You want to quickly and easily create great-looking signup forms. And you want to do it without having to know HTML.

Makes sense to us. So the new Web Form Generator – coming out soon – aims to help you do exactly that.

Here are just a few ways you’ll be able to customize the look of your forms to build your list faster and create a better new subscriber experience.

Put Your Form Labels Above, Beside or Inside Fields

Want to try putting the “Name” and “Email” labels above the boxes that subscribers fill out, instead of beside them?

Now you can choose how you want your labels aligned:

You can even put them inside the boxes if you want to – when subscribers click inside the field, we’ll remove the label so they can type their name/email!

Add Color to Your Submit Buttons And Position Them Where You Want

Want your form’s submit button to stand out and beg to be clicked? You got it.

Think that changing the colors and/or the location of it will help you get more conversions? Now you can find out.

Customize the look of your submit button – you can even add gradients to it to make it slicker:

and you can place it where you think it’ll get clicked the most – left, center or right:

If you want to get scientific about it, split test the different colors or positions to see what gets you the most new subscribers!

Show Subscribers How to Confirm With Dynamic Thank You Pages

Want to use video on your thank you pages to increase confirmed opt-ins, but don’t have the time or equipment to make it happen?

Use our video thank you pages to give each new subscriber precise instructions on how to confirm.

We’ll even show them exactly what your confirm email looks like in their specific email program (Gmail, AOL, Yahoo, Hotmail, Outlook, Mac Mail, etc).

Collect Addresses With Smart Fields

Need to collect more than just name and email address? How about a postal address?

Now you can easily ask for an address in your forms:

You can then use that data to search and segment your list in AWeber (example: send an email to all of your subscribers in Pennsylvania), or export it so you can build relationships with your subscribers by postal mail.

Automatically Insert a Privacy Policy

We’ve talked before about the merits creating a privacy policy and linking it from your signup form to increase trust, but that’s always been something you had to do on your own.

Now, just tell us to add a privacy policy to your form:

We’ll add a link to a privacy policy we created for AWeber customers to use:

It reaffirms your commitment to delivering email to people who want to get it from you and shows people how easy it is to unsubscribe if they choose to do so.

See the privacy policy.

That’s Not All

There are tons of ways to make your signup forms cooler and more appealing to subscribers (templates, anyone?). These are just a few examples.

What else can you do? You’ll have to try the new Web Form Generator and find out for yourself…

You can also sign up for a webinar/demo of the new Web Form Generator scheduled for Tuesday, November 24th.

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Forms suck.

Lets be honest, most forms are well… boring.

And creating the HTML for a web form is about as interesting as watching paint dry.

But, believe it or not… it doesn’t have to be that way.

Our new Web Form Generator: More Powerful Than Rocky?

OK, maybe it can’t beat up Clubber Lang. But it definitely packs a punch.

In fact, dare I say – using our new editor you can build a beautiful looking form without knowing the first thing about HTML.

Not only that… its fun to use. Really.

So for those of you who used to hire a professional to make your forms look pretty – take that money and go have a beer on us. YOU’VE just been promoted to lead designer.

Show Us How You Want Your Form to Look – We’ll Do the Heavy Lifting

The new Web Form Generator makes it way easier to create an elaborate form, which when done properly will help you better communicate with your subscribers.

I’ll show you what I mean.

For this example, lets say I am the proud owner of a real estate company called “Honey & Vinegar Realty.” We currently have a form on our website which collects subscribers’ name and email. This is great, but we really feel like we could be getting more out of our list of subscribers.

So as always, I first click the “Web Forms” tab and then click the green “+ Create New Form” button, although this time I’m greeted by the new Web Form Generator (see screenshot below).

So, Let’s Make a Real Estate Signup Form!

Looking through the different form templates I find that the first one is best suitable for my website.

So I click on it, which brings me to this black box that provides me with a variety of color schemes. (see below)

I like the “Trevose” color scheme… after all it is named after my home town. So I click the blue “Load Template” button.

Now my template is loaded and the template bar has been minimized.

OK, I’ve only clicked a couple of things and my form is already looking decent… now what?

Let’s Think – What Information Do I Want to Collect From My Subscribers?

In real estate, location is key. So I think for my form it would be a great to have subscribers select areas they are interested in. This way I can segment my list and send each subscriber information that is more closely tailored to what they are looking for.

Working from top to bottom… Name and Email are already inserted into my form for me. So the next thing I’m going to want is a place for my users to pick locations.

