Embeddable widget to add names to a mailing list.

November 11, 2009 3:12 PM

Looking for an embeddable widget for my blog that will let people enter their email address and collect them into a mailing list.

The ideal solution would be (in order of preference)
- quick and easy setup
- small/customizable
- a captcha,
- some kind of mailing list management, especially automated removal.

I suspect what I'm looking for is part of some web sites CRM, and I'm open to suggestions that go well beyond my list.

posted by Ookseer to computers & internet (8 comments total)

If you just want to alert people there are new blog posts, use Feedburner. There is a UI option in your account to let people get alerts by email. It's totally automated: you post, Feedburner alerts.

If you want to use your blog as a platform to collect email addresses so you can send out some other kind of mailing, like a newsletter, use Campaign Monitor. You can drop the code for the sign-up into your sidebar.
posted by DarlingBri at 3:23 PM on November 11

Yahoo Groups will do all that, and you can embed the sign up box directly onto your blog.
posted by COD at 3:50 PM on November 11

Google Docs has a template for that.
posted by JohnnyGunn at 3:56 PM on November 11

Are you using any particular type of blogging software?
posted by bitdamaged at 4:04 PM on November 11

JohnnyGun - can you point me to the template? I'm aware of the Google form - but that seems to take up a full page - is there something smaller and lighter? I'm looking for a solution that will port the emails over to a Google spreadsheet too.
posted by psergio at 4:10 PM on November 11

ReverbNation does that
posted by FlyByDay at 7:23 PM on November 11

Thanks for the suggestions so far. Like psergio I looked at just throwing a Google Docs form up there, but it was hideous. The only thing going for it was that it was simple. Everything else was hideous.

Additional information: It's a Movable Type blog.

The email addresses I want to collect are from people who are interested in a product's production status. I've been getting dozens of requests to "add me to your list" and "let me know when it's available" and it's a giant pain.

I didn't know about Feeburner's email option. I'll look into it, but I'm not sure how to control what items get fed though it (I don't want all blog postings to go out on it, just a small subset.)
posted by Ookseer at 8:00 PM on November 11

Then you can collect addresses with a sign up form using FormSpring (which will just collect them for you and do nothing else) or with Campaign Monitor, which will form the basis for the newsletter for which you so clearly have a captive audience. Really, either one will work.
posted by DarlingBri at 1:26 AM on November 12