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Customizing your subscription group subscribe page

By default, the subscribe and unsubscribe webpages for a subscription group are hosted on e3 Software webservers. If you'd like to use your own customized subscribe page, you can connect your HTML subscribe form to Direct Mail.

There are three webpages that a user sees when subscribing to your list:

Sign Up: The initial page where the user is asked to enter his/her name, email address, and other optional information. Once the user completes and submits this form, a confirmation email is sent to the given email address and the user is taken to the "Posted" page:

Posted: This page informs the user that a confirmation email has been sent to their email address and that they should check their inbox to continue. When the user receives the confirmation email, the email instructs them to click a link to confirm their email address. Upon clicking the link they are added to your subscription group and the user is taken to the "Subscribed" page:

Subscribed: This page informs the user that they have been added to the subscription group and tells them how they can unsubscribe in the future.

You can use your own hosted webpage in place of any of the default webpages provided by Direct Mail. If you choose to host your own sign up page, you can connect the HTML sign up form to Direct Mail:

To connect your HTML sign up form to Direct Mail:

Step 1

The <form> opening HTML tag should look like the following: <form method="post" action="http://ethreemail.com/e3ds/s.php">

Step 2

The body of your form must contain the following two inputs:
<input type="hidden" name="group_e3ds_id" value="the ID of your subscription group">
<input type="text" name="subscriber_email">


group_e3ds_id is the ID of your subscription group. You can find this ID by double-clicking your subscription group and examining the default subscribe URL. The portion of the URL following "g=" is the subscription group ID. For example, if the subscribe URL displayed by Direct Mail was http://ethreemail.com/e3ds/s.php?g=a12345, then group ID would be a12345.

subscriber_email is the email address of the subscriber.

Step 3

The body of your form can optionally contain the following inputs:
<input type="text" name="subscriber_name">
<input type="hidden" name="posted_url" value="the URL of your custom Posted page">
<input type="hidden" name="subscribed_url" value="the URL of your custom Subscribed page">


subscriber_name is the name of your subscriber.

posted_url is the URL of your custom Posted page. Again, this page should inform the user that a confirmation email has been sent and advise them to check their inbox. This URL will be passed two query string variables: e=(email address of the subscriber) and g=(the subscription group ID).

subscribed_url is the URL of your custom Subscribed page. Again, this page should inform the user that they have been subscribed to the mailing list and give instructions on how to unsubscribe. This URL will be passed two query string variables: e=(email address of the subscriber) and g=(the subscription group ID).

Step 4

If you'd like to gather additional information from the subscriber (beyond email address and name), you can optionally include up to 15 custom inputs in your HTML form. These custom inputs correspond to the 15 custom columns in Direct Mail's address table:

<input type="text" name="custom_1">
<input type="text" name="custom_2">
<input type="text" name="custom_3">
...


Note that even if you have assigned custom column names in Direct Mail, the HTML input tags should still be named custom_1, custom_2, etc.

Below is a full example of a HTML form that collects the user's name, email address, and favorite food:

<form method="post" action="http://ethreemail.com/e3ds/s.php">
  <input type="hidden" name="group_e3ds_id" value="a12345">
  Name: <input type="text" name="subscriber_name">
  Email: <input type="text" name="subscriber_email">
  Favorite Food: <input type="text" name="custom_1">
  <input type="submit">
</form>

Related Topics

Customizing your subscription group unsubscribe page

Creating automated subscription groups