Say hello to the Subscribe Button
We've been working hard at making it easier to grow and learn more about your audience. Following the recent release of Enlist and Subscriber Notifications, we'd like to introduce the Subscribe Button. The easiest way to add an elegant, unobtrusive subscribe form to any page on your site.
A Subscribe Button with optional subscriber count
We developed the Subscribe Button with a particular purpose in mind. Forms can be clunky things. They take up a lot of space on the page and can often be tricky to get looking great in all browsers. The Subscribe Button replaces that complexity with a simple, customizable button you can drop anywhere. It's especially perfect for your sidebar, footer or any page with limited screen real-estate.
Just copy and paste the code anywhere you like, and once it's pressed a simple subscribe form instantly appears. Here's a quick demo you can check out showing it in action.
An example of the customizable form that loads as soon as the button is pressed
Customize the button
We've put a lot of care into the polish of these buttons, which are available in two colors and sizes. You can use your own button text, and also choose to show or hide the number of subscribers in that list. Just like the number of Twitter followers or Facebook Likes, this is a nice way to promote the size of your list and encourage others to join.
Tweak the form to suit
We've also given you lots of control over the subscribe form. You can choose which fields you'd like to show, and in what order. We've also added the ability to set some fields as required, and you can add your own title and introduction at the top of the form to provide more context. If that's not necessary, simply delete it and the design of the form will automatically adjust to suit.
Available now
The Subscribe Button launched a few moments ago, and is now live in all accounts. You'll find it under a simplified sidebar for each subscriber list in your account. Just click on Grow your audience option to get started.
We're not done on the subscriber focus just yet. I'm also very excited to announce a private label version of Enlist is now under review at Apple, and we've also added lots of new features to both it and Enlist based on your feedback. We've also got some other ideas on ways to make it easier to attract more subscribers that I'll be sharing very soon.
21st February
So good! I love this and will def be implementing on some site soon. Good on ya, CM!
21st February
No comments. Just great!
21st February
This rocks. Really impressed with the new features you’ve released recently. Keep up the good work.
21st February
I love the idea (and the frequency you’ve been releasing updates!) but this seems to be lacking on mobile.
In iOS Mail it opens in a new window (which is fine), but in the Gmail app, Chrome, and any app that uses a web view, it appears to be trying to go to the URL http://btn.createsend1.com/subscribebutton/subscribe?#listid=y/15/ECD/394/DB371E9B982529A4 which just delivers a blank white screen.
I realize this is an issue with apps that use a web view (‘UIWebview’ on iOS I believe, I’m not an app developer) but sadly it’s something that’ll keep me from using the button.
21st February
Justin, nice spotting. We’ve got some nice mobile improvements in the works right now that we’ll get out very soon that do a much better job of showing the form on mobile devices. We’ll post an update here as soon as it’s good to go.
21st February
So simple and yet so needed! great job.
21st February
nice!
would be good if we could customise the resulting signup form button…
as green isnt going to go with many site colour schemes and therefore looks quite templated?
21st February
Awesome work guys!
One question that would be cool to know is the reason for only limiting the button colour to two choices? With a huge amount of talent on board I am sure you have a valid reason, just curious.
Cheers,
Jake
21st February
Jake, Skimo, and anyone else wondering about the amount of customization - we kept things deliberately simple. Just like a Tweet or Like button, we’re trying to create something simple and recognizable that you can drop into your site with a minimum of fuss.
Of course, there will always be those of you that would prefer to totally customize the experience, and we haven’t forgotten about you guys either. We have more plans in this area, and one of those will give more design flexibility to those that need it. The Subscribe Button is all about simple.
22nd February
Nice, good work. Be great when the chrome mobile issue is fixed. Don’t look at in IE7 either!
22nd February
You guys are just amazing!
22nd February
Nice one guys. I would love to use this but, with such limited customisation options, this is not something we can implement. I’m not sure I follow your thinking on that side of it?
22nd February
This is great. Thanks for the work put into this.
22nd February
Really looking forward to seeing how this rolls out in Mobile.
