Share and embed your signup form
Put your signup form where people already are: a hosted link, an embed snippet, a popup, an email signature button, a QR code and social posts.
Building a form is the easy half. The half that actually grows a list is getting it in front of people, and that is not one decision but several: your website, a popup on your busiest page, the signature at the bottom of every email you send, a code on a printed card at your counter.
Mailsoftly gives you all of those from one screen. Every channel points at the same form, so a submission from a QR code on a poster and a submission from an iframe on your homepage land in the same place, tagged the same way, starting the same automation. This guide walks each channel, then shows exactly what happens the moment somebody presses Subscribe.
If you have not built a form yet, start with Create a signup form and come back here.
Open the Share tab
Open your form and pick Share from the row of tabs along the top: Build, Style, Settings, Share, Submissions. Every publishing option lives on this one screen, laid out as a grid of cards.
You get nine cards: a Direct Link, an iFrame snippet, a JavaScript snippet, a Popup Window, an Email Signature button, a QR Code, a Share on social block, the Full Source Code, and a WordPress Plugin card. If your website already runs WordPress, Mailsoftly notices and moves that card to the front with a Recommended badge on it. Each card has its own copy button, so you take the one format your site needs and ignore the rest.
Above the cards sits an amber strip listing every automation this form starts, with each automation as a chip you can open in a new tab. That strip is worth reading before you publish anything: it is the product telling you what a stranger’s signup is about to set in motion.
If this screen asks you to verify your domain instead of showing the cards, that is the gate, not a bug. Sharing options unlock once you have verified a sending domain or connected Google Workspace or Microsoft 365. Until then you can keep building and previewing the form.
Share the hosted link
The Direct Link card holds a complete, working page hosted by Mailsoftly. Nothing to install, nothing to design twice. Press Copy Link to take it, or Open to see what a visitor sees.
The address is short on purpose. It ends in /f/ followed by a short code, and the box under the URL lets you rename that code to something a person can read out loud or type off a poster: spring-open-day instead of six random characters. Type a new one and press Save. Codes are lowercase letters, numbers and hyphens, at least three characters, and cannot be only digits. If the code is taken or the format is wrong, the error appears right next to the box.
Renaming is safe. The long original address stays valid forever, so any link you shared before the rename keeps working.
Out of the box that link is served from a Mailsoftly address. Once your account has proven it owns a domain, you can claim a branded one instead, and your forms, your landing pages and your email archive all move onto it together, so the form sits at yourname.mailsoftly.co/f/spring-open-day. You claim it from the banner at the top of this screen or from your company profile, and only an account admin can make the change. The options are not free text: they are built from domains your account has actually verified.
Everything you published before the change keeps working. Old addresses redirect to the new one, and that still holds if you change it again later, which is exactly why a code printed on a leaflet last year still lands in the right place.
Rename the short code before you print anything. Redirects will rescue a link you already shared, but the address on a poster is the one people will read for years.
Embed it on your website
Two cards give you an embed, and the difference is worth thirty seconds of your time.
The JavaScript card is one <script> tag. Paste it into your page exactly where you want the form to appear, because that is precisely where it renders: the script replaces itself in place. It brings its own styling with it, so there is nothing else to upload, no stylesheet to link and no library to load first. This is the one most people want.
The iFrame card gives you a fixed 400 by 600 frame instead. Choose it when your site strips script tags, which is common in a locked-down content system or a hosted store template.
The WordPress Plugin card is a third route, and the only one that needs a second piece of setup. It walks you through three steps: install the free Mailsoftly Form Embed plugin from the WordPress plugin directory, paste an API key into the plugin’s settings screen, then drop the shortcode this card gives you into any page or post. The card links to both the plugin and your API key screen, so you never have to go hunting.
If you would rather own the markup outright, the Full Source Code card hands you the raw pieces: a required submitter script, the required form HTML, and an optional stylesheet you can skip if you would rather write your own CSS.
Embed snippets keep the long form address rather than the short one. That is deliberate. Pasted code is never typed by hand, and the long address is stable no matter how many times you rename the short link.
