Today we're launching forms: an easy way to add standalone pages to your newsletter whose whole job is to get you new subscribers.
The rest of the industry would call these landing pages. We're probably leaving money on the table by not calling them that too — but it just doesn't feel like the right vibe for us.
Why you'd want one
Say you're running a promotion for your new book, and you want to drum up subscribers who'll follow along as it gets released. You want to offer them a sneak peek of the first few chapters, and you want to tag them specifically so you can reach out again when the sequel lands.
You could already do a version of this today, but neither path is great. You could add a custom input to your main subscribe form — but then you'd have to rewrite your newsletter description to explain what it's all about. Or you could hand-write a standalone HTML page — a curse I'd wish on nobody.
With forms, you spin up a standalone page dedicated just to the book, with styling and content unique to it. Anyone who subscribes through that path gets tagged automatically by Buttondown — no hoops to jump through — so you can build an automation that targets them specifically. You can give the form a custom URL that's snappy and easy to remember, and you can watch the conversion rate for that form alone.
The docs walk through building your first one.
How it fits into the bigger picture
One of the things I'm always mindful of is not adding functionality for the sake of adding functionality — and not adding power-user features that serve complex use cases while making the experience subtly worse for everyone else.
I'm really happy with where we landed, because forms are a genuinely new abstraction we can offer without sequestering functionality behind them or demanding extra effort from the paths you already use.
I had two goals in mind as we designed this:
- Build it so that the majority of users can simply not use it.
- Set up the abstractions to minimize conceptual overhead.
On that second point, stick with me: the main subscribe page you've always had is, in effect, just a form — one that happens to always take the style of your newsletter and its description. Forms don't bolt a new concept onto Buttondown; they generalize one that was quietly there the whole time.
Availability
Forms are available on the $29/month Standard plan and above. That's where most of the functionality that unlocks their potential — animations and the like — already lives.
As always, if you have any questions or thoughts, email me.