form component. All of these different aspects come together to create the perfect form design.

Border Type

Border types are entirely a stylistic choice. If you’ve noticed, it’s increasingly common to use a borderless design for a clean and minimal style.

However, you also have options to use less common border types in WPForms:

• Solid borders are quite popular and give your forms a professional and refined look.
• Dashed or dotted borders are less common, but they add a touch of playful creativity. Use it if your website theme is more casual but be careful not to overuse it.
• No border designs are sleek and modern, often used to emphasize minimalism or to integrate the button seamlessly with the background. When going borderless, make sure there’s enough contrast or shadow to distinguish the button from surrounding elements.

Border Size

You can also adjust the size of your border. It’s good practice to have border thickness that complements the button size. When I’m using a small button size, I make sure to complement it with a thin border of size 3-4px. This creates the most visually balanced look in my experience.

For large buttons, a border width of 4-6px is more suitable. A good rule to follow is to use subtle borders that add structure without overwhelming the button design.

Border Radius

The border radius setting in WPForms gives you full control over how rounded you want your buttons to look. Rounder buttons work great in themes using modern styles.

In fact, some studies have found a correlation between round buttons and higher conversions. It’s worthwhile to experiment with round buttons if you’re optimizing for conversions.

You can use a border radius size of around 15-20 px to attain the capsule-style button look that many modern sites today use.

If you’d rather stick with a formal vibe, feel free to keep the border radius at 0px to keep your button square-shaped.

The important thing is to balance the curvature of your button with your overall website design theme.

I have a theory that rounder shapes work better when used sparingly. This way, they’re more likely to stand out from the popular geometric shapes you generally use on other parts of your site.

Button Background Color

In WPForms, the button background color is easy to select with the color picker. Choosing the color is important because this affects your button’s visibility.

Select a background color that contrasts with your form background to make your button as comfortably visible as possible for every device.

Your branding also plays a role in color selection. If your web design is grounded on a brand color palette, it’s generally a good idea to stick close to your brand’s theme colors.

At any rate, make sure to avoid overly bright or clashing colors that might distract users unnecessarily.

Border Color

The border is only a small fraction of the submit button. But it’s a great place to add accent colors to boost your form’s visual appeal.

Borders look most attractive when they contrast nicely with your button’s background color. This not only adds personality to your design but also enhances visibility of your button.

I recommend using subtle tones to avoid drawing too much attention to the border itself. The goal is accentuate the button rather than increasing distractions with flashy button borders.

Button Text Color

With the button text color, you should have a single goal: prioritizing readability. The easiest way to make your button text easy to read is by using text color that contrasts sharply with the button’s background.

A good general rule to follow is to use white text for darker button backgrounds and black or dark gray text for lighter shades of backgrounds.

While you can get away with bold and vibrant colors in other components of the submit button, it’s best to avoid straying too far from standard neutral colors for text color to maintain good readability.

Advanced Styling Techniques for Submit Buttons

WPForms doesn’t require you to use any code for basic styling of your button. However, you’ll need to use simple CSS for some advanced effects like gradient colors.

This is much easier than it sounds. First, you’ll need the WPCode plugin installed on your site, which will allow you to easily insert code snippets for changes to your submit button styles.

Install WPCode

Open your WordPress dashboard and go to Plugins » Add New.

On the Add Plugins screen, use the search box to search for WPCode. Then, press the Install Now button to add the plugin to your site.

The “Install Now” button will change to “Activate” after it’s finished installing. Press the Activate button and you’re ready to use WPCode to add code snippets to your site.

After that, hover your cursor over Code Snippets on the side panel of your WordPress dashboard and click on + Add Snippet as the menu expands.

Then, click on Use Snippet under Add Your Custom Code (New Snippet)

You’ll then need to select the snippet type. For style adjustments, you’ll be adding CSS custom snippets. So go ahead and select CSS Snippet from the available options.

Now, you’ll just need to copy and paste code snippets in the code editor window to apply style changes to your forms. I’ll share examples of common CSS codes you can use to change your submit button styling.

Add Gradient Colors to Submit Button

A color gradient is quite eye-catching and usually indicates a highly professional form design. This is great when you want to convey your professionalism and attention to detail with gradient colors for buttons.

Here’s the code for snippet that you can use for adding a linear gradient to the submit button color:

#wpforms-8 .wpforms-submit {
  background: linear-gradient(45deg, #066aab, #0f88d4); /* Gradient colors */
}

In this code, “#wpforms-8” refers to the Form ID of the your specific form. The form that I’m editing has the ID of 8. If your Form ID is different, let’s say 17, you can add the correct number to this piece of code (i.e., “#wpforms-17”).

You can find the Form ID of your form by looking at the number mentioned in a specific form’s shortcode. This is mentioned in the Shortcode column of your form in the Form Overview screen.

The second customizable part of this code are the values for linear-gradient. These three values inside the parenthesis separated by commas are:

• The angle of gradient
• Hex code of first color
• Hex code of second color

You can change these values as desired. If you need to find the exact hex codes for the colors you need, you can use this HTML color generator.

After you’re done creating your customized CSS snippet, click the Save Snippet button and the toggle button next to it to save and turn the snippet on.

Your form will now have gradient colors applied to its submit button.

Add Hover Effects to Submit Button

By default, WPForms adds a hover effect to the Submit button to indicate that it’s interactive and provide immediate visual feedback to a visitor intending to click.

But if you want add a hover effect when using a gradient, you can use this code:

#wpforms-8 .wpforms-submit {
  background: linear-gradient(45deg, #066aab, #0f88d4); /* Gradient colors */
  transition: background 0.3s ease; /* Smooth transition on hover */
}

#wpforms-8 .wpforms-submit:hover {
  background: linear-gradient(45deg, #0f88d4, #066aab); /* Changes gradient on hover */
}

This code also includes a transition effect to ensure the interactions with the button feel polished. Generally, a transition effect of 0.3s – 0.4s provides the smoothest effect.

If you just want to change the default hover effect on a button with solid colors, you can use the WPForms Form Styles settings in the block editor to set the base background color you want.

Then, use this simplified code to change colors on hover by adding the hex code of your desired color:

#wpforms-8 .wpforms-submit:hover {
  background: #0f88d4; /* Solid color on hover */
  transition: background 0.3s ease; /* Smooth transition */
}

Make sure to click Save Snippet and activate it to apply the hover effects on your form submit button.

If you’re looking for a more unique hover effect, you can apply the pulse effect with this code:

@keyframes pulse {
  0% {
    box-shadow: 0 0 0 0 rgba(15, 136, 212, 0.4);
  }
  70% {
    box-shadow: 0 0 0 20px rgba(15, 136, 212, 0);
  }
  100% {
    box-shadow: 0 0 0 0 rgba(15, 136, 212, 0);
  }
}

#wpforms-8 .wpforms-submit:hover {
  animation: pulse 1.5s infinite;
}

This adds a creative touch with a button that pulsates on hover, inviting clicks from visitors.

Optimizations Tips for Submit Button Text

Styling is one aspect that influences submit button clicks. The second important component is the submit button text. These few words can be the tipping point where your users decide whether to act or bounce.

Good button text inspires action by focusing on a specific benefit your visitor can expect by clicking through. Avoid simply using a generic “submit”. Instead, use direct and action-oriented language pointing towards a goal.

Here are few examples of conversion-optimized submit button text:

• Get My Free Quote
• Download My eBook
• Join the Community
• Start My Journey
• Access Free Templates
• Save 20% Today

But how do you actually edit submit button text in WPForms? This easy. In the form builder, click on the Submit button at the bottom of the form to instantly move to Settings » General.

Then, simply type in your text in the Submit Button Text box. You can also edit the text that appears during the time the form is submitting in the Submit Button Processing Text box.

And that’s it.

Now that you have a better idea about submit button best practices and how you can apply these to your forms, it’s time to optimize your button text for more clicks.

Also Read: How to View Your Form History in WordPress

Creating effective submit buttons for your forms isn’t a hard science. Don’t be afraid to experiment with different styles and button texts and monitor your results (this could be as simple as A/B testing a form and measuring the difference in form submission rates).

Next, Style WPForms Email Notifications

Styling forms with WPForms is a quick and effortless process. But this customization flexibility also extends to your email notifications. With customer-facing notifications, you have a great opportunity to incorporate your branding to notifications to add a more professional appearance that your customers can trust.

Our guide on customizing form email notifications walks you through the easiest way to style your notifications.

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The number of sites you can use WPForms on depends on your license level. Let me break down the options:

• Basic: 1 website
• Plus: 3 websites
• Pro: 5 websites
• Elite: Unlimited sites

You can also use WPForms Lite on unlimited websites since you don’t need a license to use the Lite version. I’ll walk you through WPForms license levels so you can choose the right option for your business or personal blogging needs.

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WPForms License and Multiple Site Limits

The four WPForms license levels are tailored to businesses of varying sizes and cater to different needs.

WPForms Basic ($49.50/yr)

The Basic license is the entry-level option for single-site use. With this license, you get access to the essential set of form features including:

• Pre-built form templates
• WordPress entry management
• Multi-page forms
• Repeater fields
• Conditional logic
• File uploads
• AI generated forms

Besides, there are no limits to the number of forms and entries you can have. This frees you up to create as many forms and collect as many responses as you need as long as you’re using WPForms on a single site.

Who’s WPForms Basic For?

I typically recommend the Basic license to bloggers and single-site small businesses with simpler form requirements. I’ve seen it work perfectly for these use cases.

