How To Create A Form In ConvertKit – A Complete Tutorial

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Every blogger has an arsenal of tools to manage, grow and analyze their blog.

And in my arsenal of tools, ConvertKit* is the tool I use to send emails to my subscribers.

What I like about ConverKit is that it gives a blogger all the bells and whistles we need to grow our mailing list and increase sales and it leaves out the things we don’t. Which only make sense since the app was created by bloggers so they know exactly what we need.

The builders are really easy to use and you get detailed subscriber growth analytics reports.

And it’s got e-commerce integrations, lead capture integrations, membership site and course platform integrations and more.

They even make switching from your current email marketing provider easy with helpful articles to walk you through it from start to finish.

Recommended For You: Email Marketing Tips For Beginners

How To Create A Form On ConvertKit – A Complete Tutorial

ConvertKit recently gave the form builder a new look and feel which makes it the perfect time for this tutorial.

So if you’re using ConvertKit for your email marketing campaigns but you’re not sure how to start here’s a complete tutorial that walks you through a new form set up.

Before we get started here are somethings you’ll need to have ready:

• an incentive like a printable, checklist or guide
• copy for your welcome/confirmation email
• link to your incentive or redirect page
• the ConvertKit plugin installed activated (I’ll tell you more about this later in this blog post)
• an image that’s 500×325 pixels is size

And now on to the tutorial…

Click on the Forms tab. Scroll down to the center of the page and select ‘create form’ on the right side of the page.

Next, decide what kind of form you want to create. For this tutorial, I’ve selected ‘form’.

Next, choose from the two options which format you want to use. If you’re wondering what the difference is, an ‘inline’ form is embedded within a page or post and a modal will pop-up the form.

For this tutorial, select ‘modal’.

Now choose a template. I’m going to go with the Full template.

Before you start editing, the first thing to do is name your form. On the top left of the screen there is a default title. Click on the pencil icon to change the name then click the save button located on the top right of the page to save changes.

To edit the heading and content within the form double-click the text, edit then click the save button to save your changes.

Click on the image placeholder to upload an image. This is how the form will look like. But if you prefer a larger image, I’ll show you how you can do that in a bit.

If you want to add more fields click the plus sign. A custom field editor will appear on the right to name the field and change the appearance.

Select the ‘custom field’ dropdown and select any option. Then click on ‘custom field label’ to change the name of that field. Click the save button to save the changes.

The Final Touches

To put the final touches on the form’s appearance click the wand on the right side of the page.

 

If you want to change the template, click on ‘change template’. And if you want to change the background colors scroll down a tad and click on the color box to edit the color to your liking.

Finally, if you want a larger image to appear on the form, click background image to upload the image you want to use.

Here’s how the form will look like with the image set as the background image:

Now let’s edit the subscribe button. Click on the button to open the editor. You can change the font color and background color. And to edit the call to action text, double-click on ‘subscribe’. Don’t forget to click the save button.

When you’re done, click the eye icon to preview the form and if you like how it looks you’re ready to move set up what happens after someone subscribes and the incentive email.

Set Up Action and Incentive Email

Click the settings icon in the blue bar to the right.

By default, the ‘show a success message’ is ticked. But if you want to redirect subscribers to a thank you page or a download page, tick the ‘redirect to another page’ then copy and paste the link in the box below it.

The next section is the display options. This is where you decide when to show the form to your visitors.

• It can be when ConvertKit detects your visitor is about to exit a page
• When the visitor scrolls to a certain percentage of the page
• Or when the visitor is on the page for so many seconds

Underneath the display options is a code you can copy and paste to a page or blog post if you want to trigger the modal with a link.

Next, select which devices should see your form and then select how often should your visitor see your form.

Check over the settings, then click save at the top to continue.

Incentive Email

Now click on the envelope icon in the blue bar. If you want to send new subscribers an incentive email like a download or link, tick the box and edit the email contents. Tick the box next to ‘auto-confirm new subscribers’.

Next, decide if you’re going to include a link or download a file.

Double check the spelling in your email content, make sure the link is correct or that you’ve downloaded the right file. And if it all looks good to go, click the save button.

Advanced Settings

The last icon is the advanced settings section.

In this section you’ll select what happens to the form when returning visitors have already opted in.

Tick the box next to ‘send subscriber to thank you page if you want to redirect new opt-ins there.

And last but not least tick the box next to ‘invisible reCAPTCHA’ to enable reCAPTCHA on the form and enable the badge.

Save any changes you make and you are done!

Give the form one last preview before embedding it on your website.

Embed The Form

Now that your form is ready, the next step is to embed the form on your website. But before you do this make sure the ConvertKit plugin is installed and configured.

To configure the plugin, from the WordPress dashboard look for the ConvertKit link. If you don’t see it, look in the settings tab.

Click the links to get your ConvertKit API key and API Secret then copy and paste that info into the appropriate box.

Next, if you have more than one form, select a default form if you want one then tick the ‘save connection data to a log file’ if you choose then save changes.

When you install the ConvertKit plugin it will automatically attach your form to any post or page.

But if you have more than one form, scroll down to the blog post settings and you’ll see a ConverKit section like this:

Click the dropdown arrow to select the form you want to attach and that’s it!

If you would rather embed the form using a code instead of the plugin, click ‘embed’ in the tool bar in ConvertKit.

The next window to appear will display the options to embed your form. You can choose the JavaScript, HTML code or click on WordPress to copy the shortcode and then paste that in any blog post or page.

And that, dear reader is how you create a form in ConvertKit. If you haven’t tried ConvertKit, click here to start a 30-day free trial*.

Over To You

I hope you found this tutorial helpful.

If ConvertKit is your email marketing provider tell me how it’s been going for you in the comments below. But if you haven’t tried it, what’s been holding you back?

And before you go, please share this post on social media so that other bloggers who need help with their forms can use this to guide them.

Thanks!