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7 Reasons Why You Should Use an External Form System and Not a Mailing System Forms?

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external forms data-collection advantages

While most email marketing platforms (ESPs) include sign-up forms, there are better alternatives. Why shouldn't you use the ESPs and prefer using external sign-up forms?

Table of Contents

Anyone engaged in email marketing uses forms in some way to collect leads or allow subscriptions to their mailing list.
This could be a short form collecting just an email address or a detailed interactive questionnaire for gathering extensive information, such as a survey. It might be a permanent form embedded in various places on a website or a landing page, or a popup of some kind.
While many email marketing platforms offer their own forms, there are significant advantages to using an external form platform over the built-in forms provided by email marketing platforms, especially if the form is embedded on a website or a landing page on a WordPress site.

What are the main advantages of using an external form platform compared to forms from email marketing platforms?

Data Security and Data Quality

We wouldn’t dream of allowing strangers access to our information systems, and in many cases, even within the organization, not all employees have access to information systems. A signup form is a kind of backdoor that allows anyone to input information into our systems, so it must be protected.
Security is a critical issue when collecting information from potential customers, and in this area, professional external form platforms generally offer significant advantages over the forms provided by email marketing platforms.

Professional form platforms are equipped with advanced security options to protect against spam bots and fake profiles, including the ability to connect to multiple layers of advanced Captcha, Honeypot protection that hides fields from bots, geographic checks that can block registrations from certain countries, and real-time email verification. All these help ensure that only genuine and high-quality registrations reach your mailing list.
While some email marketing platforms include basic protection in their forms, they often lack the comprehensive features mentioned above. Moreover, a significant drawback of forms from email marketing platforms is the direct integration, which doesn’t allow for data validation, cleansing, or formatting before transferring the data to the email marketing system.

מערכות טפסים נפוצות ל-WordPress

שם המערכת וקישור ליצרן הערות
Fluent Forms
Happy Forms
Gravity Forms
WP Forms
Formidable Forms
Ninja Forms
Contact Form 7
ARForms
Wufoo
Elementor מערכת טפסים ופופ-אפ קיימת כחלק אינטגרלי מאלמנטור
SureForms

Protection against spam and bots

Spam bots scan the web looking for vulnerable forms to fill out, creating false registrations. These registrations can cause various damages, including “infecting” your mailing lists with fake sign-ups that might report spam or include known spam traps, potentially leading to blocks and harming your reputation.

Protection through multiple layers against spam bots is a reason to prefer using an external form platform over the forms provided by your email marketing platform. Professional external form platforms are equipped with advanced tools to detect and prevent registrations from spam bots and fake profiles. They can analyze user behavior, identify suspicious registration patterns, and include protection mechanisms such as HCaptcha, reCAPTCHA, and Cloudflare Turnstile. Additionally, they offer extensive support for real-time email verification services.

See more about Spambots

תוספים לזיהוי ומניעה של spam bots באתרים וטפסים

שם התוסף / שירות הסבר
Cloudflare Turnstile תחליף קפצ'ה. שירות חינמי של קלאודפלייר
HcCptcha תחליף קפצ'ה
Google reCAPTCHA קפצ'ה של גוגל
Akismet מגיע מותקן כברירת מחדל בהתקנות וורדפרס
Maspik
zerospam
oopspam
antispam-bee
Human presence
wpcerber

Real-Time Email Verification Support

Another danger stemming from the data is related to incorrect registrations. When typing email information, we all make mistakes because of thwarting letters or because of “fat fingers,” a phenomenon that causes us to type the wrong letters on the small keyboard on our mobile. Either way, the result is incorrect registrations.

I have clients whose subscribers include thousands of leads and new customers every day. Without protecting the forms from incorrect records, the bounce rate in the initial email automation (the first welcome email) is 6% to 8% on average, hurting their deliverability.

Real-time email verification can prevent invalid addresses from entering your mailing list, improving the quality of your contacts and reducing bounce rates. External form platforms often integrate with email verification services to validate addresses as they are entered.

Real-time data validation will prevent false registrations that include incorrect data and will solve three problems at the same time:

  • Preventing the initial bounce, which, as mentioned, may harm deliverability above a certain threshold.
  • Saving money if we paid for traffic so that people would sign up, and by verifying emails in real time, we prevented fictitious registrations, which would otherwise have gone down the drain.
  • Improving the customer experience and maintaining trust between a brand and its customers. Many times, after filling out a form, we receive a message saying, “Thank you for signing up. We will send you an email immediately.” This email will never arrive because the email address is incorrect.

See more about email authentication services

שירותי email validation נפוצים

שם השירות הערות
Bouncer
Zerobounce
Kickbox
Clearout קיים פלאגאין לבדיקת אונליין באתר ותמיכה רחבה בטפסי הרשמה
Debounce קיים פלאגאין לבדיקת אונליין באתר ותמיכה רחבה בטפסי הרשמה
Briteverify
Webbula דורש חתימה על הסכמים ואין אפשרות הזמנה באתר

Independency


Using an external form platform lets you separate the data collection process from your email marketing system. This separation provides flexibility; for instance, if you decide to switch email marketing platforms, you won’t need to rebuild your forms from scratch. Instead, you can update the integration settings in your external form platform to connect with the new email marketing system.


Advanced Data Processing Capabilities

External form platforms often offer advanced data processing features, such as data cleansing, formatting, and enrichment before the information reaches your email marketing system. This ensures that the data collected is accurate, standardized, and ready for effective campaign segmentation and targeting.

An example of an indirect integration between a form on the website and other systems

Integration

The flexible integration that external form offers is another significant benefit. While mailing system forms usually only connect to the system itself, professional external systems allow connection to a wide range of tools and systems both directly and through integration tools such as Zapier, Make, internal WordPress integration tools such as Uncanny Automator or FlowMattic, and others.

The ability to integrate the data collected in forms with other systems enables the creation of more complex and effective marketing processes and the better use of the information collected.

Monitoring and control

One of the most prominent advantages of outdoor form systems is their flexibility and advanced features. While the basic forms of mailing systems may satisfy the most basic needs, external systems allow publishers and marketers to improve their lead collection and sign-up practices, for example by advanced lead tracking and source tracking capabilities, the ability to create complex forms with conditional logic, and diverse design features to better match the look of the website.

In addition, these systems often offer direct and indirect integrations with a wide range of additional tools and systems, allowing the forms to be seamlessly integrated into the business’s overall marketing setup in combination with automations and integration tools.

Independence from the mailing system

Another advantage of external form systems is that when replacing a mailing system, there is no need to replace the forms on the site (sometimes in many places on the site) with the new forms of the new mailing system, but only to define the integration of the form system with the new mailing system in a tool where the indirect integration was implemented, such as Zapier, Mike, or an internal integration tool in WordPress.

Podcast interviews with international email marketing experts

Listen to my English podcast – EmailGeeks.Show
אני סלע יפה, מומחה אימייל מרקטינג ועבירוּת אימיילים. אני מזמין אותך לפגישת יעוץ ראשונית של 1/2 שעה ללא עלות בנושא עבירוּת אימיילים ואסטרטגיית אימייל מרקטינג. book an email deliverability discovery call.

Further reading

Sella Yoffe
CEO , 

Email Deliverability & Email Marketing Expert 

Helping global email senders, startups, digital agencies, and ESPs with email deliverability, email authentication (SPF, DKIM, DMARC, BIMI), and email & content strategy

Podcast creator & Blogger @ CRM.BUZZ & EmailGeeks.Show

מאמרים קשורים

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