WPForms Plus ($99.50/yr)

The Plus license allows usage on up to three sites. It also unlocks additional features beyond the Basic plan. This includes marketing integrations like Aweber, Brevo, Kit, MailerLite, and other popular marketing tools.

One feature I find particularly valuable is the Slack integration that allows you to route form notifications to specific Slack channels.

Who’s WPForms Plus For?

I recommend the Plus plan to users with a small number of sites that needs forms synced with marketing tools for automated subscriber management workflows.

WPForms Pro ($199.5/yr)

I consider the Pro license one of the most versatile options, as it supports up to five sites and provides access to even more advanced form functionalities. Here are the features I find most valuable:

• Conversational forms
• Lead forms
• Geolocation
• Save and Resume
• User Registration
• Calculations
• Post submissions
• Dropbox
• Coupons

WPForms Pro also supports multiple payment processors including Stripe, PayPal, and Square. You get flexibility to choose different payment modes as well such as one-time payments or recurring payments (or both with conditional logic enabled).

Who’s WPForms Pro For?

In my experience, the Pro license works best for businesses and nonprofits running a handful of websites. I often recommend this plan to my clients because it offers a perfect balance of affordability and advanced features that I’ve seen help businesses generate more leads and grow.

WPForms Elite ($299.50/yr)

The Elite license is the top-tier option from WPForms. It provides usage on unlimited sites. What makes it particularly powerful is that on top of Pro features, it also extends integrations with more advanced marketing and CRM tools as well as payment processors such as:

• ActiveCampaign
• HubSpot
• Salesforce
• Authorize.Net

One of the standout benefits is that it comes with premium support from our Trusted Advisors.

Who’s WPForms Elite For?

In my experience, the Elite plan is ideal for users with numerous websites, agencies managing client sites, and developers needing maximum flexibility and support.

Upgrade to WPForms Elite

Using WPForms on Multiple Sites

If you want to use WPForms on multiple sites, there are a few ways you can go about it.

Multiple Sites with a Single License

You can use a single WPForms license across multiple sites. But this depends on your license level.

For example, with WPForms Basic, you have a limit of 1 license per site. That means you can’t use the same license on two websites at the same time.

However, here’s a tip I often share: you can switch licenses from one website to another. WPForms lets you deactivate an active key from one site, freeing it for reuse elsewhere.

This approach works well if you only need WPForms on one website at a time. But I strongly recommend upgrading to a higher WPForms plan if you’re managing multiple sites that require forms.

The WPForms Pro plan, for instance, lets you use advanced WPForms features on 5 websites with a single license.

Multisite Network with a Single License

WPForms supports easy license activation for your entire network of sites if you’re using a multisite WordPress setup. You’ll need the WPForms Elite license for this, which lets you activate WPForms on all websites that are a part of your network with a single click.

This is great for government organizations, educational institutions, agencies handling website setup for large enterprises, and nonprofits with multiple chapters.

FAQs – Using WPForms on Multiple Sites

Next, Import Form Entries to Another Site

If you have multiple websites or are migrating to a new domain, transfering form entries is essential to prevent data loss.

Thankfully, this is pretty easy to do with WPForms. Follow the instructions in our guide on importing form entries to a new site to learn how you can transfer form data in no time.

Create Your WordPress Form Now

Ready to build your form? Get started today with the easiest WordPress form builder plugin. WPForms Pro includes lots of free templates and offers a 14-day money-back guarantee.

If this article helped you out, please follow us on Facebook and Twitter for more free WordPress tutorials and guides.

However, while strong sales numbers are worth celebrating, focusing solely on revenue misses crucial opportunities.

Instead, you can use the post-Black Friday period as an opportunity to build lasting relationships with your customers and set the stage for a successful new year.

I’ve managed Black Friday campaigns for various projects over the years.

From analyzing customer data to building powerful social proof, I’ll show you how to transform your Black Friday momentum into year-round success.

Thinking Beyond the Black Friday Sale: Tips and Strategies

1. Analyze the Black Friday Sales Data

This is an obvious post-sale activity that every business undertakes after Black Friday is over. But a lot of the time, your analysis doesn’t have to be super complex.

For example, unless you’re an eCommerce retail store, you don’t need highly granular product-level analyses. You can evaluate things accurately by simply looking at the top-level data like transactions, revenue, and redeemed coupons for the time range when your Black Friday sale was active.

So if you’re using payment forms in WPForms, you can get the big picture directly in your dashboard with payment charts and tables.

One of the simplest ways to gauge your growth is to compare your sales with last year’s BFCM. You can use the date picker in WPForms to get the payment summary for any given date range, which can help you get a glimpse of your sales trends over different time periods.

At the same time, don’t just focus on the raw sale numbers. For true understanding, it helps to analyze your traffic sources. Did you get more sales from organic search? How much did social media contribute to your Black Friday sales?

To answer these questions, you’ll need your Google Analytics reports. Reading GA4 data is remarkably intuitive if you have MonsterInsights installed. You’ll be able to see all the important eCommerce-related info directly in your WordPress dashboard, and that’s always a massive time-saver.

You can also use Looker Studio to create a custom report focusing only on the data that is important to you.

When you have your answers, you’ll be standing in a much better position to double down on channels and strategies that worked well for you and rethink the ones that didn’t for your future campaigns.

2. Evaluate Customer Feedback

Statistical data from your Black Friday sales will give a top-level view of your total profits and sources of revenue. But there’s no substitute for qualitative data that only your actual customers can provide through post-purchase satisfaction surveys.

You can send a personal follow-up message to customers after the dust has settled down from Black Friday to collect feedback.

With WPForms, you can quickly build survey forms that make it easy to analyze your customer preferences. This survey form template can help you get started.

Remember that you can customize the template as little or extensively as you need. And once you’ve collected enough responses, you can analyze the data with WPForms’ survey reporting charts.

Soon, you’ll begin to understand what customers like about you and what they don’t. And being aware of your strengths and weaknesses is the first step to improving your product and services and making your customers stay with you for the long run.

3. Gather Reviews and Testimonials

Surveys are fantastic for discovering strategic information about your customers as well as your own company. But you can go one step further and take advantage of the high Black Friday traffic and request reviews from your new customers.

Once again, you can use WPForms to collect reviews that you can later post as testimonials on your main website. It’s a fantastic, organic way of boosting your social proof.

You can use the product review form template and customize it as needed for your website.

However, try not to solicit positive reviews in exchange for any incentives. Your goal is to get an accurate picture of how people really feel about your business, and offering incentives can bias the reviews in your favor, so you’re none the wiser, even if you collect a huge amount of reviews.

Besides, most review platforms strongly discourage incentivized testimonials. So, if you ask your customers to write reviews on other websites like TrustPilot or G2, you might end up violating their policies.

4. Follow Up With New Customers

Black Friday is a great time to acquire new customers, which is both a blessing and a curse. It’s a blessing when the right customers connect with you.

But inevitably, you’ll also find many customers who are the wrong fit and simply buying from you in the heat of the Black Friday frenzy.

These customers are unlikely to stay for long. But if you’re not proactive, you might also lose good prospects.

One way to make a strong first impression is to adjust your welcome email sequence by taking into account unique considerations for Black Friday buyers.

Here are some ideas you can incorporate:

• Emphasize unique value proposition: Don’t lose any time discussing your value proposition. From the first email of the sequence, focus on what makes you unique and highlight the non-sale benefits the customer can expect by staying with you long-term.
• Value reminders: Send value reminders to educate your new customers about your products or services. This is your chance to make sure they’re aware of your product’s specific features and how it solves specific problems. It will also be a chance to share tips for getting the most out of their purchase.
• Avoid inbox crowding: After the Black Friday sale, customers typically don’t want to be receiving too many emails. It’s a good idea to space out your welcome email sequence with longer delays between each subsequent email during and after the Black Friday period to prevent annoyed customers.

5. Streamline Your Returns Process

Returns and cancellations happen all year round, so you likely already have an existing process for entertaining return requests. However, Black Friday often attracts impulsive buyers, and you might see higher return requests than what you’re used to seeing.

This is why it’s important to review your existing returns process and make sure you’re prepared for a possible surge in requests after the Black Friday sale.

The WPForms return/exchange form template can help you collect return and exchange requests and keep things organized for you and your team.

There are a number of ways you can expand on the functionalities of this form to ensure maximum efficiency in your return processing workflow. For instance, you can connect your form to a spreadsheet if you prefer tracking your return/exchange requests in Google Sheets.

The WPForms Slack addon is another super helpful feature that lets you send notifications and reminders to specific members or channels in your Slack workspace. You can use this to get form notifications about returns to the right people in your team and minimize delays.

6. Plan for the Year Ahead

After the Black Friday sale and the holiday season are over, most businesses experience a cooldown period. This is a great time to plan ahead for the next year and use the data you’ve collected to make projections.

The main things you’ll want to look at are your goals for sales, customer retention, and email list growth. Your past performance and year-over-year (YoY) growth will inform your projections here, coupled with any additional factors that can help you grow faster.

This is also the time to review opportunities you haven’t cashed in on yet. Here are some specific areas you can focus on:

Lead Generation and Signup Forms

Acquiring new subscribers means you need to have lead gen forms working for you throughout the whole year. Depending on your business, you have a few options for acquiring leads if you’re using a versatile form builder like WPForms:

• Multi-step forms: The WPForms Lead Forms addon enhances the interactivity of your forms by adding page breaks and progress bars and placing your form inside a container with advanced visual styling for maximum impact. This is ideal for lead magnets.
• Calculator forms: It’s an old strategy, but providing instant quotes, pricing, and other answers to visitors is still effective at capturing emails. With WPForms, you can create custom formulas to perform the calculations for you dynamically, which is great both for boosting user engagement and providing the answers they seek instantly.
• Newsletter signup forms: The classic newsletter signup forms are never going out of fashion for businesses that are great at building relationships through emails. You can use WPForms to easily add your newsletter signup forms in visible areas of your site, such as the sidebar, footer, and inside your blog posts.