22nd February
Awesome work guys! This is great!
22nd February
Oh hello little button. I have been waiting for so long for you.
22nd February
LOVE.
22nd February
Great work in keeping it simple. Love it.
22nd February
Can you create a button that un-subscribes as well?
22nd February
Nice work! Now all we need is the ability to add segmentation options into the popup form from the button :-) Any way that is coming?
22nd February
Awesome new feature!
Any future plans to allow more style customisation?
22nd February
Hi Ryan, you can add fields corresponding to your list’s custom fields to the subscribe form. Does this answer your question?
Phil - As Dave mentioned above, we’ll certainly consider making the subscribe button and form more customizable. Stay tuned to the blog, as we’ll be sure to announce any changes here :)
22nd February
wow this is just awesome and totally cool, keep up the good work guys!
Any possible support for Joomla?
22nd February
Hi Seyi, you can add the subscribe button to any page, as long as you can edit the page/template’s code.
However, if you’re looking for a subscribe form plugin specifically for Joomla, we have a few here. :)
22nd February
I do like that everything you guys do is done with grace and style. Keep it up.
22nd February
Great work guys - this will be huge in increasing subs.
Would love to see the ability to integrate analytics experiments to push different calls to action to refine the messaging.
22nd February
Great tool! It saves my customer lots of work by not having to manually transfer their subscriptions from their website to Campaign Monitor lists.
I have one issue about this tool though: The thanks you message can only be in one language. Same thing if I use a return URL, there can only be one. Did you guys think about multilingual websites?
Thanks
22nd February
Hi Louis, there actually is no thankyou message with the Subscribe button, other than the small envelope icon in the button turning into a tick. Here’s a demo where you can see this in action.
We do have a language option for any fixed elements where we support 20+ languages, we definitely thought about multilingual sites. The Subscribe Button can be dropped into any page, regardless of language.
22nd February
I love the subscribe button. I’ve just added it all over my site. But for some reason the counter gets displayed on a new line instead of to the right of the button. Do you have any suggestions on how I can fix that? Please see http://www.tapforms.com for an example. And also on my support page at the top.
22nd February
Hey Brendan, thanks for dopping the button in so quickly, I just checked out your site and it’s looking great for me. Here’s what I see.
If you’re still having problems, please get in touch with more details, like the browser you’re using, and we’ll try and replicate it at our end.
22nd February
I’m in absolute love.
Will it be a violation to wrap the iframe in a div class to customize? I really want to create a ‘flat’ version. Is this something you’ll be planning in the future? (Or providing separate JS and CSS files?)
Now you awesome people need to work on giving us the option for a custom ‘Unsubscribe’ HTML redirect template similar to the ‘Confirmation’ option.
(Is there a good AJAX option available?)
22nd February
I LOVE IT!!! SO GOOD!!!
22nd February
Do you think it would be possible to integrate this with something like Gravity Forms (a WordPress forms plug-in which has a Campaign Monitor add-on)?
22nd February
Phreaking awesome!
22nd February
Brendan, just a quick follow up. The guys are working on a fix for that count wrapping over to lines, which they’ll push a fix for in the coming days. In the mean time you might want to turn off the subscriber count option. Thanks again for getting in touch about this.
Jason, because of the way we inject the button into your page via an iFrame, there likely isn’t an easy way to hack the design I’m afraid.
22nd February
Very cool guys.
I wish one day in the future you guys, Stripe, Twitter, Facebook and a couple of other ‘must have a button for’ guys sits down in a room and standardises all of this with one uniform way of ‘doing buttons’. Maybe even chat to the browser guys and get them involved too.
And then whenever we place something that subscribes/pays/likes/shares/tweets/etc that isn’t really part of a page but is essential in an abstract way it all looks and works the same..
22nd February
I always test new functionalities on mobile. So I tried to access your site with my different mobiles. Right widget do no appear on mobile. Is there any page where I can test it. Or does it work on mobile as it works on regular website?
