How to create a signup form that collects new email addresses

A signup form that collects new email addresses rests on three decisions: where to place it, what to offer in exchange for the contact details and how to write and design it. First, Google Analytics and Search Console tell you which pages people visit and what they are looking for there. Then you choose a lead magnet for each page that follows on from its content. Finally, you design the form: a headline with an outcome, one or two fields, an unticked consent box and a button that says what people will get. Below you will find a step by step procedure, current data on what increases and what reduces the number of signups, examples of a good and a bad form and a guide to the new Quanda form editor.

In brief

1. Older articles bring 76% of blog views and 92% of blog leads (HubSpot). That is why the form belongs on your most visited older pages, not just on the home page.
2. The offer has to follow on from the content of the page. According to Wisepops, targeted forms convert more than twice as well as generic ones.
3. Every extra field costs you contacts: one field 4.41%, two 2.90%, three 1.93% (Sleeknote 2026). Ask for the email address and only what you will use.
4. A first person button converts at 1.18% versus 0.80% for a neutral one (Popupsmart 2026), and a line about spam below it cut signups by 18.7%.
5. The colour of the button matters not for its shade but for its contrast with the surroundings. The text on the button needs a contrast of at least 4.5:1.
6. Before launch, fill in the form yourself on a computer and a mobile phone, and deliver the promised material by automation within a minute.

In short: where to place the form, what to offer, how to write it and what can go wrong

• Where to place it: on the pages with the most traffic and a topic for which you have an offer. The Pages and screens and Landing page reports in Google Analytics will show you which ones.
• What to offer: content or a tool that follows on from the page: a checklist for an article, a quote for a price list, a deadline reminder for a product.
• How to write it: a headline with an outcome, one or two sentences of description, two or three bullet points, one or two fields, a button with a benefit and a sentence about what will arrive.
• What can go wrong: a long form, a generic "Subscribe to our news", a pre-ticked consent box and silence after submission.

What a lead magnet form is

A lead magnet form is a short form on a website in which visitors exchange their email address for something that interests them: a checklist, a guide, a quote, a discount, a deadline reminder or a webinar registration. The lead magnet is the offer that makes people give their address. The form then decides whether they notice the offer and whether it seems worth it to them.

A form on your website is also the cheapest source of contacts that are truly yours. Nobody rents them to you, you obtained the consent yourself and the contacts keep coming every day, even when you are not thinking about them. How many there will be depends on three things: the page and its traffic, the offer and the form itself. This whole article is built around them.

Three steps to a form that collects emails

You create a form that collects emails in three steps: you analyse your traffic and choose the pages, choose a lead magnet for each one and design the form. Building it in the editor, testing it and setting up automation then take a few hours.

The whole procedure in eight steps:

1. In Google Analytics, find the pages with the most traffic and the landing pages, and in Search Console the queries that bring people to them.
2. Choose three to five pages where traffic, interest in the topic and an offer you can prepare come together.
3. For each page, choose a lead magnet that follows on from its content and helps readers with what they are dealing with right now.
4. Write a headline with an outcome for the reader, one or two sentences of description and two or three specific bullet points.
5. Ask only for the email address and the details you will really use, add an unticked consent box and a button that says what people will get.
6. Build the form in the form editor and adjust the desktop and mobile versions separately.
7. Fill in the form yourself on a computer and on a mobile phone and check the email, the tag and the entry in Completed forms.
8. Set up an automation that delivers the promised material within a minute, and after two weeks compare submissions with views.

Step 1: Analyse your traffic and choose pages for the form

Traffic analysis means finding out which pages of your website people arrive on, where they come from, how long they stay and what they are looking for. People by no means arrive only through the home page. Often the first page of a visit is an article or a product page that a search engine, an AI assistant or a link in an email sent them to. That is where the form has the best chance.

