How the Form Builder Works
Learn how to customize forms, welcome emails, and other response emails with our Form Builder.
Advanced Form Customization
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Paid account holders have access to an advanced mode for creating and editing Mailchimp's hosted signup forms and response emails. This is an advanced feature and is recommended for users familiar with custom coding. Contact your developer, or hire a Mailchimp Expert if you need assistance.
Switch to advanced mode
To access the Advanced Forms tool, follow these steps.
- Click Audience to navigate to the audience overview page.
- Click the Manage Audience drop-down menu and choose Signup forms.
- Select Form builder.
- On the Create Forms page, scroll to the bottom of the screen and click advanced mode.
- In the pop-up, click Delete to confirm that you want to start from scratch on a new advanced form.
What can I edit?
You can customize most Mailchimp audience management forms, emails, and confirmation screens.
- Signup form
- Signup thank you page
- Opt-in confirmation email
- Confirmation thank you page
- Final welcome email
- Update profile form
- Update profile thank you page
- Unsubscribe form
- Unsubscribe confirmation page
- Goodbye email
- Campaign archive page
- Survey landing page
When you customize, make sure you don't alter the unique Form tags, field names, and merge tags, because they're connected to the audience and need to stay the same. The following image shows highlighted areas of what you can and shouldn't edit.
Custom Thank You Pages
You can also set up meta redirects to send users to custom thank you pages on your website. The following is the meta redirect code you'll want to use. Make sure to replace http://www.yourwebsite.com/ with the URL you want to redirect to.
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;URL=http://www.yourwebsite.com/"/>
Here's how to set up the meta redirect.
- Click Audience to navigate to the audience overview page.
- Click the Manage Audience drop-down menu and choose Signup forms.
- Select Form builder.
- Click the link for the Signup "Thank You" Page or the Confirmation "Thank You" Page.
- Copy the meta redirect, and paste it in the
<head>section of the thank you page's code. - Click Save Changes.
Custom signup form error messaging
If you prefer to handle signup form errors on your own, instead of having Mailchimp manage them, use a META redirect to pass signup form data back to your domain using this code.
<meta http-equiv="Refresh" content="0;url=http://www.domain.com/newsletter.phtml?EMAIL="*|EMAIL|*"&FNAME="*|FNAME|*"&LNAME="*|LNAME|*"">
The URL should be a full path to your newsletter subscriber page. To grab the audience variables' names, navigate to your audience settings and view the fields and associated merge tags.
To complete this process, you'll need to know how to process GET variables in your site and make sure your audience id is a part of any form you submit back to our domain.
Instead of using a META redirect, you could also use our API. You'll still most likely want to add a META redirect on the final confirmation screen to make the sign-up process feel totally seamless to your subscribers.
Hide fields in advanced forms
To add a hidden field to your advanced form code, follow these steps.
- Click Audience to navigate to the audience overview page.
- Click the Manage Audience drop-down menu and choose Signup forms.
- Select Form builder.
- If you have already set up an advanced form, the screen should display your code view. If that's not the case, scroll to the bottom and click advanced mode and click Switch in the pop-up confirmation modal.
- Add an entry for your new field, as you normally would.
- For the input type element, change the value to " hidden."
<input type="hidden" name="FNAME" value="*|FNAME|*">