This post will take you the steps of how to easily install and setup email submit forms in your website using the autoresponder Mailchimp and an easy-to-use submit form design tool.

Mailchimp List Building and Management

Mailchimp is an email autoresponder that allows you to build and manage email lists from your website’s traffic. It lets you to create opt-in forms which you can place anywhere on your website in an attempt to keep in contact with your traffic and gives you the ability to tell your users about new products, services, discounts, or updates you might have to offer them.

Getting Started

As you’re guided through the setup process after you’ve created your free account, you can choose the layout and design of your opt-in form along with your confirmation page, thank you page, and about 12 other responses or forms. The design interface for the forms in Mailchimp makes form creations incredibly simple.

The Sign Up Form

As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, we‘re also going to explore a simple submit form design tool that will really make your submit form pop. So I’m not going to discuss the different designs of the form. Just make sure that you’ve properly included all of the inputs you would like to use in your submit form (like “name” and “email”).

Placing Your Form On Your Page

After you’ve included all of your inputs, you can click on “Share It” which then brings you to a page where you can view where your subscribe form lives along with an option to embed a small subscribe form into your web page (which then leads them to your subscribe form). However, if we want to utilize other submit form designs, we’ll need to get creative.

Copy and Paste the Code Into Your Page

First you’ll need to navigate to the url where your submit form lives. Once you’ve clicked on the url, you’ll be brought to a page with the form you just created. Next, you can just right click over the page, and click “view page source”. When the code pops up, you can start copying all of the code you see except for what’s inside the <style type=”text/css”> tag. Since we’re using a different submit form design though, we don’t need all of that .css stuff. Of course, if you want to keep the styles, I would suggest placing them in a .css file and linking to that style sheet in your web page.

Introducing: UI Parade

Once you’ve edited and pasted your submit form from into your web page, you can head on over too UI Parade to design a sleek submit form. UI Parade is a website where designers share some of their interface design ideas.

But UI Parade isn’t just a showcasing site where you might be able to find some design inspiration, it’s also home to UI Live Tools; a free online design app center that allows you to easily create your own UI elements with almost no coding knowledge.

Form Builder

UI Livetools has 4 tools that allow you to create buttons, ribbons, icons, and submit forms. Just select the Form Builder to begin designing your submit form. Once inside, you can choose the color gradient of your entire form including shadows and highlights, as well as the color of your text input fields, lables, and the design of your submit button.

Full CSS Design

Perhaps the greatest feature of the UI Livetools is not their usability, but the fact that the design is all html/css based. That way, everything looks sleek and professional without requiring a bit of coding knowledge. While this design tool may not be robust, it certainly is easy to work with and is visually appealing.

Placing Your Designed Form Into Your Web Page

Once you’ve designed your submit form, you can grab your custom code by clicking the “Generate HTML” and “Generate CSS” buttons and placing that content into your web page’s PHP/HTML file. To keep things clean, you may want to save your form’s css in a separate style sheet. Next, you just need to edit a few input variables, and you’ll be ready to go!

Finishing Up With Some Edits

After you’ve grabbed the html for your newly-designed submit form, you’ll need to change some things in your code. Keep in mind that you still need some of the values you pasted in from the form code you got from Mailchimp. So What you need to do is create a sort of hybrid which crosses the input values, actions, and ids from Mailchimp and the design code from UI Parade. Below is a basic example of how you’ll need to change your code:

In the above code, the red is what I had to add from Form Builder to the existing code I got from Mailchimp whereas the gray is what was deleted from the code I got from Mailchimp. What you should be left with is what’s in red and black.

Once you’re all done changing your code, you can then place this form anywhere on your web page and you’ve got a css-designed email submit form that will help to make your submit pages look unique, clean, and professional

Before we began developing the fully-comprehensive campaign management platform, we had to become well-versed with the intricacies of subIDs and the weight they hold in tracking. At the same time, while subIDs are ubiquitous in internet marketing, it’s become apparent to us that a lot of online marketers don’t quite understand what a subID is and how crucial it is to their success. Follow along to understand what a subID is, how it can be tracked, and what you can do to keep your conversions.