HubSpot shows that the analysis pays off. According to its blog, 76% of monthly views and 92% of leads from the blog come from older articles. When HubSpot adjusted the offer in articles with high traffic and weak conversion to match the keywords people arrived with, it more than doubled the number of leads from those articles.

Google Analytics: which pages people read

Google Analytics 4 is a free Google tool for measuring website traffic. Three reports are enough to choose your pages:

• Reports > Engagement > Pages and screens. Shows which pages have the most views and active users and how long people stay on them (Average engagement time). Sort by views and look at the last 90 days.
• Reports > Engagement > Landing page. Shows which page people start their visit on. This is where the form makes its first impression. If you cannot see the report, the account administrator can add it to the navigation.
• Reports > Acquisition > Traffic acquisition. Shows where people come from: search, social networks, emails or AI assistants. With the + button next to the dimension, add Page path and screen class to see the sources for a specific page.

Two more settings are useful. A comparison by the Device category dimension shows how many people visit the page on a mobile phone, so you can design the mobile version of the form accordingly. And when you switch on Enhanced measurement in the data stream settings, Analytics records scrolling to 90% of the page and interactions with forms. Then mark the form submission as a key event and you will see which pages actually bring in contacts. You will find a detailed description of the reports in the Google Analytics help.

Watch out: Automatic measurement of form interactions may not capture every form and sometimes fires even on a failed submission. It is more reliable to count submissions through views of a thank-you page or by the completed forms directly in Quanda.

Search Console: which queries bring people in

Google Search Console is a free Google tool that shows how your website appears in search. For choosing an offer it matters more than Analytics, because it reveals what people are looking for on the page.

1. Open the Performance report (Search results) and switch to the Pages tab.
2. Click the row with the page. The report is filtered to that page only.
3. Switch to the Queries tab. You will see the queries people used to reach the page, how many times it appeared and how many times they clicked on it.

The queries are a ready-made brief for a lead magnet. Someone who arrives at an article about a kitchen renovation with the query "kitchen unit dimensions" will appreciate a checklist of dimensions. Someone searching for "made to measure kitchen price" will appreciate a quote. Since 2025, the Performance report in Search Console has also included impressions in AI Overviews and AI Mode. The filtering procedure is described in the Search Console help.

Microsoft Clarity: how far people scroll

Microsoft Clarity is a free Microsoft tool that shows click heatmaps, scroll maps and session recordings. For placing a form, the scroll map is the most useful. It shows what percentage of visitors reach each part of the page, and the Average fold line marks what people see without scrolling.

Place the form in the part that most readers reach, not below the point where half of them leave. According to Nielsen Norman Group, people spend 57% of their time on a page in its first screen and 74% in the first two. How far people read depends on the content, though: Chartbeat found across two billion visits that on a typical content page, 66% of attention goes to the part below the first screen. Clarity will show you how it works on your website. Since 31 October 2025, Clarity requires consent to analytics cookies from visitors in the EU, so connect it to your cookie banner. You will find a description of the maps in the Microsoft Clarity documentation.

How to choose pages: traffic, intent and offer

You choose pages for the form by three questions: how many people visit the page, what they are looking for there and whether you can offer them something extra. Score each question from 1 to 3 and start with the pages with the highest total.

Look above all for pages with high traffic and few contacts. That is where a new form brings the most. Leave the About us page or your contact page without a lead magnet form, people are looking for something else there.

Which type of form for which page

A link or a form right in the text works better than you might think. HubSpot found on its eleven most successful articles that 47 to 93% of leads came from a link to the offer within the text, while the banner at the end of the article brought only 6% on average. According to our measurements with several Quanda customers, an animated form collects up to two and a half times more contacts than a form placed in a fixed position. How to set it up so that it does not annoy people is described in the article Animated forms: a vending machine for new contacts.

Step 2: Choose a lead magnet that matches the page content

A lead magnet is content or a tool you offer in exchange for contact details. A different one works on each page, because each page answers a different question. A generic "Subscribe to our newsletter" offers nothing specific and people skip it.