22nd February
Hi,
this is a fantastic feature and I would love to use it on my site. But for now it just says:
The resource you are looking for has been removed, had its name changed, or is temporarily unavailable.
(https://btn.createsend.com/static/button/null.json)
22nd February
Great feature.
I cant get the black color to work on my site though. When I compare the code supplied for the blue/black color, it looks excactly the same. Any ideas?
22nd February
Figured it out - It was a browsercashe-problem
22nd February
Hats off to you all :-)
This is such a nice little feature.
23rd February
Great work but what about multi-language sites? One option is to have multiple buttons for different language versions. Another is the ability to show different languages via popular CRM language plugins.
23rd February
Love this new button and I have one quick question. Have you guys considered making the subscriber count option so we could insert it into the form summary? That way you could write something like “Join the other [subscriber-count] people already receiving our special email offers and sign up now!”
Just a thought, Thanks!
24th February
Great execution. This definitely eases the signup process for a user and it looks great.
I would like to add a Google Analytics Goal or Event upon submission of the button. Is there any way(or plans in the future) for this? I may be able to hack something together in the meantime if it is not in the product plan.
Thanks!
Bryan
24th February
I just tried this and really like it. Thanks! One thought: in case someone clicks the button and then decides not to subscribe, there could be an X in the corner of the popup to close it out. (I know you can just click off of it, but some users may not realize that right away.)
25th February
This is great! way better than having the form on the site
25th February
Fantastic job guys! Can’t wait to integrate it with our sites.
26th February
Fantastic! Thanks!
27th February
+1 for being able to customise the look and feel of the button, even if it’s just a hex colour. First thing my clients said was ‘Can we change the button colour to match our brand’
5th March
Great job. Would love to be able to make the button any color we want to further integrate. Without that, we cannot quite use on our site (or most of our client sites for that matter).
5th March
@Jeremy - This is very unusual, if you’re still getting that strange page when adding the button to your site, please get in touch with details and we’ll get to the bottom of it.
@Iv - Good call, we’ll add your vote to have this localised. Really appreciate your feedback here!
@Clarke - We’ll certainly add your vote for this kind of customization, but for now, we just want to keep things simple. I’ll keep you updated if this changes, though!
@Bryan Hackett - At present, we don’t have plans to tie this in with Google Analytics, however I’d guess that it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to manually create a goal in GA. If you do so, be sure to share the details with us :)
@Nicki - That’s great feedback, we’ll be sure to pass it on to our design team here. Thanks for letting us know :)
For everyone who have asked to change the colors/look and feel of the button, we’re listening! If it’s something we do at a later date, we’ll be sure to keep you updated. As always, stay tuned to this blog for more :)
7th March
This has boosted our subscriptions better than anything else we have tried! Nice work.
7th March
Love the concept, it’s been something that’s a lot of work to build on our own.
That said: pleaaase consider making it easier to control the size. I could live with the colors, but it’s just too small for my designs.
Thanks for rolling out new features like this - they’re amazing!
7th March
One more question: is there a way to ‘listen’ to the submission form JS, so we can trigger other events after it’s successfully submitted?
7th March
I’m guessing because you’ve implemented this as an iFrame, this wouldn’t work, but it would be wonderful if there was a way to get all your functionality from just a few JS calls. That way people could attach it to their own buttons, images or events.
There seems to be some growing backlash from developers against these iframe-based ‘share’ buttons, like Twitter and FB use.
7th March
Hi there Allan, thank you so much for your feedback here - we’re certainly happy to look into how we can further customize the subscribe button, so we’ll keep you posted on whether we make resizing it an option.
While it’s not yet possible to interact with the button as you’ve described, we’ll see if this is something that gets frequently requested by devs like yourself. But as Dave mentioned earlier, it was our goal to keep things simple - and of course, you’re more than welcome to play with our original subscribe form code :)
7th March
Why load the json file more than once?
http://d.pr/i/jqrc
Thanks for fix.
