Subscribe Form Module Set to Email

If you are looking for basic information about styling and settings, this is not the post for you, please take a look at this guide for more info: https://styleguide.wdsgallery.com/functionality/email-subscription-forms/

This post will be addressing the common mistakes we see when setting the Service to Email on the Subscribe Form Module and the reasons why these are bad practice.

There are times when you don’t need to style this module at all because it already fits with the site design. That is absolutely acceptable, however, you still need to set up a connection within the module. Having no Service set up will simply cause confusion for the customer in the future. They probably do not know that they need to make edits to allow for email marketing and subscription services. At the very least, set up the service to connect to the customer’s email.

More times than not, we have seen the module set to email, but the account name was set to the business name. This presents a huge problem. First, we cannot see what email address was entered after the module was saved for the first time. Second, there is NO way to troubleshoot issues with receiving the information. So, When setting up this module to use email as the service, you should be putting the email address in as the account name. This will allow us to direct the customer to the email account it was set up with. From there they can either add a new email account, or connect their email marketing service.

In every case of a subscribe form module being used on a site, you need to leave a note in the ticket about where the subscribe form lives on the site, which service was set up, and if the service was set to email, the email that was used.

Note: The email service should only be used as a placeholder while building IF there was no other email marketing account information provided. This is because there is no automatic way for an email recipient to opt out of email communications. An email marketing service will do this for you and complies with the CAN-SPAM Act. Using your email account to collect subscription data will be a very manual process and you would be held liable for any continued email that has already requested to be removed.