The data confirm this. Wisepops measured a conversion rate of 5.53% for pop-up forms targeted at specific pages, compared with 2.40% for forms shown the same way everywhere. Brian Dean of Backlinko added a checklist on exactly the topic of his most visited article, and the share of visitors who left their email rose from 0.54% to 4.82%. This kind of offer is called a content upgrade: an extension of the article that saves readers work on what they are reading right now.

When choosing, ask yourself three questions. Will the offer help readers with what they are dealing with right now? Can you deliver it straight after the form is submitted? And will it bring in people who could one day become your customers? A competition to win a tablet brings hundreds of contacts, but not kitchen customers.

You will find specific lead magnets by industry in two sister articles. For businesses, it is Lead magnets in B2B marketing: what brings quality leads, for consumers Lead magnets in B2C beyond e-commerce: examples for 7 industries. If you decide on an e-book, you will find the procedure in the article How to create an e-book people are happy to give their contact details for.

Tip: Not sure what to offer? Go through the Search Console queries for your most visited page and the questions customers ask you by email and on the phone. The most frequent question you can answer better than others is your lead magnet.

Step 3: Design a form people will trust

A form is a short advertisement for your offer. Within a few seconds, visitors decide whether the offer is worth their email address, and they read only a fraction of the text. According to Nielsen Norman Group, people read at most 28% of the words on a page, more likely around 20%, and when scanning they mostly take in the first two words of a line. Every part of the form therefore has to work on its own.

Anatomy of a form: what it must contain

The ranges in the table are a practical guide, not a measured result. Nobody publishes data on the ideal headline length in a form. What the data do show clearly is that simpler text converts better. In 2024, Unbounce measured across more than 41,000 landing pages a conversion rate of 11.1% for copy readable at a 5th to 7th grade level and 5.3% for professionally written copy.

Headline: promise an outcome, not a newsletter

The form headline is the only part that almost everyone reads. It has to say what people will get, and right in the first few words. A question in the headline works just as well as a statement, Popupsmart measured no difference in 2026. What matters is being specific.

Description and bullet points: what exactly will arrive

The description is one or two sentences below the headline. It says exactly what will arrive, in what format and why to trust it. The bullet points then show the specific content. Two or three are enough. A fifth bullet point convinces no one, it only makes the form longer.

Fields: how many and which ones

Every extra field reduces the number of people who submit the form. The data differ in the details, but the direction is the same everywhere.

Some fields put people off more than others. According to a 2026 Mailchimp survey, 65% of brands want a phone number in their forms, but only 28% of consumers are willing to give it. Zuko, which measures behaviour in forms, recorded the highest share of people abandoning a form at the password field (10.5%), the email field (6.4%) and the phone field (6.3%). HubSpot found that questions about age and exact address significantly reduce conversion.

When which fields are enough:

Do not ask for an address when you are not sending anything by post. Ask for a phone number only where you promise to call. And when you need a detail for follow-up emails, such as industry or company size, ask in the first email or with a short survey. Our own form offering tips on email subject lines has a single required field, the email address, and 7.1% of the people who see it fill it in.

Watch out: What matters is the number of fields people see, not just the number of required ones. An optional field also makes the form longer and slows people down. Nielsen Norman Group recommends one or two optional fields at most, clearly marked.

How to label and set up fields

A field label is a short text above the field that says what belongs in it. Placeholder text is the grey text inside the field that disappears as soon as people start typing. It does not replace the label: according to Nielsen Norman Group, placeholder text used instead of a label strains short term memory, makes it harder to check for errors, and people mistake it for a filled in value.

