Collecting emails on a website is a vital tool to build an audience and measure engagement for your product. That means you need a simple Subscription Widget For Your Website to collect these emails without having to build forms or set up complex integrations.
Contents
- What Are Subscription Widgets
- Why You Should Collect Emails
- SG Widget
- Give it a try
- A Subscription Widget For Any Website
- What makes SG Widget Different
- How To Setup SG Widget
- How SG Widget Works
- Sign Up Today
What Are Subscription Widgets
Before jumping, it’s important to first understand how subscription widgets actually work. They are simply a piece of code that is added to a site, which renders a basic form for a user to enter their email address so they can signup and receive bonus content or some kind of freebie. The form connects the site to an email marketing provider like MailChimp, SendGrid or Drip.
When users enter their email address, it is not stored in the database of the website, but often sent to the email provider to be stored in an account there. This is because email marketing is a complex industry and there are so many things involved in successfully sending emails that it’s best to outsource everything to an expert provider than attempt to do it yourself through Gmail or Outlook.
Simply put, if you want to have a widget on your site, then you need to have an account at an email marketing provider to store the email addresses.
Why You Should Collect Emails
Despite being an old technology in internet terms, email remains a powerful marketing technique with conversion rates way beyond many other channels. Online marketers will tell you that an engaged email list is the most valuable data any business owner can have in YEAR. This is because email is personal and goes directly to the top a users inbox at the time you specify. Compare that to SEO where updates take a few days to filter out and then you are competing with others to get noticed.
Email is also highly targeted because to get onto a list, a user must have previously given their consent, so they will be familiar with the author of the email and have an interest in the content it contains. Being an existing contact in your list means you will have some data on the user and can tailor the content to their needs or preferences.
These factors present the perfect base for a long term and profitable marketing channel that has an impact on traffic and revenue if the correct strategy is used.
Now all you need to do is add a Subscription Widget To Your Website that captures and stores these emails quickly and effectively.
Enter SG Widget…
SG Widget
SG Widget is a website subscription widget that provides an embeddable form for collecting email addresses. With a few lines of code, you can add subscribe functionality to your website and start building your list with ease.
It integrates with SendGrid, the email service provider so you’ll need an account there.
SG Widget is the glue that connects your website with SendGrid in a fast and user friendly way.
SG Widget was created by LeaderInternet.com.
We are a small team of Web Developers in Ireland that were frustrated by the time it took to set up an email collection form on a website. We built the tool to solve our own problems and found that our clients liked it too so we’ve released it for the open market to enjoy. We’ve even got the thumbs up from SendGrid themselves and have been accepted into the Startup Accelerator Program to develop the product further.
Give it a try..
We could talk all day about the benefits and ease of use but you will understand a lot faster if you just use the widget yourself. So go ahead and enter your email below to see how it works.
Pretty sweet, eh?
A Subscription Widget For Any Website
SG Widget is a simple subscription widget that can be dropped into any website, regardless of the technology it was built with. It goes directly into the front end HTML so it doesn’t matter if the backend is Wordpress, Drupal, October CMS or even pure code independent on any CMS. You simply create a widget and paste it into your site to instantly add email collection functionality.
Think of it like a Wordpress plugin but one that works on any site, not just Wordpress.
This gives website owners a lot of flexibility as they don’t have to worry about upgrading anything or installing software to do a simple task. All of the complex processing is done on offsite on our servers, so there is no impact on your site.
What makes SG Widget Different
There are lots of widgets and forms on the market that have the ability to collect emails but they come with the overhead of complex setup and sub standard user experience on the front end. We tried to use them so we know what areas they suffer in a what SG Widget needs to do to be different.
Simple
People’s attention span is short so they need to be able to enter their email and click Subscribe quickly without having to jump through hoops to verify their identity. SG Widget is designed to be the simplest user experience imaginable. Enter an email and click the button. That is all users have to do.
Secure
The front end can seem incredibly fast but there are a lot of operations happening behind the scenes to ensure that the email is a valid person and not someone spamming your site to fill your contact list with fake address. SG Widget validates all entries to ensure they are properly formatted email addresses and takes steps on the backend to ensure you will only have authentic subscribers.
Fast
All of this happens on our servers, so there is no drop in performance on your site. The widget will make a single request to our API and we handle the rest. The end result is that users receive a feedback message within one or two seconds to indicate whether their signup attempt was successful or not.
Quick Setup
Not only is it fast for front end users but it’s also a breeze to setup and configure for website administrators. As the widget is HTML, CSS and JS, you just drop it in at the top level of your architecture. There is no need to do anything on the server or database level.
Customizable
The base version of SG Widget is simple, both in style and functionality to keep the setup process fast and allow it to be dropped into any website without looking out of place. Some folks want a more polished finish so it can be customized to suit the design of any website. As the widget will be embedded in your HTML, just add the desired CSS in your own site code and it will override our base styles. Our CSS is actually inlined into the widget so you can remove this entirely if you prefer.
Internationalized and Personalized Validation Messages
Customization is taken one step further by having the ability to specify the validation messages users receive when interacting with the form. Instead of displaying ‘Thanks for signing up’ after a user inputs their email, you can display a message that says ‘Thanks for subscribing to ‘AwesomeSite.com.’
Which one do you think is better for branding purposes?
If your website is not English, you can even enter feedback messages in your native language. You have complete autonomy to enter whatever messages you wish for display for the various stages of the signup process.
How To Setup SG Widget
Firstly, you need a SendGrid account as they are the email service provider that SG Widget integrates with. Create one before getting started. Once that is done you can create your SG Widget account.
SG Widget can be setup in five minutes by creating an account, creating a widget and then pasting a few lines of code into your front end HTML.
There is nothing to install, download or scripts to be run. It is extremely simple to set up and remove if required.
How SG Widget Works
When you paste the code into your website it contains the HTML and CSS to render a basic version of the subscribe form along with a link to an external JavaScript file hosted on our servers and served through a CDN. If you check the network requests you’ll see that it’s called sg-widget.js.
When a user enters their email and clicks subscribe, the code in the JavaScript file makes a request to our API that contains the user's email address along with a unique code for your list. That allows us to send the email to the correct place - your email list.
If there are any errors, the user receives a simple message on the front end to help them correct the mistake and try again. This all happens quickly as we place great emphasis on performance and pagespeed so designed our infrastructure to scale, no matter where in the world users are located.
Sign Up Today
SG Widget can solve your email collection problems today so go ahead and sign up for an account. You get one widget free forever on a single website so there’s no reason not to try it out.
If you have any questions about our Subscription Widget For Your Website, get in touch or let us know in the comments below.
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