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Giveaways and Contests

If building a social media community is an important goal for your business, hosting giveaways is a powerful way to create buzz about your brand.

And with the tools available today, running a giveaway is fairly easy. RafflePress is a handy little WordPress plugin that you can use to create giveaways that benefit your business and keep your audience happy and excited.

Last year, we ran a giveaway before Black Friday that amassed over 40k entries from new and existing subscribers. If you plan your giveaway well enough and align it with strong strategic goals, you can drive some pretty crazy growth.

Affiliate Program

Building an affiliate program can be one of the best decisions you can make for your business. Think about it. The ability to boost your sales without hiring more people or making any extra efforts simply by sharing a fraction of the profits in commissions? It’s a win-win.

The only challenge is setting up an affiliate program without difficulty. And that’s easily taken care of because there are some fantastic WordPress plugins like AffiliateWP that you can use.

AffiliateWP is a comprehensive plugin for creating and managing an affiliate program right inside your WordPress dashboard. You can track referrals with pretty links, choose different commission modes, create an affiliate portal, simplify affiliate registration, and more.

Once you’ve set up your affiliate system, you’ll just have to market it to find partners interested in promoting you. After a while, you’ll have opened up a new revenue stream capable of growing your business all-year round.

Next, Create Enticing Black Friday Offers

Many businesses start planning for next year’s Black Friday as soon as they conclude the present year’s Black Friday sale. One important consideration for your Black Friday campaign is creating interesting offers to attract and convert your customers. If you’re looking for ideas, see this handy guide on creating impactful Black Friday offers.

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It goes without saying that preparing your email list for Black Friday should be at the top of your priority list ahead of the holiday sale. But if you’re not sure where to start, I’ll provide some simple email growth strategies you can apply for your BFCM campaign.

Let’s begin.

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Building Your Black Friday Email List: Tips for Pro Users

Set Up WPForms for Email List Building

First things first, you’ll need to install and activate the WPForms plugin on your WordPress site. Once that’s done, follow these steps:

• Go to WPForms » Add New in your WordPress dashboard
• Choose a form template (the Newsletter Signup Form template is perfect for this)
• Customize your form fields (at minimum, include an email field)
• Set up your form notifications and confirmations
• Configure your form settings, including connecting to your email marketing service.

Remember, simplicity is key. The easier you make it for visitors to sign up, the more likely they are to do so. Start with just asking for an email address, and you can always gather more information later.

These are the basic steps you need to start collecting emails with WPForms through signup forms.

In the next sections, I’ll go over different types of forms and strategies you can use to build your Black Friday email list.

1. Simple Newsletter Signup Forms

A newsletter signup form is one of the oldest tricks in the book of a digital marketer. The idea is simple: you put a signup form on your website’s popular posts and pages, and let people sign up so they can receive more of your exciting content.

If you do this right, your subscribers will not only buy from you during Black Friday but also stay with you for the long term after the Black Friday sale!

Creating custom newsletter forms in WPForms is easy. You can use the pre-built newsletter form template as-is or as a starting point before making further changes. For instance, it’s a good practice to add microcopy within the form to highlight your value proposition.

Here’s an example. I used the newsletter form template and added the Content field, which lets me simply type in some copy into the form.

There’s no HTML required to insert content or media into your form. The Content field is a WYSIWYG editor that makes adding microcopy incredibly easy.

When you’ve created your form, feel free to embed it in different areas of your site. For instance, you can add it at the bottom of your popular posts, sidebar widgets, and the footer of your site to give visitors the maximum chance to subscribe to your newsletter.

Once you launch Black Friday, you can then send your promotional offers to these subscribers directly via your email campaigns.

2. Signup Form With Discount Incentives

Nothing gets people to sign up faster than an exciting discount or deal. If you want to add a boost to your email collection strategy, you can make an attractive discount offer your main value proposition.

This, again, is something that’s very easily taken care of with WPForms. Using the Coupons Addon, you can create a custom coupon code and use it as an incentive to get more people to sign up to your list.

For example, here’s a 50% off coupon code I created.

You can check out this guide on BFCM coupon codes if you’re looking for inspiration.

The next step is to display this code to the subscriber as soon as they submit the signup form. WPForms gives you a few options for this, including sending the coupon via email and providing it inside the confirmation message on the form (or both).

I prefer using both options at the same time to ensure the subscribers do not miss the coupon code. You can simply mention the coupon code in the confirmation message and notifications from their respective settings in WPForms.

Finally, you can use the Coupon field inside your order or checkout forms where you want to apply the discount. The subscriber can then enter the discount code they received from you at signup and claim the discount as they checkout.

With an exciting signup discount, your new subscribers will naturally expect even bigger and better deals for Black Friday. So make sure to have something special for your Black Friday email list!

3. Capture Emails With Popup Forms

Conventional signup forms are effective, especially when you’re a recognized brand or content creator with a healthy fan following. However, building your list can be a little slow if you’re only embedding your newsletter forms inside posts and widgets.

Sometimes, you need the power of a popup form to grab the visitor’s attention. Ahead of BFCM, generating your email list like this can be particularly effective.

OptinMonster is one of the best tools for creating popup forms for newsletter subscriptions. It also integrates with WPForms, so you can turn any form you’ve built with WPForms into a popup element. Here’s a guide on creating WordPress popup forms that explains this in more detail.

Remember that popups work best when they’re used strategically. No one wants to be pestered by a popup as soon as they land on your website.

Instead, I recommend using Exit Intent popups, which are much less invasive and can be very effective at collecting emails when a visitor is just about to leave your website. OptinMonster gives you a lot of control with its display rule settings, so you can trigger your popup form based on precise user behaviors.

These forms can be a great asset for your Black Friday email marketing strategy.

4. Checkout Form Optin

Online stores frequently have a newsletter optin box on checkout. This is a relatively simple but effective way of encouraging newsletter subscriptions while a customer is ready to make a purchase on your store.

You can add a Checkbox field next to the Email field of your checkout form to let customers join your list.

Since customers are already interested in purchasing from you, a signup option in the checkout works wonders for creating a targeted list of active customers.

And if they’ve ordered from you once, they’re likely to order again, especially if you target them with Black Friday marketing emails during the peak holiday season.

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Syncing Your Forms With an Email Marketing Service

When you start capturing emails on your WordPress form, you can view entries from your dashboard to see all the emails you’ve collected so far.

But these people still need to be added to your email marketing tool so you can send them your newsletter and promotional offers directly to their inbox.

This entire process can be completely automated by integrating WPForms with your email marketing service. All the popular email marketing tools like Constant Contact, ConvertKit, Brevo, ActiveCampaign (and lots more) connect with WPForms with straightforward, native integration processes.

So whenever a person fills out your signup form in WordPress, they’ll automatically get added to your email marketing tool. That’s how all pro marketers manage their email signup programs (including ourselves).

Bonus Tips for Black Friday Email Marketing

You’re now familiar with the essential Black Friday list-building strategies. But once you get comfortable, you can take things to the next level with these bonus tips:

Using WPForms Conditional Logic for Targeted Sign-ups

One of the most powerful features of WPForms is its conditional logic. It’s a versatile feature that has more applications than I can cover here, but you can use it to segment your audience right from the signup.

For example, you could ask what product categories they’re most interested in, and then tailor your Black Friday emails to their preferences. You can easily configure WPForms to segment your list using tags, groups, lists, and other similar options depending on the particular email service you’re integrating your forms with.

This level of personalization can significantly boost your conversion rates both at sign-up and when you send out your Black Friday offers.

Creating Irresistible Lead Magnets

Earlier, I talked about offering incentives to boost your email capture using discount codes. But that’s not the only list-building strategy you can use for Black Friday.

People love free stuff and discounts. And there are various ways you can turn your offers into a powerful lead magnet.

Here are some ideas for Black Friday-themed lead magnets:

• Early access to your Black Friday deals
• A Black Friday shopping guide for your niche
• Exclusive discount codes for subscribers
• A chance to win a popular product in a pre-Black Friday giveaway

When creating your lead magnet, think about what would be most valuable to your target audience. What problem can you solve for them? What insider knowledge can you share?

The more value you provide, the more likely people are to sign up, engage with your emails, and stick around.

Nurturing Your New Subscribers

Getting people to sign up is only half the battle (admittedly, a very important half!). To ensure people remain engaged (and eventually buy from you on Black Friday), you need to nurture these new relationships strategically.

The specifics of the strategy vary for every business and the industry you belong to. But in my experience working across SaaS and eCommerce sites, here are a few things I’ve found particularly effective:

• Send a warm welcome email/onboarding series immediately after signup
• Deliver your promised lead magnet or value proposition right from the first email
• Use a smart mix of value-driven content with more helpful tips and less promotional content
• Gradually introduce your products or services
• Build anticipation for your Black Friday deals well ahead of the holiday season.

Remember, the goal is to build a relationship with your subscribers. Don’t just bombard them with sales messages – show them why they should care about your brand and your offers. If you can do that, sales will naturally follow when Black Friday comes.

Next, Kick Off Your Black Friday Preparations

Black Friday planning can be quite a challenge for marketers. If you’re struggling to create an outline of your plan and figure out the necessary steps, see this BFCM checklist for ideas about how to organize your Black Friday marketing plan.