• A label above the field. In Matteo Penzo's measurements, people moved their gaze from a label above the field to the field in about 50 milliseconds, from a label on the left in 500 milliseconds. On mobile, a label above the field is the only sensible option.
• Plain words. "Email", "First name", "When does your fixed rate end". Not "Enter your email address in this field" and not "Your best email".
• An example as placeholder text. Put a sample of what the detail should look like in the field: "jana@email.com", "e.g. 05/2028".
• The right field type. An email type field shows a keyboard with the @ sign on mobile and lets the browser offer autofill. According to Google's 2024 measurements, people using autofill abandon forms 75% less often.
• Errors right next to the field. Luke Wroblewski measured 22% more successfully submitted forms and 42% shorter completion times with inline validation next to the field. Validate when people leave the field, not on every keystroke.

Consent and reassurance

Consent to receive commercial communications is a voluntary and separate box that people tick themselves. A pre-ticked box does not constitute consent, as recital 32 of the GDPR states, and the Court of Justice of the EU confirmed this in 2019 in the Planet49 judgment. Deliver the promised material even to those who do not tick the consent box.

What people fear most is that you will flood them. According to a 2026 Mailchimp survey of US consumers, 50% worry about a flood of messages right after signing up. The sentence "We will never spam you" does not help, though. In a test by Michael Aagaard, it reduced signups by 18.7% because it reminded people of the worry. A factual sentence without the word spam, by contrast, increased signups by 19.5%.

Trust also grows with a sender people know, a link to the privacy policy and a clean look without flashing elements. A subscriber count ("Join 12,000 people") helps only when it is really large. Tests by Recart showed that a subscriber counter in a form tends to reduce conversion, and in the GoodUI overview of tests its benefit was weak. Double opt-in helps you verify the address and filter out typos.

Button: text, colour and size

The button is the call to action (CTA). It is the last thing people read before submitting, and it should confirm what they will get.

Text. Write what people will get, not what they will do. The word "Submit" promises nothing, and HubSpot found that pages with a "Submit" button have lower conversion. The first person works better than the second: in a test by Michael Aagaard, changing "Get your" to "Get my" increased clicks by 90%, and in 2026 Popupsmart measured a conversion rate of 1.18% for first person buttons compared with 0.80% for neutral ones.

Colour. The shade itself does not matter. In 2026, Popupsmart measured no significant difference between button colours, and the famous HubSpot test in which a red button got 21% more clicks than a green one is explained by contrast: red stood out on a green website. What matters is whether the button stands out from its surroundings. That is why a complementary colour is chosen for the button, a colour from the opposite side of the colour wheel to the main colour of the website: orange for blue, red for green, yellow for purple.

The text on the button needs a contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1 against the button colour, and the button itself at least 3:1 against the form background, as set out in the WCAG 2.2 accessibility guidelines. White text on light orange or yellow does not meet these thresholds.

How to choose and combine colours is described in detail in the article How to get colours on your side.

Size. The button has to be easy to hit with a finger. Apple recommends controls of at least 44 × 44 points, Google 48 × 48 dp, and WCAG 2.2 sets a minimum of 24 × 24 pixels. On mobile, make the button the full width of the form.

Images, icons and emoji

An image helps when it shows what people will get. Wisepops measured a conversion rate of 5.71% for pop-up forms with an image compared with 3.98% without one, and Sleeknote 4.05% compared with 0.66%. OptiMonk, however, measured no difference. What makes the difference is the image you use: a guide cover, a checklist preview or a calculator result makes the offer tangible, an illustrative stock photo only takes up space.

Icons can replace bullet points or accompany the reassurance below the button (a padlock next to the privacy sentence, an envelope next to the sentence about when the email will arrive). One icon per line, in the same style and colour.

Emoji do not affect conversion. In 2026, Popupsmart measured at most a small difference in clicks and none in submissions. One emoji in the headline does no harm, a string of emoji looks like an advert and hurts a form that is meant to build trust.

Mobile: a different form, not a smaller one

Most people now arrive on a mobile phone. Unbounce found that 83% of landing page visits come from mobile, yet mobile converts 8% worse than desktop. For pop-up forms it is the other way round, Wisepops measured 4.98% on mobile compared with 3.67% on desktop. So mobile pays off when the form works well on it.