I’ll use a “Text Element” to add an instructions sentence. In this case I’ll write – “Select the counties you are more interested in:”.

Now, I’d like them to be able to select multiple areas. Using a checkbox might be my best bet.

So I’ll create a new “Field” for each county and set the “Input Type” to be a checkbox.

I’m happy with my design but I feel like maybe I should have some sort of divider to separate the sections of the form a little bit.

So lets add one in:

And of course I can’t forget to add some some writing in my header and footer:

There you have it! A nice, professional form… without touching any HTML.

At This Point I Know Everyone Is Probably Thinking “Yeah, Yeah… Get to the Templates!”

Eric and I are now in the phase of development where we are spending most of our time cranking out form templates. We want to provide some fresh designs and ideas to take your forms to the next level.

Click to view some of the ones we’ve made up to this current date.

Of Course, Your Input is The Most Important Thing of All.

If you have any ideas for form templates that you’d want made, please leave a comment.

Eric and I will be creating a lot of form templates in the up coming weeks so any inspiration and ideas you can send our way will go a long way!

“New Web Form Generator? But AWeber already has a web form generator…”

Sure we do. And it’s helped marketers create hundreds of thousands of opt-in forms that you’ll find on websites in countless industries.

At the time we released it, the web form tool was cutting edge, and it’s stood up well over time.

But it wasn’t perfect.

It didn’t output the prettiest HTML. And while you could certainly customize that HTML to fit the look of your website, you had to do so outside of AWeber, rather than styling it before you got the form HTML, and you had to do so without any templates.

We knew we could create something better. So we did.

To prove it, here’s a video, and a list of reasons why you’re going to love our new Web Form Generator.

Web Form Templates

You may not be a web designer, but you still want a web form that looks like it was made by one.

So we’re launching the new Web Form Generator with a slew of templates to help you build great-looking forms with one click of your mouse. Currently there are about 25 template “families,” each available in a variety of colors and styles (and we’ll keep adding more).

Advanced Design Tools

Want to customize a template to make it yours? Or build your own one-of-a-kind stylish opt-in form from scratch?

The new Web Form Generator gives you the same sort of powerful design customization that you’d typically find in web design software.

You’ll drag and drop. You’ll point and click. You’ll have complete control over the feel of your forms, and you’ll make better-looking ones than ever before.

Better Popover and Lightbox Animation

Do you use “hover” style forms (like our lightbox ones) to grab visitors’ attention and lift your opt-ins?

You’ll love the updated animations used for these new forms; we’ve ditched the Windows95-looking blue bars at the top and smoothed out the fading and sliding motions.

Dynamic Thank You Pages

Want to use video on your thank you pages to increase confirmed opt-ins, but don’t have the time or equipment to make it happen?

Use our video thank you pages to provide precise instructions to each new subscriber on how to confirm.

We’ll even show them exactly what your confirm email looks like in their specific email program (Gmail, AOL, Yahoo, Hotmail, Outlook, Mac Mail, etc).

Stay Tuned For More

The new Web Form Generator will be released soon. Until then, we’ll keep filling you in on how you’ll be able to create better signup forms and improve your list-building.

Keep watching the blog!

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At the end of our recent post on the trouble with choosing the “best” time to send your autoresponders, we proposed that autoresponders need to get “smarter:”

• Deliver themselves only during the days and times you want.
• Avoid days and times that don’t work for your subscribers.

Throughout most of the history of email marketing, this sort of focused delivery scheduling was only available for broadcasting – not for autoresponders.

That’s about to change. To learn how, watch this video or read on.

Send Windows Make Your Autoresponders Smarter

Today, we’re excited to announce that you can deliver your automated follow up messages during the days and times you’ve determined to be best for your subscribers.

To see Autoresponder Send Windows in action, watch the short video below:

RSS subscribers: if you can’t see the video above, watch it on the blog here.

As you can see, you can easily choose during which days, and times you want your autoresponders to go to your customers and prospects.

And when you opt to use the geographic awareness, we’ll automatically adjust delivery to each subscriber’s time zone – no matter where they are in the world, if you tell us to deliver your follow up in the morning, that’s when we’ll send it to each person!

How Can You Use This To Make Your Email Marketing More Effective?