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Naturally, preparing for an event as big as this requires careful planning. I’ve been involved in BFCM preparations for small businesses from various industries, so I know how chaotic this period can be.

But I’ve also picked up some lessons about what typically works during Black Friday and what doesn’t in terms of the one thing that matters most: sales.

In this post, I’ll share a Black Friday checklist consisting of the best strategies and tips that have helped me achieve holiday sales goals for different small businesses.

Black Friday Checklist: Tips for BFCM Success

1. Start Preparations Early

Black Friday has a tendency to sneak up on you quietly. It usually plays out like this: you’re busy with your day-to-day business tasks until one day, you look at your calendar and the startling realization dawns on you – it’s just 1 month until Black Friday!

What ensues is a lot of chaos that could’ve been avoided if you’d started your preparations early.

So how early are we talking?

That depends on the complexity of your business and the target you’ve set for yourself. But there’s no harm in starting 3-4 months early (if that sounds excessive, I’ve seen teams that start thinking about the next BFCM as soon as the last one ends).

2. Analyze Data From the Previous Year

If this isn’t your first time running Black Friday, then you can learn a lot by retrospecting on your previous BFCM campaigns.

This doesn’t have to be very deep or complex. Even if you just pay attention to the broad overview, you can make some very good decisions based on a simple analysis. Some of the specific data that you can look at include:

• Marketing Channel Performance: Tools like GA4 can help you identify which channel (organic search, organic social, paid search, email, etc.) produced the highest conversions for your business.
• Best Selling Products: For eCommerce stores, looking at your best-selling products and product categories from the previous year is a great way to predict which products you can expect to contribute to your overall sales for the upcoming sale period.
• Email Performance: Any promotional emails you sent last year should offer insights into the kind of subject lines and content that resonated with your audience.

These are just some of the easy ways you can use your past year’s campaign performance to inform your decisions for BFCM. Do more of what worked last year and try to change up your strategy for areas that have potential but where you didn’t see the results you would’ve liked.

Also read: What to do after the Black Friday sale

3. Set a Sales/Revenue Target

There’s an endless amount of complex ways to forecast your Black Friday sales target.

But the strategy I recommend for small businesses is a simple one – try to do better than the total sales and revenue you made last year.

The question is, how big of a revenue jump should you be setting your eyes on? The answer to that becomes apparent by comparing important metrics connected with your business growth this year versus the previous year.

For example, you can look at the percentage increase in your website traffic, the growth in email subscribers, changes in your ad spend, and so on.

Combine that by estimating the growth in traffic and other statistics during Black Friday period (you can look at your industry averages or compare the boost in BFCM versus non-BFCM traffic on your site from the previous year), and you’ll have a definite number you can set as your target for this year.

4. Extend the Sale Over a Longer Period

Black Friday isn’t just about Black Friday. People start shopping — both online and in-store — well before Thanksgiving and well after it, too.

Extending the sale over a longer period gives you a much bigger window to attract more customers and make significantly more sales than what you can expect from a sale concentrated on a single or just a few days.

Consider running a sale through the whole Black Friday week. In fact, in some industries, you can make a bigger impact with 10-day long sale or even when it’s extended through 2 full weeks.

The exact sale period depends on the nature of your business and how ambitious you are. If you’re inexperienced with managing longer sales, you can start small and gradually scale it up as you get more confident next year!

While planning and executing a long sales campaign can be slightly more challenging, the extra effort will be well worth it.

5. Create a Compelling Offer

This one is a no-brainer for a Black Friday checklist. Every Black Friday campaign needs a powerful offer to attract customers to your business or store in high volumes.

Customers expect better deals than usual during this period. That means if you’ve previously offered your product(s) for 30% off, you may want to bump that up to 40%. While this exact percentage bump isn’t a rule by any means, it pays to be a bit more generous (within reason) with your discounts during BFCM.

If you need inspiration for your Black Friday coupon codes, we have a separate guide dedicated to that entire topic!

Besides, don’t just limit yourself to discounting the prices of your products. You can craft interesting offers in a lot of ways, such as:

• Free shipping: This is an effective way to boost average order value by encouraging customers to order more products with the money they can save on shipping. You can use the WPForms Coupons and Calculation fields to easily build forms that automatically remove the shipping cost with a coupon.
• Product bundles: Price your product bundles at a slight discount compared to the individual prices of the item to boost sales for a bigger overall profit margin.
• Buy some, get 1 free: Offering something for free is always a strong motivator capable of boosting traffic and sales, so you earn a higher profit by increasing the volume of sales.
• Loss leader: Offer a popular product at a price that’s not profitable in order to attract more customers who buy multiple additional products for higher overall profits.

These are just some of the proven ways that I’ve seen being used with great results by small businesses.

6. Create a Detailed BFCM Campaign Plan

Starting preparations early is only one aspect of ensuring your Black Friday and Cyber Monday campaigns go smoothly. It’s equally vital to create an organized plan for your sale period.

Some of the important details you can include in your plan are:

• The start and end dates of your sale
• The specific details of the discounts and pricing strategies
• Schedules for running your promotional designs and messaging

These are just the basics, but you can develop your plan with as many details as you need to be comfortable and on top of your tasks ahead of the campaign launch.

7. Start Collecting Emails Early

Email consistently outperforms all other marketing channels in terms of ROI. For me, this is more than just a statistic. Email drove a huge chunk of the conversions for us at WPForms during last year’s BFCM campaigns.

The first condition for making your email promotions successful is having a healthy list of subscribers. The more subscribers you have, the wider your reach for BFCM promotions will be.

Email signup forms are a great tool for this purpose. You can use these ahead of BFCM to gradually build interest and even provide an early access offer to get more people to sign up.

The best part is that signup forms are very easy to build and design with WPForms Pro.

The native email marketing integrations in WPForms also make it easy to sync your form with any tool, so your subscribers are automatically added to your list and existing automation.

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8. Build Powerful Marketing Emails

A good email signup flow needs to be coupled with a strong email marketing strategy for maximum impact.

Here are a few practices I follow to make emails more impactful:

• Create a full email sequence: If you’re running an extended sale over a longer time period, you need a longer email sequence to match with sale launch emails, reminders, and last-chance emails for maximum reach.
• Segmentation: Create unique emails focusing on different products from your store or different features of a single product based on the past purchasing history of your existing customers.
• Email teasers and sneak peeks: Build interest and excitement in the weeks leading up to BFCM with teasers about your deal, giveaways, donations, and a timer counting down to the sale launch to warm up your subscribers.
• Leverage email automation: Make sure to have automated emails set up for specific behaviors like cart abandonment or viewing specific products without making a purchase. These emails are very effective at boosting sales and reducing losses from abandonment.

9. Use Promotional Website Banners

The Black Friday season produces a natural surge in website traffic. But you only have just a few seconds to promote your best offers and grab their attention by making the visitor aware of your sale.

A website banner takes up a small amount of space on your pages, but it’s impossible to miss. Make sure to prominently highlight your discounts or any other offer in the banner, with a clear CTA that directly points to your product or pricing pages.

You can also combine your banners with Exit Intent popups to reduce abandonment and promote your offer one last time with greater urgency (such as by adding an expiry timer to trigger FOMO in the visitor).

These strategies have always made a noticeable impact for me across various websites by contributing to sales during past Black Friday campaigns–I’m not planning on abandoning them any time soon!

10. Review Your Checkout Process

Checkout experience is always critical, whether you’re in the holiday season or not. But during Black Friday and Cyber Monday, it’s even more important because online shoppers are spoiled for choices and won’t stick around if your checkout is slow, inconvenient, or buggy.

It always helps to think about your checkout from a customer’s perspective. Is it simple enough? Can it be made even simpler?

For example, one powerful way to improve checkout is by offering user-friendly payment methods, such as Stripe. If you have Link enabled in Stripe, customers can fill out their payment details in just a single click for faster checkout.

Options like Google Pay and Apple Pay also add incredible convenience by allowing customers to complete checkout with fewer clicks.

The WPForms Stripe integration supports Link for auto-filling payment details. Plus, users who have Google Pay or Apple Pay enabled can simply use these payment options to go through the checkout much faster.

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11. Prepare Your Site for High Traffic

Website traffic often peaks during the holiday season for most businesses. It can be an absolute disaster for your sales if you encounter website slowdowns – or worse – right in the middle of the sale period.

It’s imperative to think ahead and make sure you’re equipped to handle the high Black Friday traffic. There’s no substitute for testing here. There are various load testing tools that can simulate high-traffic conditions on your website and measure the impact.

You can see this WPBeginner tutorial on stress testing for WordPress to learn more about how you can ensure your website is ready to handle Black Friday traffic peaks.

At the same time, you should also use tools like PageSpeed Insights to check the responsiveness and speed of your website. This is extremely important for identifying areas of improvement ahead of time.

There’s a lot more that goes into speeding up your website, but you’ll need to start preparing well in advance to get ready to provide the best possible experience to customers during the Black Friday period.

12. Optimize Your Site and Campaigns for Mobile

Mobile website themes are mobile-friendly by design these days. But that’s only one small aspect of being mobile-friendly. You also need to ensure that your website is easy to interact with from mobile devices.

This can mean checking that all buttons and clickable parts of your website are touch-friendly. I still frequently come across websites with buttons and links that are too small or cramped together for my fingers on a mobile screen.

It’s a common problem with online forms as well. But WPForm’s mobile-friendliness focuses on the end user, making sure they’re perfectly responsive on smaller screens as well.