• One column, labels above the fields, a full width button.
• Shorter text: a headline, one sentence of description, two bullet points at most.
• A smaller image or none, so that the fields and the button are visible without scrolling.
• A pop-up form must not cover the whole content, otherwise you risk problems with Google.

Example: a bad and a good form

Both examples offer the same thing, a kitchen dimensions checklist for readers of an article about planning a kitchen. The kitchen studio is fictional.

On mobile, shorten the same form. The Quanda form editor lets you design the mobile version separately:

What changed between the bad and the good version:

How to create the form in the new Quanda editor

In Quanda, you build the form in the new form editor, which Quanda launched on 6 October 2026. It is a drag and drop editor: you put the form together with your mouse from fields and elements and see the result straight away. You set up fields, design, animation and custom CSS in one place.

1. Create the form and in the settings name it after the page and the offer, for example "Kitchen article, dimensions checklist". The name is how you will find it in the forms overview and in Completed forms.
2. Adjust the default fields. A new form contains a title, the required fields First name, Last name and E-mail, consent to the processing of personal data and a Submit button. Delete Last name and switch Required to NO for First name. Only the email stays required.
3. Add what sells the form. On the Fields tab, under Other elements, you will find Heading 1 to 3, Text, Image, Video, Consent, Checkbox, Dropdown menu, Line and Rectangle. Drag a label, a description, bullet points and a cover image into the form. Use a second Consent for optional newsletter sign up.
4. Write the texts according to the tables above: a headline with an outcome, a description, two or three bullet points, field labels, consent text with a link to the policy and a first person button instead of Submit.
5. Set up the design. Clicking an element opens the Design tab. For fields, set the field label position to the top, so that the label sits above the field. For the button, set the Button color to a complementary colour, the Font color with enough contrast and, if you like, an Icon before or after the text. You can choose from 63 Google fonts, take the colours and font from your website.
6. Design the mobile version. Switch to mobile at the top and when asked whether you want a different design for mobile devices, answer Yes. Shorten the text and keep one field.
7. Prepare the thank-you page. On the Thank-you page tab, write what happens next: "The checklist is on its way, check your email." With the cog icon in the top right corner you choose whether after submission the visitor stays on the page, sees the thank-you message or is redirected to another page.
8. Choose how the form appears. Without animation, the form is embedded in the page. On the Animation tab, turn on Enable form animation, choose the direction (from the bottom, top, left, right or popup) and whether the form appears when the page loads, after a set number of seconds or only after a specific part of the page is displayed. That part is the place in the page where you insert the form code: the form appears as soon as the visitor scrolls it into view. If you put the code in the middle or at the end of an article, the form appears once the reader scrolls to that point. Quanda does not offer showing the form when a visitor is about to leave the page. In the further animation settings you decide how long the form stays hidden from someone who closed it (5, 10 or 14 days or 1 month). You will find the details in the help article Form animation.
9. Place the form on your website. On the Embed Code page, copy the script and the code and paste them into the pages you chose. The Check settings button verifies that everything is ready. Quanda inserts the form directly as HTML, not as a frame, so it loads quickly and takes on the look of your website. Unlike forms embedded through an iframe, the form is an ordinary part of the page, you can fine tune its look with your own CSS and its submissions are easier to measure.

On the Embed Code page you will also find an address where the form is shown as a standalone web page. It is useful for testing before you place the form on your website and for a QR code in a shop, at a trade fair or in print advertising, with details in the article Trade fair leads: how to collect them and not waste them. The step by step procedure is described in the help article How to create and set up an active form.

Tip: In Quanda, forms are available in the custom package from the Standard level, which includes 15 forms. Give each page its own form with its own offer, so that in Completed forms you can see which place on your website brings in the most contacts.

Try the new form editor in Quanda

How to test the form before launch

A form test is a check that the whole form works: from filling it in through the email to the record on the contact. First test it yourself, then let it run and measure.