8th March
Hi Martin, it’s likely because we’re loading two iframes - one for the subscribe button, and one for the subscribe form when the button is clicked. Does this answer your question? :)
9th March
Hi, we’re using sign ups as a goal in GA and Clicky. Any tips on how we can do this with the button as there is no confirmation page.
Thanks!
Dominic
9th March
Hey Ros, et. al., thanks for responding. We know you can only do so much! ;)
One more thought - building it with CSS rather than with images (as I think it is now, with a big sprite) would make it more flexible. I think of all the CSS3 button generators out there as examples.
In spite of the limitations, the user experience once it’s clicked is superb, and I don’t have to build that part. Awesome!
Thanks for all your hard work, CM team! Much appreciated.
9th March
Beautiful button and UI!
But the colors don’t come anywhere close to looking good on the some sites. Pink children’s theme? Bright bright button clashes, black is just off, and the popup form and big green form subscribe button are not sitting on enough opacity to let them stand alone. Everything feels way too busy =/
I doubt I will persuade you from your goal of simplicity, but a greyscale slider option or customer background image option would be nice for the subscribe button, and an option to adjust the opacity would be great for the subscribe form.
Maybe these could be added as *secret* options in the code that we can add? You get your simple interface, we get to customize your work so it fits in with the brands that we’re working with?
12th March
Hi Dominic, at present this is a fairly tricky one - I don’t think it’s possible as yet to make this trackable as a goal in Google Analytics. In the interim, I’d suggest adding these signups to a separate subscriber list and taking these into account in your reporting. We’ll certainly keep you posted if this is something we improve in the future, though :)
Allan - You’re right, we’re using a sprite here. We could possibly use a pure CSS approach (and yes, that would likely make the button easier to customize), so I’ll pass this on to our designers. Thanks for the great suggestion!
Ben - We’re certainly looking into what kind of customizations we can provide, so thank you for this excellent feedback. The hipster in me loves the idea of “secret” options, by the way :D We’ll be sure to keep you posted if we make it possible to change the button color, backgrounds etc - as always, we’re listening.
9th April
I love this feature but it doesn’t work on my iPhone 4s, is it normal ?
10th April
Hi Creative Art, that’s unusual - if you could kindly get in touch and let us know what you’re experiencing here, we’ll try to get things working for you.
11th April
Hey - is it possible for the subscriber to be redirected to a page following completing the form?
Right now the form doesn’t inherit the landing/thank you page associated to the list - it just submits inline - how can we make it redirect?
Thanks
Liam
17th April
Hi Liam, this isn’t possible at present, but it’s certainly one for us to think about. We’ll certainly let you know if we make it possible to redirect to another page, but in the interim, you may want to consider rolling your own subscribe form for customizations like this.
24th April
Just adding my +1 vote to more customisable options. The blue/black button could do with a colour picker, and the big green “Subscribe” button on the resulting form clashes with lots of sites.
Please give us the option to change these colours!
25th April
Hi Shaun, we’ll certainly look into this. In the interim though, our new customizable subscribe form project on GitHub may be of interest to you - you can tweak the provided code to make changes to the color scheme and more. Hope it’s helpful!
4th May
Hello Campaign Monitor lovlies…
Just a quickie to say I absolutely love this button - it’s so easy and simple to use and I don’t want you to change anything about the ease of use, but can my voice please be added to the people asking for the ability to change the colours?
It looks great on my http://sigma-imaging-uk.com site (which is black), but not so great on a new site that I’me designing which is pink and cream!!
5th May
Hey there, Simon! Here’s a little good news - we’ve now got a customizable subscribe button and form. The code is pretty well documented on GitHub, but let us know if you have any questions about it! Hope that helps :)
14th May
We’re just trying out the new groovy subscribe button.
My only comment is that at 41 years of age and a bog standard monitor, I can hardly read the pre-filled text hints. Pale grey on white never was my forte.
Other than that, groovier than a groove sandwich.
14th May
Hi Jonathan, glad you like it! We’ll certainly pass on your comments here to our designers, as there may be something we can do to improve readability in a later update. Thanks for letting us know!