But while you’re optimizing your website for mobile, don’t forget your other marketing assets.

If you’ll be sending emails, test them on both mobile and desktop devices. The same applies to any website banners and popups you’ll be using.

13. Ensure Customer Support Accessibility

Maintaining the quality of your customers while providing fast response times is one of the most challenging parts of the holiday season. But you can take some measures to prepare your support team for navigating through Black Friday.

First, it’s imperative to have 100% alignment between your customer support team and all other departments. Strong internal communication can go a long way in ensuring your support team has accurate information about the different aspects of your sale, products, pricing, and policies to assist customers.

It can be helpful to maintain a document consisting of replies you can copy in response to common questions, problems, and complaints to speed up your response time. You can also have other notes for your team’s reference, such as your refund or exchange policy, shipping, and so on.

14. Measure Performance for All Marketing Channels

No serious Black Friday checklist can be complete without performance measurement as one of its key items. The only way to learn from your Black Friday sales and improve them for next year is to measure what worked this year and what didn’t.

There are a lot of different metrics you can use to track your sales and conversions. Here are the essential ones I recommend:

• GA4: Google Analytics should be your source of truth for all key metrics like revenue, total purchases, conversion rate, and traffic statistics.
• WPForms Payments Summary: WPForms Payment tracking provides an easy way to view your total sales, refunds, and coupon usage for all transactions performed via forms built with WPForms.
• Email Marketing Statistics: For email campaigns, your marketing tool should provide metrics like open rate, clickthrough rate, unsubscribe rate, and even revenue stats (though these aren’t usually super accurate).
• Looker Studio: With Looker Studio, you can combine the data from all your different sources into a single comprehensive report for easy analysis.
• Heatmaps: Depending on how deep you want to dig, you can gather behavioral data with heatmap analytics to see how your visitors interact with your website.

15. Retrospect for Future Improvements

Black Friday is a fairly laborious undertaking, and there’s a lot that goes into planning a successful sale. It’s tempting to simply close the chapter once the sale is over and move on to the next important task for your business.

But you can lose important insights and lessons from the Black Friday period if you wait too long to reflect on it. Instead, try to bring your team together soon after the sale has closed and collectively retrospect on what worked and what didn’t.

This doesn’t mean you should solely focus on the tangible results of the sale in terms of revenue; it’s also a good time to think critically about your workflows and processes to identify opportunities for improving efficiency in your sales planning.

That’s pretty much the “secret” to running successful Black Friday sales, year after year.

Next, Test Your Online Forms

Online forms keep your business growing with lead generation and provide an easy way for your customers to contact you. You can’t afford to have forms that are broken in any way, especially during the Black Friday season.

Just like other parts of your website, it’s vital to test your online forms. This form-testing checklist serves as a quick guide for reviewing the functionality and user experience of your forms.

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While asking people for their names and honorifics sounds simple enough, I’ve seen some examples of websites that don’t do a very good job of it from a user experience standpoint.

In this article, I’ll demonstrate how you can add an honorific to the WPForms name field in the simplest way without hassling your visitors.

How to Add an Honorific to Your Form (Step-by-Step)

Step 1: Install WPForms

WPForms’s drag-and-drop editor makes it easy to add honorifics to your form. While you can achieve this with WPForms Lite (free version), you can unlock more powerful features like form abandonment, professionally-designed form themes, and integrations with email marketing tools, Google Sheets, and more with WPForms Pro.

I’ll be using the WPForms Pro license for this tutorial, which is a big help for adding cool styles to the form so it looks more visually impactful.

Here’s how you can install and active WPForms on your website, if you’re new to WordPress plugin installations (I promise, it’s incredibly easy).

After installing the plugin, move on to the next step.

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Step 2: Create a New WordPress Form

With WPForms, you have the advantage of a huge library of ready-made form templates that make form creation even faster. However, you can also build your form completely from scratch. The choice is yours.

Either way, you first need to click WPForms » Add New from your WordPress admin dashboard area.

After that, you can name your form on the form setup screen. The name you use can then later be displayed as the title of the published form, or you can just use the name internally as well.

Scroll down to the template selection area, where you’ll find 2,000+ form templates available for your use. I’m using the Simple Contact Form template, but you can pick any other template that best suits your needs. The process for adding honorifics or titles will still be the same.

This form template will then appear on your screen inside the form builder. From here, you can fully customize every aspect of the form using simple drag-and-drop functionality.

You’ll notice that this form includes a Name field, but there’s no field for honorifics or titles. That’s no problem – we’ll simply add a new field above the Name field for the title/honorific manually.

Step 3: Add an Honorific/Title Field to Your Form

There are a few options for adding an honorific field to your form. Commonly, most websites either use a Dropdown field or a Radio/Multiple Choice field for honorifics.

I prefer to use the Multiple Choice field because it’s a more mobile-friendly solution compared to Dropdown. However, the process is the same irrespective of which approach you take.

Inside the form builder, drag and drop the Multiple Choice field above the existing Name field on your form.

After placing the field where you want it, click on it to open the Field Options menu on the left-hand pane.

You can then edit the Label of the field and update the Choices. For example, I’ve labeled this field “Honorific / Title” and added a few common titles that cover the standard choices your visitors will expect.

This is already starting to assume a good shape, but we can do more to improve the layout. I like using an inline layout for honorific choices so they take less vertical space. That will help improve the user experience on mobile even more.

To change the layout of the Multiple Choice field, click on the Advanced tab under Field Options. Then, use the Choice Layout dropdown and select Inline.

Now, you’ll notice all the honorific choices appearing in a single row, eliminating a good chunk of the extra vertical scroll.

You may want to make this field mandatory so your visitors don’t skip it. Just right-click on the Honorific / Title field and select Mark as Required in the menu.

That completes the field setup. But with the honorific field now added, it begs the question: what will you do with it?

You can immediately take advantage of the honorifics by using them to address your customers in the automated form notifications and confirmation messages.

Step 4: Set Up Notifications and Confirmations

To customize your form notifications, click on Settings » Notifications on the left-hand side of your form builder.

By default, WPForms has a default notification intended for the admin already set up. This way, you’ll instantly know whenever a new submission comes through the form. You can customize the default notification by changing the recipient’s email address, subject line, from name, and message.

At the same time, you can also add a separate notification meant for the visitors. Simply click on the Add New Notification button at the top.

Since the goal is to send this notification to the person who filled the form, the Send to Email Address needs to have the appropriate Smart Tag added. You can click the Show Smart Tags link to see all available field data that can be used as a Smart Tag and click on it.

So go ahead and select Email in the Smart Tag menu, which will populate the tag associated with it automatically.

Here comes the fun part. With the name and honorific information that you’re now collecting, you can personalize the email notification by addressing the person right in the subject line.

Just type in a message, and use both the Smart Tags for Honorific / Title and Name – Last fields, separated by a period (.)

The field IDs you see might not match this example (because these are specific to every form), but the image above is a general format for what the subject line with the honorific and last name data should look like.

You can apply the same concept when editing the email message, which also accepts Smart Tags.

Similarly, you can customize the form confirmation message (which appears on the form immediately after submission). To customize the confirmation message, go to Settings » Confirmations.

Once again, you can take advantage of the Smart Tags to personalize the message and showcase that you honor professional courtesy consistently with your messaging.

On the front end, this is how the confirmation will display:

Make sure to press the Save button to save all your changes up until this point.

All we need to do now is publish the form on the website.

Step 5: Publish the Form With Honorific Field

With WPForms. publishing any form is effortless and requires no shortcodes. You can initiate the embed process by clicking on Embed next to the Save button.

At this point, a modal will appear where you can select your embed method. Let’s go with Create New Page to embed this form on a fresh new page.

Next, simply provide the name for your new page and press Let’s Go.

With that, you’ll be taken to the WordPress editor with the form embedded inside. Before you go ahead and publish the form, I recommend trying out the available form themes, or the style adjustment settings to glam up your form.

In my case, I’m using the Spring theme (which I find particularly pleasing to the eye).

When you’re ready to launch, go ahead and click on the Publish button.

And there you have it! You now have a form that lets visitors select an honorific or title for their name, giving you an opportunity to personalize your messaging in ways that resonate with your audience.

More Questions on Honorific Fields

Next, Explore Handy Templates for Power Users

WPForms has a massive library of unique form templates. However, there are some hidden form templates that can be very useful. Feel welcome to explore these templates and reuse them as you see fit for your business or organization.

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But how do you make that decision?

At the start of my career, I didn’t think that optin methods were anything important to lose my sleep over. I was wrong.

Over time, I’ve learned that it’s absolutely worth thinking about which optin approach you should use for your website. This can affect important things like your email domain reputation, unsubscribe rates, engagement rates, and even your spam score.

In this article, I’ll explain single optin vs double optin signup methods and describe which alternative suits your specific business goals.

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Single Optin vs Double Optin – Taking a Deeper Look

Let’s explore single optin signups vs double optin signup processes one by one.

What Is Single Optin Signup?

Single optin is the simpler of the two methods. When a visitor fills out your form and clicks “Subscribe” they are instantly added to your email list. It’s straightforward, simple, and preferred by many marketers who want their lists to grow quickly.

Here’s how it typically works:

1. A visitor lands on your website and sees your signup form.
2. They enter their email address and click “Subscribe.”
3. They’re added to your email list instantly, ready to receive your emails.

When to Use Single Optin Signup

If you’re a new website focused on rapidly growing your email list, you should consider using single optin. Because it involves fewer steps than double optin, the subscription process is faster and that naturally increases the rate at which new people join your email list.