1 What’s a SubID?

First things first, what is a subID? When a user clicks on your ad, a unique number is generated and is used as an id for each click. That unique number is called a subID. Without a subID, conversions cannot be properly tracked. It should be noted that whatever tracking system you’re using both creates and logs each subID generated.

2 Sending the SubID: How Your Tracker Communicates to the Network

When the user clicks on your ad that number then travels through your sales funnel until it ultimately lands on an offer page. From there, the network captures that unique number and logs it in their system. However, first your tracking system needs to know how to properly communicate with the network with the offer so that it knows what number is the subID. This is done by appending the offer url you receive from the network with a subID placeholder, entered after the subID parameter.

Ex: http://www.offer.com/html?&AFFID=001CID=0001&SID=|append here|

Using SubID Placeholders As A Universal Translator

In Prosper202 that placeholder is “[[subid]]” while in POFpro you would use “{subid:}”. Without these place placeholders, your tracking system has no idea where to place the uniquely-generated number for each click and ultimately, the network has no way of knowing which x-digit number which your tracking system has just sent them is the subID.

Once your placeholder is set, your url (once a user has clicked on your ad) would look like this:

Ex: http://www.offer.com/html?&AFFID=001CID=0001&SID=12345678901

Logging Your SubID

Next, the subID gets logged and the network monitors the user activity associated with each subID. If the user does nothing, the network has nothing to report. However, if the user decides to opt-in to an offer or buy something, a notification is sent to the network along with the unique subID, identifying which click led to the sale/opt-in. This is known as a fired pixel. Almost simultaneously, the network sends a notification back to your tracking system which simply contains the subID that resulted in a conversion.

3 Receiving the SubID: How the Network Communicates to Your Tracker

Once a conversion has occurred, there are multiple methods which a network can use to tell your tracking system which subID (click) was responsible for a conversion. The most common methods are image pixels, iframes, and server postbacks.

Iframes and Image Pixels

With an iframe and image pixel, the subID information is already attached and ready to be sent out once the conversion pixel fires. These two mechanisms are cookie-based and are ready to be sent back to your tracking system upon notification of a conversion. However, since these mechanisms are based on cookies, latent conversions may not get properly credited to your account due to the fact that cookies get cleared after a certain amount of time, while some users may turn off 3rd party cookies, thus diminishing the ability for your system to track properly.

Postback URLs

The 3rd method involves server postbacks which allows for server-to-server communication. Once set up, this allows the network’s server to communicate with your tracking server by way of a postback url. The postback url acts as a vessel in which the advertiser can send to the converted subID back to your server resulting in a tracked conversion. However, your postback url (when placed into a network’s offer) needs to be properly appended with a dynamic token assigned by the network so that the network’s server knows what value to send back after a conversion. The purpose of a token is to dynamically insert the conversion subID from the network’s log into the url you provided back to your server. Without this token, the network doesn’t know where to place the conversion subID and cannot properly communicate with your server.

Network SubID Tokens

One major tracking system that a lot of networks use is CAKE. So, for example, to track subIDs, you would append your postback url with their subID token (#s1#) like so:

http://www.yourtrackingsystem.com/tracking.html?&SUBID=#s1#

However, many networks still do not use CAKE and will likely require a different token. So before you place your postback url, it is important to speak with your network AM to find out what that might be.

4 What’s Best For You?

It should be stated that image pixels and iframes are both simple and easy for networks to place and implement. It’s because of the relative convenience in image and iframe tracking that some networks don’t even bother with server postbacks. Ultimately any network would be remiss if they didn’t tell you that server to server tracking is more accurate and more reliable that image and iframe tracking.

Combine Postback URLs and Pixel Tracking For Tracking Insurance

Since it’s based on the length of a php session and doesn’t need to be loaded on the page (like tracking pixels) server tracking is more accurate than pixel tracking. That said, server tracking is only accurate if the time between the click and the conversion aren’t too far apart.

For example, in server tracking, the postback URL will not catch any conversions when the clicker converts 20 days later. Ultimately, a lot of marketers will employ both postback and pixel tracking. The accuracy of a postback compliments the elongated reliability of a pixel.