A few ideas:

• Look at when subscribers are opening your emails and/or clicking your links (the Opens over Time and Clicks Over Time reports will show you this) and adjust your send windows so your messages stand out at the top of the inbox during those times!
• Run a weekend sale – schedule one of your follow ups to only send on Friday mornings!
• Are there certain days and/or times that you know are bad for your subscribers? Use send windows to avoid sending during those days/times!

Those are just a couple ways you can start to increase your response rates with send windows – we know you’ll come up with different and creative ideas on how to use them. When you do, we want to hear about them!

Learn More About Autoresponder Send Windows

See how to create Autoresponder Send Windows in our Knowledge Base…

…or join us for a free half-hour webinar showing you how to use them:

Learn To Use Autoresponder Send Windows

Date: Thursday, June 18th, 2009
Time: 3:00-3:30PM Eastern Time (USA)

We’ll demo the new Autoresponder Send Windows for 10-15 minutes, then answer your questions about them. See you there!

Hope you’ll join us for the webinar – and that you enjoy the new Autoresponder Send Windows!

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According to our Google Analytics stats, a lot of you are heading to our Knowledge Base to learn about creating and managing your email marketing campaigns.

A while back, we decided that it would be a good idea to liven up those how-to articles and cater to the different learning styles that you all have. So in recent weeks, we’ve begun enhancing many of them:

Introducing Knowledge Base Videos

Up until now, we’ve relied on text and pictures in the Knowledge Base to answer questions you have about creating messages, segmenting subscribers and managing other areas of your account.

We’ll still use those for a lot of entries, but thanks to our video whizzes Jay and Zachary, you’ll also start to see video tutorials in a lot of the articles there.

These videos are typically short (between 30 seconds and 2 minutes) and will either supplement the text of the article, or replace it.

Here’s an example from our article on creating a broadcast message.

RSS subscribers: please go to the blog to see the video. Thanks!

A few other examples of how-to videos in the Knowledge Base:

• Adding email personalization
• Creating and managing follow up emails
• Using our HTML email templates
• Building a web form to collect subscriber
• Customizing the confirm email

More Videos On The Way

We’ll be adding a lot more video to the Knowledge Base and a few other areas soon. If you have any suggestions, please let us know – we’re making them to help you create effective email marketing campaigns as quickly and easily as possible!

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Our affiliates responded to the recent survey about the affiliate program with a lot of helpful feedback.

Your input was very helpful, and will allow us to better serve your needs. Thank you very much for responding!

Based on your feedback, we are happy to announce the following changes to the AWeber affiliate program:

1. All commissions will be raised to 30%. This includes existing 1st tier commissions of 20%.
2. Second tier commissions will no longer be available. Existing 2nd tier commissions will be deleted.
3. Your affiliate cookie will be a 1 year, first visit cookie.
4. In the future, you will have the option of being paid via PayPal or postal check.
5. All affiliates will be paid once a month, on the first of every month.
6. The minimum check payout will be $30.00 for US affiliates and $50.00 for affiliates not based in the US (This applies to both PayPal Payments and postal payments)

All of these changes will be effective on April 8th, 2009. The only exception will be the PayPal payment option, which will be available in the future. If you do not have a PayPal account, now would be a great time to sign up for one here.

How Your Input Helped Our Decisions

We feel that your input is always very important. So the information you provided us in our last survey was instrumental in our decisions.

For example, let’s take a look at your responses to our question about how long we should make our affiliate cookie length:

As we can see, 36.1% of you voted for the 1 year cookie. Second was the 10 year “lifetime” cookie at 23.6%. However, since the remaining 40.4% of you voted for a cookie duration less than 1 year, we thought a happy medium would be the 1 year cookie.

Now let’s take a look at your feedback on our commission proposal of 30% :

A commission hike of 30%, plus the removal of the second tier affiliate commissions was met with very strong approval. It was apparent that this change would be welcome, so we certainly are going to implement it.

With the rest of the changes to our affiliate program, we followed the same guidelines. We took your feedback and came up with the best possible changes based on that feedback.

Moving Forward…

As the months go by, look forward to many other exciting changes that will benefit your AWeber affiliate campaign.

We hope you enjoy the new changes to our program thus far. As always, if you have any questions or concerns feel free to contact us.

This should be an exciting year for all of us!

At AWeber, we believe that strong businesses do much to make the world a better place.

But we also recognize that there are other people whose contributions to society (and to the business world) often far outstrip the resources available to them.

With that in mind, we’re pleased to now offer special pricing for two groups:

1. Non-profit organizations
2. Students

See our non-profit and student pricing.