But it’s also important to consider your audience, industry, and any legal requirements that apply to your company. If you’re collecting sensitive information and your audience expects a high level of data privacy, then single optin wouldn’t be the ideal choice.

You’re also subject to email marketing laws depending on where your subscribers are located. Single optin might not be an option for you if the law requires you to use double optin for your subscribers.

Pros and Cons of Single Optin

What Is Double Optin Signup?

Double optin adds an extra step to the signup process, but that doesn’t mean it’s more complex by any means. The only difference is that, after a visitor submits their email address, they need to confirm their subscription by clicking a link in a confirmation email, similar to building a progressive profile.

This additional step verifies that the email address is valid and that the person genuinely wants to be on your list.

The process typically looks like this:

1. A visitor enters their email address in your signup form.
2. They receive a confirmation email with a link to verify their subscription.
3. The visitor clicks the link to confirm.
4. They become a subscriber to your list.

When to Use Double Optin Signup

Double opt-in is the way to go if you’re a trusted and well-recognized brand with an audience that knows they can expect high-quality emails from you. Marketers who are aiming to build a highly engaged list of genuine readers often prefer using double optin signup.

While your list might grow a little slower this way, you’ll also see a reduced unsubscribe rate (so fewer people leaving after they’ve subscribed).

However, my favorite advantage of using double optin is that it eliminates spam and fake signups. Every subscriber you acquire is a real person with a validated email, so you’re reducing the risk of having your emails bounced or sent to an uninterested audience.

As a result, it’s easier to maintain a low spam score if you have double optin in place.

Pros and Cons of Double Optin

How to Create an Email Optin Form

Implementing single optin and double optin are both very easy with the right tools. You’ll just need the WPForms Pro plugin on your WordPress site and a top email marketing service like ConvertKit.

I’ll use the WPForms ConvertKit addon to sync a signup form with ConvertKit, so make sure you have WPForms installed on your website.

Adding Double Optin Signup With WPForms-ConvertKit Integration

With your WordPress admin menu opened, navigate to WPForms » Add New.

You should see the form setup screen appear, with the options to enter a name for the form you’re about to create and select a suitable template.

I’ll use the Newsletter Signup Form template, which is a super simple form that’s ideal for this scenario.

When the form template opens, you can edit it if you want to change anything by inserting new fields or adjusting the settings for current fields.

A signup form is supposed to be very simple, so I’ll just use this template as-is with the two fields that come pre-loaded with it.

Next, click on the Marketing tab from the sidebar on the left and then select ConvertKit.

After that, click on the Add New Connection button on the top-right corner.

You’ll now be asked to provide a name for the connection. Press OK after entering the connection name.

At this point, you’ll see additional options appear on the screen. Start by selecting your ConvertKit account using the dropdown menu. After that, simply continue using the dropdowns to select an Action to Perform and map your signup form fields with your ConvertKit account.

It’s important to note that, to make this integration work, you’ll need two forms:

• The form that you’ve just built in WordPress using WPForms
• A form saved in your ConvertKit account that you’ve made using ConverKit’s form builder.

You’ll then need to select the ConvertKit form in the Form dropdown menu while configuring the WPForms ConvertKit addon settings. In my case, I built a form in ConvertKit called “Lead Gen (Test)”. This is what I’ll select when mapping fields inside WPForms.

Now, you can go ahead and save your form and proceed to embed it.

When you’ve published the form, go ahead a fill it out yourself to ensure that contacts are properly passing through from your WordPress forms to your ConvertKit account.

Since ConvertKit uses double optin by default, submitting the form will send a confirmation email to the address you provided when filling out the form. Go ahead and open the email and click the “Confirm your subscription” button.

After completing this action, head into your ConvertKit account dashboard. You’ll find a new subscriber created with the details you provided when filling out the form.

Well done! You’ve just created a double optin signup form on your WordPress site that’s synced seamlessly with your ConvertKit account.

Changing Optin Method in ConvertKit

Remember that WPForms will only follow the optin method that’s configured with the ConvertKit form it’s connected to. If you want to use single optin instead, go to your ConvertKit account and open the form that you’ve integrated with WPForms.

Then, click on Settings.

Select the Incentive menu and then uncheck the box next to Send incentive email. Make sure to press Save after making these changes.

Now, visitors will be immediately added as subscribers to your ConvertKit as soon as they submit your WordPress form. They’ll no longer receive a confirmation email that needs to be clicked in order to become a subscriber.

The process for selecting the optin method varies by email service provider, so make sure to check with your particular provider if you need to configure single or double optin for your subscribers.

No Optin Strategy Is Set in Stone

My advice for every new startup is to avoid making a decision randomly when it comes to choosing single optin vs double optin. It’s important to think it through, and then pick what you think is the best option for you.

But it’s even more important not to overthink this. Because this is NOT an irreversible decision. Even if you make the wrong call, it’s not like you’re condemning yourself to failure.

In most cases, you can switch between one optin method to another without any difficulty.

So, if you’re unsure about this, I suggest starting with single optin (assuming it’s legally permissible for you) and monitoring your emails. If you’re seeing poor engagement, frequent spam complaints, and/or a high unsubscribe rate, you can switch to double optin.

And there you have it! You now have all the information you need to make an informed decision about whether you should use single optin vs double optin for your email list.

Next, Learn About Lead Forms

Lead forms are some of the most powerful tools available to any digital marketer. But despite their simplicity, it’s not always clear to beginner marketers what a lead form is supposed to look like for their particular scenario.

If you need a refresher, see our introductory guide on lead forms.

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And my experience confirms this statistic. However, merely using a lead form is unlikely to produce the results you’re after. There’s a method and strategy for creating impactful lead forms.

In this guide, I’ll try to define lead forms by sharing tips for building ones that drive results based on my own past marketing experience.

What Is a Lead Form?

Essentially, a lead form is a tool for collecting email addresses and other contact information.

These forms give your visitors a simple way of expressing their interest in your business without fully committing to making a purchase at this point.

While a lead form doesn’t directly contribute revenue to your business, it brings prospective customers one step closer to seriously considering buying your product or service.

For that reason, it’s very frequently the case that the customers who do end up converting on your website overwhelmingly come from the leads you acquired through your forms.

Prominent Features of an Effective Lead Form

Lead forms come in all shapes and styles. But when you look for successful examples of lead forms, you’ll always come across certain common features shared by them all:

• Eye-catching headline: This is your first impression. Make it count by writing a punchy and reasonably descriptive headline.
• Concise form fields: Ask for essential information only, like name, email address, website, and phone number. Adding unnecessary fields increases abandonment rates and risks poor conversions.
• Clear call-to-action (CTA): Your submit button should be impossible to miss. It should be prominent and consist of relevant text other than just “Submit”.
• Value proposition: Clearly state what the user gets in return for their information, whether it’s a free eBook or a newsletter with valuable information.

Optimizing Your Lead Forms for Conversion

Creating a lead form is just the first step. To truly harness their power, you need to optimize them for conversions. Here are some excellent strategies and lead capture best practices that have proven effective for me:

1. Keep It Short and Sweet

In my experience, shorter forms generally perform better. Ask for only the information you absolutely need. If you’re just starting out, try sticking to a name and email address.

This is a good example of a form having only name and email address fields. No more, no less.

2. Use a Compelling CTA

Your submit button is more important than you might think. Instead of a boring “Submit”, try something more engaging like “Get My Free Guide” or “Start My Free Trial”.

Here’s an example that I like sharing about a simple yet compelling CTA text.

While this form isn’t perfect, the CTA does a fantastic job of grabbing visitor interest by emphasizing a specific and highly exciting result they can achieve by completing the action.

3. Offer Something in Return

People are more likely to share their information if they’re getting something valuable in return. This could be a free ebook, a discount code, or exclusive content.

I love this rather adorable example of a pet DNA testing service, offering a gamified discount in return for just the visitor’s email address.

4. Use Social Proof

If you have impressive statistics or testimonials, display them near your form. For example, “Join 10,000+ satisfied customers!”.

WPBeginner makes great use of social proof in their lead form, and the fact that they have pretty insane numbers to boast makes it hard to miss!

It’s one of my favorite examples of lead forms and you can steal this idea to create a highly engaging form that drives the results you want.

5. Optimize for Mobile

With more and more people browsing on mobile devices, it’s crucial that your forms are mobile-friendly. WPForms makes this easy with responsive forms that look great on any device.

Creating Lead Forms for Your WordPress Site

Now that we understand the importance of lead forms let’s dive into how to create them for your WordPress site. While there are several ways to do this, I’ve found that using a dedicated form plugin like WPForms offers the best balance of ease-of-use and functionality.

I’ll summarize the main steps quickly here, but you can read this detailed step-by-step guide on creating lead forms in WordPress for a comprehensive tutorial.

With your WPForms Pro plugin installed and activated on your WordPress site, navigate to WPForms » Add New from the admin menu.

When the form builder screen opens, you can enter a name for your form and select a lead form. For this example, I’m going to use the Lead Magnet Download form template.

This is a fairly simple form template, just like a lead capture form should be. The form should take just a few seconds to load and appear on your screen.

I’ll use the lead form mode to give this form a sleek appearance, similar to the distinctive style of most lead forms on the web. You can enable the lead form mode by going to Settings » Lead Forms and using the toggle button labeled Enable Lead Form Mode.

You’ll see additional options appear as soon as you enable this mode. Don’t forget to give your form a compelling and engaging title. Also, I recommend enabling all of the styling options here, which will make your form look much sharper and visually impressive.