Turn it into a popup
The Popup Window card gives you another single <script> tag, but this one shows the form as an overlay instead of putting it in the page. Press Preview Popup first to see the real thing, not a mockup.
Open Popup Settings underneath to shape it. Auto-open after a delay, between one and ten seconds. Width and height as a percentage of the screen, anywhere from thirty to ninety. Press Save Settings and the snippet you already pasted picks the change up on its own.
Mailsoftly caps how often the popup shows itself, so you are not the reason somebody leaves your site. If a visitor submits the form, they never see the popup again. If they close it, it stays away for a day and then gets one more chance. Buttons you add yourself are exempt from all of that: give any link or button on your page the class ms-modal-trigger and it opens the popup on click, every time, which turns the same snippet into an on-demand "Join our list" button anywhere on the site.
Leave auto-open off on pages people arrive at from search, and put a manual trigger button in your page instead. You get the same form without spending a first impression on an overlay.
Put it in your email signature, and on social
The Email Signature card turns your form into a subscribe button you can carry in every message you send. The button preview is live: type your own label, up to sixty characters, and pick a colour. It starts in your brand colour already.
Two buttons take it away. Copy Button puts the styled button on your clipboard so you can paste it straight into Gmail’s signature editor or Outlook’s, styling intact. Copy HTML gives you the raw markup for editors that want code instead. The card spells out where each of those settings screens lives, so you are not hunting through menus.
Next to it, the Share on social card gives you a prewritten line and the form link ready to paste, plus one-press buttons for LinkedIn, Facebook, X and WhatsApp.
Every one of these carries its own tracking tags, so when you look at where your subscribers came from, signature clicks, QR scans, social posts and plain link shares are all told apart from each other automatically.
Print a QR code
The QR Code card is for everywhere your audience is not looking at a screen. Download it as PNG for a slide or a leaflet, or as SVG when a designer needs it to scale without going fuzzy.
Print a sheet opens a ready-made page you can put up as it is: your logo, your brand colour, a big code, and a headline and a line under it that you edit by clicking straight on them. Change the words, press Print, and it comes out as a poster, a counter card or an event table sheet.
That sheet’s default wording follows the language your form is written in rather than the language you are working in, because the person reading it is your audience, not you. Edit both lines before printing either way.
A printed code survives a change of address. If you later claim a branded address, or change the one you have, Mailsoftly keeps redirecting the old one, so a card printed today still works after the move.
Know what happens when somebody signs up
Every channel above feeds the same pipeline, and you control it from the Settings tab of the same form.
The moment somebody submits, Mailsoftly finds an existing contact with that address or creates a new one. If you turned on Assign a tag, the tag goes on. If you turned on Add to contact list, they join the list you chose. They also join your subscription list, which is what your campaigns send to, and if you have never made one Mailsoftly creates a list called Form Subscriptions and uses that. If your form carries the Email Subscriptions field, every box the person ticked is recorded, and any subscription you have linked to a contact list adds them to that list too.
Then automations run. Any automation with the "when a form is submitted" trigger pointed at this form starts, which is what those chips at the top of the Share tab were telling you.
Two more things worth knowing. Duplicate submissions are absorbed: an identical submission within ten minutes is accepted politely and stored once, so a double-clicked button gives you one contact, one notification and one automation run. And you can send people somewhere of your choosing afterwards, either to your own page with the Redirect option, or to a thank you page you write yourself right here.
If you want people to confirm by email before they count as subscribers, build it with an automation. Mailsoftly ships a Double opt-in recipe: it sends a confirmation email, waits a day, and branches on whether the link was clicked. One change is essential. The recipe arrives with the "when a contact is created" trigger, and that trigger deliberately does not fire for form signups. Switch it to "when a form is submitted" and point it at this form, or the automation will never start.
Pick two channels, not nine. A form embedded on the page people actually visit, plus a button in your signature, will out-collect a form that lives in five places nobody looks. Then send those new subscribers something worth reading with Build a welcome automation, and keep the lists they land in tidy with Import contacts and manage lists.
Ready to try it in your own account?
Free to start with your Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 account. No credit card required.
