Put signup forms where interested visitors will see them, and keep the fields to a minimum.
Priya sells maths help to parents whose children are in primary school, and her lead magnet is a heuristics checklist. Before anyone can download it, she has to settle three things about her signup form: which pages it appears on, which details it requests, and the wording around the button.
It helps to start with what goes wrong. Someone follows a link to an article, and within two seconds a box fills the screen asking for their email, name, birthday and phone number. Closing it means hunting for a small grey cross. Faced with that, most visitors either leave the site or give an email address that isn't real, and the business gains nothing either way.
The reason to sign up came from lesson 2.1. A good offer can still be let down by the form around it, so its location, its fields and the words beside the button each need some thought.
Put your form where people who already care about the topic will see it. Four placements handle most of what a small business site needs: the homepage, the end of a blog post or guide, a dedicated landing page, and a pop-up.
Plenty of first-time visitors arrive on your homepage. A brief section about halfway down that offers your lead magnet reaches people who are looking around without a clear plan yet.
The bottom of a blog post or guide tends to perform best. Someone who read to the end cares about the subject, and a lead magnet on the same subject follows on easily from what they just read. Priya has published an article about helping a child with P5 fractions. Parents who reach the end of it are interested in exactly what her checklist covers, so that is where her form belongs.
A dedicated landing page exists only to offer the lead magnet and take the email address. You can link to it from a social post, your WhatsApp profile, an ad or a QR code. Mei Ling (an invented example) has a cake business and prints a QR code on her cake boxes that opens her landing page. For how to lay one out, see lesson 5.1 "The sections of a landing page, top to bottom" in the course "Content and copywriting that people read".
A pop-up is a box shown on top of the page, triggered either by a delay or by signs that the visitor is about to leave. Handled with care for the visitor, it can do well, and the last section explains the settings.
There's no need to use all four from the first day. Choose the two pages your most interested visitors already visit, and begin with those.
Each field you add means more typing and gives people another point at which to give up. The only one you really need is the email address, and Mei Ling's form asks for nothing else.
Add a first-name field only when you have a use for it, such as opening your welcome emails with the person's name. Priya does this: she signs her emails and addresses each parent by name, so her form has two fields, first name and email. When you can't say for sure that you'd use a name, drop the field. You can ask for it later, and lesson 6.2 shows how to gather extra details over time.
Phone numbers, birthdays and postcodes on a first form mostly reduce the number of people who sign up. The PDPA also applies here: collect only what you need for the purpose you told people about.
The decision to sign up happens when someone's eye reaches the button, so the details they need should be right there. Directly next to or below the button, add a short line stating what they'll receive and how often. Information tucked behind a privacy policy link goes unread at the moment it would matter.
That short line is the consent line, which tells people what they get, how often, and that they can unsubscribe. It's the line you drafted in lesson 1.2, and it serves a legal purpose and a persuasive one at once. Priya's says: "Get the heuristics checklist now, then one email a fortnight with a maths tip for P5 and P6. Unsubscribe any time." In one line she names the checklist, says what will arrive afterwards and how often, and lets parents know they can leave.
For the button itself, use words that describe what clicking does. "Send me the checklist" tells the visitor what they'll get, while "Submit" gives them no information about it.
Many pop-ups are badly done, which has given all of them a poor reputation. The usual faults are showing up as the page loads before any reading has happened, covering the whole screen, hiding the close button or making it tiny, and on phones being close to impossible to get rid of.
Set yours up the other way:
Let it appear only after the visitor shows interest, for example after scrolling well down the page or staying on it for a while. Give it a close button that is big and easy to see. After someone closes it, stop the same pop-up from appearing again on each page they open. On phones, show a small banner along the bottom of the screen in place of a box over the content.
Google's Search documentation states that intrusive pop-ups covering the main content on mobile can make a page less useful to searchers, which gives you one more reason to keep a pop-up modest.
The delay, trigger and repeat frequency are settings in most email tools. When you know what you want, configuring them takes a few minutes.
In the activity below you will sketch your own form: the headline, the fields you will ask for, the button text and the consent line, plus the two pages where it will first appear.
Sketch the signup form for your site: headline, fields, button text and consent line. Then write down the two pages it will go on.
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