With the Lead Form Mode now enabled, you’ll notice that a page break has been added next to each field in your form. You can go back to your form by clicking on Fields on the sidebar. I’ve made several adjustments here by adding the Name and Email fields above the first Page Break (so they both appear together in the same step).

On the next page, there’s just one final question before the lead can complete the form and receive something in return for their email address.

I also prefer using placeholder text for some of the field names and hiding their main labels. This gives the form a clean look, but that’s entirely up to you.

When you’re done customizing the form fields, go to Settings » Confirmations. This is where you can insert a link to a download for your leads in exchange for their email address.

Remember to change your submit button text by replacing it with a super specific and action-oriented message. You can change the submit button text by going to the General menu inside Settings.

Great! You’re on your way to publish this form now. Go ahead and press Save and then click the Embed button to start the process.

A lead form is usually embedded inside a post or page with supporting content for your lead generation strategy. You can either embed the form in a new page or in an existing one–WPForms makes both options easy.

While the embedding process is fairly straightforward and form builder will guide you through the necessary steps, you can read this article on embedding a form for additional details.

Here’s what the embedded form looks like on my test site:

The CTA button will appear on the next page since this specific form is split into two steps.

Advanced Lead Form Strategies

Once you’re comfortable with the basics, there are some advanced strategies you can employ to take your lead generation to the next level. And WPForms is fully equipped to make it easy for you to implement these tactics:

Multi-Step Forms

I’ve found that breaking longer forms into multiple steps can increase completion rates. It’s less intimidating for users and can create a sense of progress.

It bears mention, though, that multi-step forms are more impactful when you’re asking for additional details beyond just names and email addresses. A good rule of thumb is that if you have more than 3-4 fields on your lead form, it’s usually a good decision to split it into multiple steps, in my experience.

The Lead Form mode in WPForms does exactly that–adding page breaks automatically between each field to add multiple steps. If you have a super simple lead form with just a name and email address, there’s no reason to turn such a simple form into a multi-step form, so use your judgment wisely here!

Conditional Logic

Smart logic in WPForms is a powerful feature that allows you to show or hide fields based on user input. It’s great for creating more personalized, relevant forms that adapt based on the given response. For example, if your form includes questions like “Are you filling this form as a business or an individual?”, you can then show different additional fields relevant to the provided answer.

Exit-Intent Popups

Exit intent popups are arguably the highest converting tools you can use on your website. This type of lead form appears only when a visitor is about to leave your website, similar to the lead forms used by WPBeginner and many other successful sites.

I recommend giving Exit Intent lead gen popups a whirl. You might be surprised how well they actually perform. But at the same time, be careful not to overdo it–nobody likes an overly pushy website!

You can avoid annoying visitors by setting reasonable display rules to prevent these popups from appearing repeatedly for uninterested visitors or on areas of your site where they may not be a good fit (such as customer support pages).

For a full tutorial, check out building WordPress popup forms to get started.

And there you have it! I hope this article helped you learn about lead forms, get inspired by some of the examples I shared, and build your own lead gen strategies to grow your email list.

Reader Questions About Lead Forms

Next, Using Lead Forms vs Landing Page

Now that you know more about lead forms and how powerful they can be, you might be wondering where landing pages fit in your marketing strategy.

It’s an interesting question, and I’ve explored it in some depth in this article on landing pages vs lead forms.

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I consider myself a power user of WPForms, but I still continue to discover new templates that even I had no knowledge of!

So I thought to myself, if I found these templates so interesting, I’m sure there must be a lot of other power users who’d love to know about these.

In this post, I’ll introduce you to some exciting and lesser-known form templates that come pre-loaded with powerful features that you can leverage to build even more impactful forms.

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Hidden WPForms Templates

Most of the templates I’ll share in this post require an appropriate WPForms addon enabled before you can use them. That’s because these templates use certain special fields and features that are only available with the right WPForms addons.

If you’re a WPForms Pro user, then you’ll simply be prompted to install the required addon when you select any of these templates. This installation will occur without you having to leave the screen, so it’s sweet and smooth.

You can access these templates from the Addon Templates category on the form template selection screen.

Let’s get right into it!

1. NPS Survey Enhanced Form Template

Addon Required: Surveys and Polls

The NPS Survey Enhanced Form template includes just one main field – the NPS scale. But there’s more than meets the eye here.

There are several other fields included in this form template, but they will only appear depending on the rating the visitor gives on the NPS scale.

For example, a rating of 7 will automatically reveal additional fields, asking for feedback and an email address field so you can get back to the person.

If the rating is 9 or higher, then a different question appears – this time, asking the customer to share details of their positive experience and whether they’d be willing to leave a testimonial (highly satisfied customers are more likely to leave you great testimonials that you can then show off on your site.)

So, how does this template manage to show different fields based on the given NPS ratings? This is nothing but conditional logic in action.

WPForms offers powerful conditional logic that lets you show or hide an individual field or a group of fields only when certain conditions are met, such as selecting a certain score on the NPS field.

The beauty of conditional logic is that you can ask your visitors only the most relevant questions and adjust your messaging accordingly. That’s one of the most effective ways to minimize user frustration and abandonment and boost your completion rates.

2. NPS Survey Simple Form Template

Addon Required: Surveys and Polls

The NPS Survey Simple Form template is a simplified version of the enhanced NPS form template. The key difference is that it doesn’t show any additional fields when a high score is selected. The NPS field is the sole question that a very satisfied customer has to answer.

However, if the score is 8 or lower, a single question appears requesting feedback for improvement.

So if you want to make your form even simpler by reducing the follow-up questions to the NPS score, this template is ideal for you. At the same time, don’t forget that you’re free to customize the template by adding more fields if you want.

3. Poll Form Template

Addon Required: Survey and Polls

Thinking of running an online poll? Try the Poll Form template, which is another one of the single-field form templates consisting of a Multiple Choice question.

You can edit the question and its choices or even include multiple poll questions. But a poll isn’t all that fun if your visitors also aren’t able to see the results.

Displaying poll results for your visitors is really easy. You can go to Settings » Surveys and Polls and use the toggle button to enable Enable Poll Results.

That’s all it takes to display poll results on your form after your visitors submit it.

Polls are a fun way to add interactivity to your website and boost visitor engagement. While this template is a simple example of a poll form, you can use it as a starting point to build more complex poll forms with the WPForms drag-and-drop form builder.

4. Survey Form Template

Addon Required: Survey and Polls

The Survey Form Template is one of the most versatile templates in the WPForms library. Along with a Star Rating field, it also includes Likert Scale fields, which are great for precisely gauging customer satisfaction levels.

While it’s primarily a customer satisfaction survey form, it can be easily repurposed for other purposes, such as employee surveys. Simply reword the field labels and Likert Scale answer rows and columns to adjust the form for the exact goal you’re using it for.

The best part is that you can easily visualize the results of the survey with beautiful reports. This feature can be enabled from the form builder by navigating to Settings » Surveys and Polls and clicking toggling on the Enable Survey Reporting option.

There are multiple chart types you can choose from (pie charts, bar graphs, and more). Plus, you can export the visual reports and use them in a presentation or other document to present the findings of your survey.

5. WordPress User Registration Form Template

Addon Required: User Registration

One of my biggest gripes with WordPress is how limited the default login and registration forms are. You can’t add any additional fields or even include anti-spam to improve the security of these critical forms.

This is why the User Registration Form template is one of my favorites – it takes the pain out of customizing your registration form since you can add any fields you want with drag-and-drop functionality.

The user registration settings in WPForms also allow you to map your form fields to the WordPress user profile fields. This means that fields like Username, Password, Email, and Bio will automatically be populated in WordPress as soon as the user submits the form to complete their registration.

Additionally, you can also set the User Role for people registering. And you have options for enabling user activation, which can be used to require email confirmation from the user to ensure only legit people with valid email addresses are signing up on your site.

If you’d rather approve the registration requests manually, you also have the freedom to handle signups this way.

Using a custom registration form doesn’t only give you extra functionality; it also comes with the flexibility of styling your form with branding elements (which isn’t easy to do on the default registration page).

You can insert the Content field to add logos and use the form style options on the WordPress block editor to make a fully customized registration form that looks and behaves exactly the way you want.

Also read: how to create a user registration form in WordPress.

6. WordPress Login Form Template

Addon Required: User Registration

The User Login form template is a special one. Despite its apparent simplicity, it offers some unique features that are exclusive only to this template.

First is the “Remember me” checkbox. As you might have guessed, this isn’t an ordinary checkbox–it’s specially designed to enable a user to log in automatically on their subsequent visits to the website.

If you go to Settings » User Registration from this form, you can change the form visibility behavior as well.

This is one of the only two WPForms form templates where you shouldn’t add or remove any fields. The entire purpose of a login form is to let a person log into your site. It doesn’t need anything more complex.

And since you have a custom login form now, how about adding some branding to it? See our guide on creating custom WordPress login page to learn more.

7. WordPress Password Reset Form

Addon Required: User Registration

This form template is another special one. It’s designed to send an email with instructions for resetting the password after the form is filled.

The password reset email can be customized from the Settings » User Registration menu.

Once the user clicks the reset link from the email, they’ll be taken back to the same form where they can set a new password. The user can then log in again normally using your login form.

Also read: how to create a custom password reset form in WordPress.

8. Blog Post Submission Form

Addon Required: Post Submissions

An easy guest post submission workflow is critical for publishers. And this template does exactly that. The template features multiple sections, each focused on a specific goal. Your guest authors can add their biographical details and immediately start writing the blog post in the same form.

The Post Submissions settings can be used to map the form fields with WordPress post fields in order to create a complete article covering the title, content, body images, excerpt, featured image, author, and post type.