A hands-on test:

• The editor has no separate preview. So open the form via the address for displaying it as a web page, which you will find on the Embed Code page, before you place it on your website.
• Fill in the form on a computer and on a mobile phone, ideally on both an iOS and an Android phone.
• Submit it once with the consent box ticked and once without.
• Try an incorrectly entered email and an empty required field. The error message must say what to fix.
• Check that the email with the promised material arrived and that the links in it work.
• In Quanda, check that the contact got the right tag, the automation ran and the submission appeared in Completed forms.
• If you have double opt-in switched on, click the verification link and check that the contact is verified.
• Go through the form using only the keyboard (the Tab key) and check that you can always see where you are.

Measuring after launch. Form conversion is the share of people who submitted the form out of everyone who saw it. In Quanda, the CTR column in the forms overview shows it, as the ratio of submitted forms to form views. Next to it you see the number of submitted forms, new contacts and edited contacts, and you will find individual submissions in Completed forms. Google Analytics adds where people came to the page with the form from. For comparison: our form offering tips on email subject lines is filled in by 7.1% of the people who see it. Pop-up form benchmarks range from just under 1% to around 5% depending on the source, and the median for landing pages is 6.6% according to Unbounce.

Improving. Change only one thing at a time, such as the headline or the button text, and let each version run for at least two weeks. Optimizely and VWO both recommend running a test for at least one full week, to capture the differences between weekdays and the weekend, and ideally ending it within four weeks. With low traffic, compare longer periods.

How to set up what happens after submission

After submitting a form, people expect the promised material straight away. A form automation is a rule triggered by the form submission that takes an action: it sends an email, adds a tag, alerts a salesperson or saves the consent details. In Quanda, you set it up in the form's left menu in the Automation section.

The confirmation email is the most read message you send a contact. Our confirmation email with subject line tips is opened by 60.2% of recipients. Put the promised material at the top, add one button and information about what comes next. Follow it with an email series of three to five messages. All seven actions and the four automations worth setting up for every form are described in the article Form automation: how to set it up and make the most of it.

The most common form mistakes

• A generic offer. "Subscribe to our news", the same on every page. People do not know what they will get.
• A form like a doctor's questionnaire. Asking for a phone number, address and job title for a checklist puts most people off.
• Placeholder text instead of labels. Once people start typing, they do not know what belonged in the field.
• A pre-ticked consent box. It is not valid and it undermines trust.
• A "Submit" button in the background colour. It promises nothing and nobody sees it.
• A sentence about spam. It reminds people of the worry you want to dispel.
• A shrunken mobile version. Tiny text, a button below the edge of the screen, fields side by side.
• Silence after submission. Without an email within a minute, people forget why they filled in the form.

Checklist: a lead magnet form

Before launch, check that:

• The form is on a page with traffic and a topic the offer belongs to.
• The offer follows on from the content of the page and you can deliver it straight away.
• The headline promises an outcome and makes sense even without the rest of the form.
• The description has two sentences at most and there are three bullet points at most.
• Only the email address and the details the offer cannot work without are required.
• The fields have labels above them and the right type.
• The consent to receive news is unticked and separate from the privacy policy.
• The button says what people will get and stands out with a contrasting colour.
• The text below the button says when the material will arrive and how to unsubscribe.
• The mobile version has one column and a full width button.
• An automation sends the material within a minute and adds a tag.
• You have filled in the form yourself on a computer and on a mobile phone.

Conclusion

A good form does not start in the editor, but in your traffic data. When you know where people go and what they are looking for, the offer almost writes itself and the form only has to say quickly what people will get. Ask for as little as possible, promise something specific and deliver it straight away.

You can go through the whole process from the form to the lead magnet and follow-up emails in the free online course Collecting contacts: forms and lead magnets. If you are not sure where to place the form or what to offer, get in touch. We will go through your website traffic with you, suggest an offer and help you build the form and set up the automations.