Know someone who would benefit from this? Share it with them!

As you may have noticed, we recently widened the AWeber.com public site recently to:

• Make better use of the increased screen resolutions that modern monitors offer
• Make using our navigation bar more intuitive by switching it to a drop-down style instead of the horizontal rows that we had been using.
• Offer more usable information in the footer.

Today we’re implementing some of these same adjustments, along with a couple other style tweaks, to your AWeber control panel.

Here’s what you’ll find different:

The Control Panel Is Wider and Centered

While there were still a small minority of people accessing their accounts using monitor resolutions of 800 x 600 pixels or smaller, the overwhelming majority of you (and we’re talking 99%+ here) are looking at your accounts on screens that are at least 1024 x 768 pixels.

So, we’ve widened the control panel to allow us to provide more useful information to you in a more readable layout (not only now, but as we add content and make adjustments in the future). We’ve also centered it to better match the style of the public site.

New Look For Your Account’s Home Page

• The “Getting Started box” has been moved to the sidebar, moving your stats front and center on the page.
• The “Unsubscribed” column has returned to your “Home” page stats.

  Some of you didn’t like that this went away (due to lack of space) when we introduced the Setup Wizard. Now that we’re working with more room, it’s back!

(Click to see full-size)

Drop-Down Navigation – No More Rows!

The old “hover over this tab, then move your mouse along the row of links beneath it” style navigation needed fixing. So we replaced it with with the same drop-down style menu from the main site. This should make it faster to navigate your account.

New Tabs in Navigation

You’ll notice a few changes to the navigation bar (see above screenshot):

• There’s now a “Web Forms” that takes you directly to create and manage your web forms.
• There’s a new Tab “My Lists.” This is similar to the “List Settings” tab we had before (in fact, List Settings is the first option under My Lists).

  If you click on “My Lists” you’ll be taken to a page where you can view all of your current lists, create or deactivate them, and create a backup of your account data.

(Click to see full-size)

Cleaner Page Styles

We’ve been on a mission to get rid of visual clutter and make it easier and faster to get into your account, get things done, and get on with managing the rest of your business.

We began this with our redesign of the message edit pages a while back, and are continuing it throughout the rest of your account.

Here’s an example from the “Add Subscriber” page:

(Click to see full-size)

Hope You Find The New Changes Helpful!

Many of these changes are a direct result of your feedback (moving the “Getting Started box” to the sidebar, for example).

More enhancements are on the way throughout 2009 – stay tuned!

When creating an in-line (as opposed to a pop up type) opt-in form for your website, AWeber provides an option of two types of HTML available to publish to your site:

• A JavaScript Snippet
• A Raw HTML Version

Up until recently, the Raw HTML version did not provide the ability to track the performance of forms published to your site.

Then Dan, one of our developers who also spearheaded our recently released Setup Wizard project, helped cast another vote for the old cliche adage, “where there’s a will, there’s a way”.

What’s Changed?

Tracking for the following is now available for both versions of HTML provided by our web form tool:

• Displays
• Submissions
• Submissions / Display Ratio

From now on, if you need the full HTML for a form so you can make advanced changes to its design, you won’t lose these useful stats.

Two Quick Notes

If you have forms created before the beginning of December, you will need to get their HTML again and re-publish to your site.

Also, unique displays are still available only if you use the JavaScript Snippet version).

More on the difference between the JavaScript Snippet and Raw HTML versions.

My introduction to email marketing came through working with AWeber users on our Customer Solutions team, so I know a lot about your concerns.

We all know it can be intimidating to start anything new, and many of our new users are just getting started with their first email marketing campaigns.

I can’t tell you how many times people have asked me, “Can I just have a walk-through of what I need to know?”.

Well, I’m as happy to say now as I was then: “Yes! I’d be happy to show you how to set up everything you need to know to start seeing results.”

Email Marketing Setup Just Got Easier

OK, so maybe I can’t speak with each and every user personally, but you might hear me in the videos in our new setup wizard.

Here’s a quick preview:

The wizard will quickly guide you through just the steps you need to take to start building a list of subscribers and have a welcome message ready to go out when they sign up.

When Can I Use the New Setup Wizard?

If you’re one of the limited number of users we’ve rolled this feature out to, you can see this now in your control panel as you work on your lists.

Don’t see it there yet? Check back soon. We’ll release it for all accounts in the very near future.