Basically, this form alone can handle the complete post creation process for a guest writer. When they submit the post, you can review the draft and proceed to publication.

Many websites only accept paid articles. You can easily add payment fields to the form to let the guest writer pay you at the same time as they submit the post, making for a smooth and painless process.

And there you have it! These are some of the most useful WPForms form templates with unique capabilities that can help streamline many critical processes for your business and website.

Next, Explore Advanced WPForms Features

The range of features in WPForms is quite vast. It’s unlikely that you’ll need to use all of these features at the same time, but I’ve come across many customers who were glad to learn about an existing feature they had no knowledge about!

Make sure to read our in-depth article on powerful WPForms features to build forms faster. If you’re looking for a quick method to manage student information and facilitate communication between teachers and parents, also check out this guide to create a class roster in WordPress.

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But how do you make a decision about where you should be hosting your digital fundraiser? In this post, I’ll answer this question to help you understand the pros and cons of each approach.

By the end of this post, you’ll be able to make an informed decision about WordPress fundraisers vs third-party platforms.

Quick Overview – Onsite Fundraisers vs Offsite Fundraisers

Let’s dive in deeper to compare important differences in self-hosted fundraisers on a WordPress site vs third-party platforms.

Understanding Donation Pages on WordPress vs Third-Party Sites

Before we explore the pros and cons, let’s clarify what we mean by donations hosted on WordPress and third-party donation pages.

A self-hosted donation page is one that you create and manage on your own WordPress website. This typically involves using a plugin like WP Charitable and WPForms, or similar tools to set up a donation form directly on your site.

On the other hand, a third-party donation page is hosted by an external service provider. These could be platforms like GoFundMe and JustGiving. While you can promote and link to these off-site donation pages from your WordPress site, the actual transaction occurs on the third-party platform.

WordPress Fundraisers

Creating a fundraiser directly on your website comes with various important advantages:

• Complete control and customization: When you host your own donation page, you have the freedom to design it exactly how you want. You can match it perfectly with your website’s branding with a lot of flexibility.
• Personal touch: Plugins like WPForms allow you to create personalized thank-you notes for donors, sent directly to their inbox as soon as the donation is complete.
• Reduced costs: Recurring donations often come with extra surcharges on third-party platforms. But with WPForms, you can accept recurring donations without any extra costs.
• Direct data ownership: When you have a custom donation form, you can acquire zero-party data like the email addresses of donors with their consent. This information can be invaluable for future campaigns, something that’s not possible with third-party tools.
• Faster transactions: A donation made through your site immediately ends up in your account with the payment service you’re using (Stripe, PayPal etc.). With third-party tools, your funds are held by the platform first before you can withdraw.

Third-Party Fundraising Sites

While hosting a donation on your own website confers some strong advantages, third-party also offer some notable conveniences:

• Easy setup and maintenance: Building a campaign is usually a breeze with websites like GoFundMe, even if you have no experience. While creating campaigns on your own website is easy with modern plugins, it might not be the ideal option if you don’t already have a website ready.
• Platform trust: If you’re a newer or lesser-known organization, people might not trust you enough to donate directly on your website. Donors are often more comfortable entering their payment information on a familiar platform like GoFundMe, which can boost donations.

Setting Up a Self-Hosted Donation Page on WordPress

There are a few ways you can create a donation page or form on your website. The solution you need depends on your goals and the kind of campaign you’re aiming for.

Let’s talk about some of the best available options.

Donation Forms with WPForms

WPForms is a plugin for creating forms (and that means any kind of form). In many cases, nonprofit websites need more than just a donation form–you might also need one general contact form, a separate volunteer application forms, and so on.

If that sounds like you, then WPForms can be the perfect fit for you even though it’s not a dedicated donation management plugin like some options I’ll share later on.

When it comes to donation forms, WPForms is one of the only plugins that lets you collect donations without necessarily upgrading to the Pro version. WPForms Lite connects with your Stripe account, allowing you to accept donations via your forms with 3% + additional Stripe fees per donation (if you upgrade to Pro, the 3% charge is removed too).

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With Stripe, donors can pay you via their credit cards or even mobile payment services like Apple Pay and Google Pay. And if you want to offer more options, you can easily integrate your forms with PayPal and Square as well with WPForms Pro.

You can create a customized donation form to accept one-time donations by offering different choices to the donors using the easy drag-and-drop form builder. This requires no coding knowledge and is highly intuitive for beginners.

You also have options for adding media and text inside your form to tell the story about your fundraising cause and get more people to donate.

WPForms also lets you collect recurring donations without extra costs that third-party platforms like GoFundMe usually charge. With WPForms Lite, you can accept either one-time donations or recurring donations on a single form.

But if you upgrade to WPForms Pro, you can enable both options on the same form and let the donors make their choice.

The best part is that you can add a newsletter subscription checkbox to the same form and add donors to your email list using built-in integrations for marketing tools like Drip, Constant Contact, Mailchimp, and more. This is great for staying in touch with your donors, sending them updates, and letting them know about future causes that they’re interested in supporting.

WPForms also has a neat payment tracking system built into it. You can track your donations with a chart, filter it by date range, and also see details for each donation in a table underneath. This is a supremely helpful tool for managing your donations without having to rely on any external solution for tracking.

So, if you need a donation form and other forms for your nonprofit that you can embed anywhere, WPForms is a fantastic choice. Plus, there’s a special discount for WPForms Pro and Elite exclusive to nonprofit organizations.

But if you’re looking for comprehensive donor management and crowdfunding features similar to what you get on sites like GoFundMe, there’s another great option that you can use on your own website that I’ll talk about next.

💡 Also Read: Giving Tuesday: How Nonprofits Can Promote Their Cause

Fundraising Campaigns with WP Charitable

WP Charitable is a plugin that lets you create full-fledged fundraising campaigns on your site similar to sites like GoFundMe. The difference is, that you have complete customization control and data ownership with the self-hosted campaigns created with WP Charitable.

Like WPForms, WP Charitable has a drag-and-drop campaign builder. You can include every kind of element you’d need for your donation page, from displaying your donation goals, the total amount you’ve raised, as well as fields for media and text.

It also offers ready-made templates for different kinds of fundraisers. You can start with a template and then freely customize it by changing the layout, rearranging the different fields, or adding/removing any elements you need. Here’s an example of a fundraiser I built using a free WP Charitable template:

The free version of WP Charitable integrates with PayPal and Stripe, charging the typical transaction fees associated with these payment gateways. But you can unlock many more payment options and really powerful features that can make your fundraiser a resounding success.

I’m a huge fan of WP Charitable’s donor management and reporting system. You can easily track donations with an easily digestible chart showing only the most important numbers you need to understand how well your fundraisers are performing.

But WP Charitable also goes far beyond that with advanced reports like LYBUNT / SYBUNT to help you spot past contributors who have stopped making donations recently so you can nurture and retain them easily.

On top of that, you have separate reports for donors, which you can filter by donors who have contributed the highest amounts for your fundraisers, recurring donors, and first-time donors.

That’s not all. It also supports integrations with marketing platforms like Mailchimp, Campaign Monitor, ConvertKit, and more, allowing you to nurture your donor list with emails and advanced workflows.

It gets even better when you use Charitable addons like Ambassadors–a feature that enables peer-to-peer fundraising if you have a network of fundraisers. In fact, you can even turn your website into a platform for other fundraisers who can host their campaigns on your website, exactly like GoFundMe.

Basically, WP Charitable turns your website into a complete fundraising platform for your organization and for other organizers as well.

Other WordPress Donation Solutions

With WordPress, you’re never short of options. There’s always a decent range of plugins available for any given task. And fundraising is no different. Apart from WPForms and WP Charitable, you can also use these plugins for online fundraising:

• WP Simple Pay
• GiveWP
• Accept Donations with PayPal
• Formidable Forms

I recommend reading our helpful breakdown of online charity tools to learn more about your options,

Creating Online Fundraisers on a Third-Party Site

As I hinted earlier, creating an online fundraiser is easiest when you’re using third-party websites. That’s because everything is pretty much already locked in and set for you. All you need to do is add your story, set your donation goal, connect the website with your bank account, and publish your fundraiser.

Some of the most popular websites for hosting fundraisers include:

• GoFundMe
• Donorbox
• Givebutter
• DonorPerfect

Every platform is different and has its own fees and pricing structure. So, make sure to read the fine print before choosing a website for your fundraiser.

Some websites like GoFundMe only offer basic donor management and share limited data with you. That means you won’t be able to build your email list or maintain a donor CRM based on your GoFundMe contributors. Besides, GoFundMe doesn’t offer any integrations with marketing or email tools.

If these features are important to you, consider alternatives like Donorbox or create custom-designed fundraisers on your own website.

Choosing a Fundraising Solution for Your Organization

Now that we’ve explored both options, you might be wondering which is the best choice for your organization. Your decision should be based on several factors:

• Availability of your own website
• Your budget
• The volume of donations you expect
• Your need for customization
• Your comfort level with handling sensitive data

In my experience, many growing nonprofits find that a self-hosted fundraising solution offers the best balance of control and cost-effectiveness.

However, if you’re just starting out and don’t have access to a website as an organization that people recognize and trust, a third-party solution might be the way to go.

Next, Get Inspired by Donation Page Examples

When you’re struggling for ideas, it’s always helpful to look to other sources for inspiration. Creating a custom donation page in WordPress gives you a lot of room for customization, but if you’re not sure what your page should look like, check out some of these donation page examples to get some ideas flowing!

Create Your Donation Form Now

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