So when you’re trying to figure out which tracking mechanism you should use when you’re trying to find the best way to track your conversions, keep in mind that there is both a variety of choices with advantages and disadvantages in all.

Earlier this week, POF came out with some new and improved ad guidelines. In light of these new changes, I’d like to try to shed some light on the situation and tell you why it’s not all that bad.

POF Introduces an Updated Set of Guidelines

POF has grown quite a bit in the last few years. But with rising popularity with both marketers and users, POF was reportedly receiving an increasing number of complaints from their users about an excess of lewd images.

Yet, while explicit images were not permissible, pictures of shirtless men and women in provocative bikinis outdoors were almost becoming commonplace. So in an attempt to retain user experience, they came out with a new set of guidelines:

1. No Bikinis (1-piece swimsuits as well)
2. No Short Skirts (nothing shorter than mid-knee length)
3. No Bare Stomachs, ie. Midriff, on women
4. No Nude Torsos (topless males from the shoulder up are acceptable)
5. No Short Shorts
6. No Pictures of People That Look <20
7. No Images of People with a “Sexual Expression” On Their Face

Essentially, if it’s not work-appropriate, the approval team has been instructed to decline your ad. This means that if your images contain women in tight dresses or who resemble adult entertainment employees, they will likely be declined.

POF Also Introduces Retroactive Declines

Not only will new ads be required to follow the new guidelines, old ads will too. This is because for the first time, POF will be conducting ongoing retroactive denials.

Retroactive denials means ads which were previously compliant under the old guidelines will not be grandfathered in and will be subjected the same approval process as new ads, resulting in a more leveled playing field

Along with these new guidelines, there will also be a greater emphasis on consistency with the approval team. While in the past this has been a minor issue with POF, their mentioning of enforcing these rules more diligently is encouraging.

5 Things to Look Forward To With New Guidelines

At first glance, these new guidelines may be incredibly discouraging to a lot of people out there. But change isn’t always a bad thing. Before dismissing these guidelines as a completely negative thing, consider the benefits of running on a stricter advertising platform:

1. Higher Quality Leads – Abandoning superficial tactics will force marketers to rely more on creating ads with more substance.
2. Wider Variety of Offers – As a trend of higher quality leads from POF begins to develop, more advertisers will want POF’s traffic and more of it.
3. Payout Increases - At the same time, current advertisers will be more willing to pay you more for your POF traffic.
4. Greater Sustainability - With a greater volume of higher quality traffic, your chances of getting kicked off of an offer for a working campaign will decrease dramatically.
5. Equal Footing - Lastly, those annoying legacy ads that have somehow continued to undermine the compliance guidelines will finally be a thing of the past, placing you at equal footing with your competition.

The new guidelines mean that many POF marketers will have to re-think how they design their campaigns. No longer will people be able to rely on superficial, cheap tactics of raw sex appeal.

Also bear in mind that your landing pages will not be subjected to these new guidelines. So while some of your old ads may be getting declined, your landing pages will still be compliant.

Turn Lemons Into Lemonade

Think of the long-term gains. For instance, you may find that maintaining success in POF under these new conditions may inadvertently teach you how to create angles that could be applied to campaigns on other traffic sources.

As previously mentioned, without the use of lewd images, you will have to rely on your ability to tap into deeper emotional triggers to get users to click and convert resulting in a more universally applicable campaign.

Plus, while these changes were sudden, everyone appeared to find out at the same time without much notice. So while we wish that the community would have gotten a “heads up” of sorts, at least a majority of people out there got equal notice, leveling the playing field even further.

A Little Bit of Advice

There will be a lot of affiliates who will undoubtedly give up on POF because of the new guidelines, so take these upcoming weeks as an opportunity to take a higher share of POF traffic and innovate with new rising POF paradigm.

What you should also do is talk to your network AMs and advertisers about allowing POF traffic with its new advertising guidelines. Let them know that traffic quality is on its way to an upward trend and that you’d like to test their offer to see if it works for them now.

Some Final Words

Keep in mind that you still have access to one of the most comprehensive targeting ad platforms available today. While you may not be able to use the same images you used in the past, you can still target to any niche out there.

Ultimately, continue to explore new ideas and develop new angles while you have the chance.