Use this link to share with your colleagues:
All About Email Signup Forms: https://help.pm.leapevent.tech/a/1276578
Your patrons need to use a signup form to opt in to your marketing emails. In this article, we'll cover your options and our best practice recommendations, including:
- How do email signups get into my PatronManager database?
- What signup forms can I use?
- If you're using Emma
- If you're using MailChimp
- If you prefer to use the PatronManager signup form
- How should I capture email preferences?
- or How can my patrons sign up for specific email lists?
How do email signups get into my PatronManager database?
You'll provide your patrons with a signup form they'll use to opt in to your email marketing list. It'll look something like this:
Then, those emails will come in to your Unqualified Contact list, where you and your coworkers will qualify them. Next time you send a marketing email, they'll be able to receive it!
What signup forms can I use?
That depends! Which email marketing system are you using?
Note: if one of your patrons opted out of your marketing emails and later wants to sign back up for your mailing list, they'll almost certainly have to opt back in through your email marketing system (e.g. Emma or Mailchimp), even if you normally use the PatronManager signup form.
See How to Opt In a Patron Who Has Previously Opted Out of Your Email Lists for more info.
As long as you've set up the B12 Emma integration following our instructions (paying special attention to Step 7, Configure the connector to bring over new Contacts from Emma to PatronManager), you can use an Emma signup form and those new signups will automatically flow over to PatronManager.
How do I use an Emma signup form?
Most importantly, we recommend you do not add Emma Groups to your Emma Signup Forms. Instead, use our recommended "Mailing List Preferences" field (see below), sync that field up with Emma, and add it to your Emma signup forms.
For the overall process, check out Emma's help documentation for some excellent articles on how to create and customize your forms:
- For a regular signup form, search "regular signup form"
- For a lightbox form (which pops up on your website), search "lightbox form"
Why shouldn't we add Emma Groups to our Emma Signup Forms?
In short: Emma Groups don't play well with reports in PatronManager.
If a patron manually signs up for a Group via Emma, but they're not on the report you've linked to your Emma Group in PatronManager, they won't necessarily receive emails for the group they signed up for - because you're automatically updating that Group's membership based on the report, rather than the information in Emma.
As long as you've set up the B12 Mailchimp integration following our instructions (paying special attention to Step 5, Configure the connector to bring Contacts from Mailchimp into PatronManager), you can use a Mailchimp signup form and those new signups will automatically flow over to PatronManager.
Regardless of the email marketing system you use, you can always collect contact info directly into PatronManager if you prefer. We typically recommend using a signup form from your email marketing system if the end goal is to add the person to your email list, but it's really up to you!
It's likely we've already created a simple, embeddable signup form for you with background and font colors to match your website. Jump over to our How to Use the PatronManager Signup Form article to find how to find, edit, and send patrons to your form.
How should I capture email preferences?
We recommend a multi-select picklist field called "Email List Preferences". Learn more about creating this custom field in our How to Track and Use Email/Mail List Preferences article, and learn how to add it to your PatronManager Signup Form in our How to Use the PatronManager Signup Form article.
