The Subscribe Box.  It’s that little (or often not-so-little) section of your newsletter that allows people to add themselves to the ever-growing ranks of your readership.  Many of you have astutely pointed out that if your subscribe box is in your newsletter, then most of the people who see it are already subscribers, so why take up valuable space with it? 

On the other hand, you don’t want to take away someone’s ability to subscribe when they’ve received a “tell a friend” message, or found your newsletter online.  Several of you have recently asked me about replacing the subscribe box with a subscribe link, which you can do by turning your subscribe form into an article on a micro-site.  I think this is a great idea, worthy of passing along to the rest of you.  Here’s how it’s done:

1.  Customize your subscribe box.

Before adding a subscribe link, you have to build your subscription form.  To do this, click on the Subscription Builder in the Main Menu.  Here you’ll find two options for your subscribe box, standard and custom.  If you want to ask for more information than just email addresses, choose “Custom.”  Then click on “Open Editor” to customize the form people must fill out in order to receive your newsletter.

You can add fields to your form using the “Add Input Field” button.  You can use any of the twenty fields that IMN gives you automatically, any of your ten custom fields, and you can even add a number of lists for subscribers to choose from.  After you select the fields of information you want to collect, you will have the opportunity to edit those fields in the Custom Subscribe Box Editor. When you are finished, click the “save” button, and then click “save” again at the bottom of the subscription builder options.

If you don’t want to ask any qualifying questions, you can just check the standard option. 

2.  Copy the source code for your subscribe box.

Once you have selected and/or customized your subscribe box, you must save your changes at the very bottom of the Subscription Builder page and then click into the Subscription Builder again.  Once there, click on “View Current Source” and a window will pop up displaying the source code for your form.

You will now see the HTML code, which you will want to copy.  It is a good idea to temporarily copy it in to an open notepad window, because you will need to move through a few different screens before you paste it into an article.  Note: if you see HTML tags at the beginning and end of your code that say <PRE> or </PRE>, you may want to remove them at this point as they should not be pasted into your micro-site page.

3. Copy the code for your subscribe box into an “article.”

Just as you would with a regular article, click on “Articles” from the Main Menu page and “Add New.” Then click the “Continue” button under “Contribute Your Own.”  Now you can paste the HTML code that you copied from the Subscription Builder into the article body field.  This will effectively place the form you made on your micro-site’s article page. 



Note: The radio buttons below the article body text box will default to “Plain Text.” Choose the “HTML (Formatted Text)” radio button at this point to avoid a possible error message later.

Before you save the article with the your subscribe box code in it, there are two very important settings that need to be changed in order for this article to appear in every issue and only as a link.  First, at the top of the new article page, there is a drop down menu where you can set the issue to appear in “All Issues” rather than only in the current one. 





Second, towards the bottom of the page are three radio buttons that allow you to determine the position of the article.  This should be set to “Determine position later,” so that your subscribe box article will not appear on your cover page or in your Table of Contents.  After you’ve copied in your HTML and changed these settings, save the article.

4.  Create a link to your Subscribe Box article.

Start by going into the layout of your newsletter, and clicking “” in the spot where you want the link to appear.  From the list of elements, choose the “Custom HTML (Empty Element)” as the one you want to add.  Once you are in the “Element Properties” page, click on the “Use Editor” button that sits under either the “Before” or “After” fields (it typically does not matter which one of these you choose).  The HTML editor will pop up.

Type in the text or upload the image that you would like people to click on to be taken to the subscribe page.  (If you need help using the HTML Editor for loading images, check out the Knowledge Base from your Main Menu.) 

Then, select your text/image, and click on the hyperlink button (it looks like a chain). In the “Link To” field, select the subscribe box article from your list of articles.  Click ok, and then save, and then save your changes as you would with any other modification to your layout.  Once saved, you should see the link you created in your template.  Note: this link refers to a live page on your newsletter’s micro-site, so it will not work until after the next time you post your newsletter to the web.

Once you have deleted the subscribe box element, you will have successfully made the switch from subscribe box to subscribe link.

Following these steps will let you free up space on your cover page without removing the subscribe option.  Remember, there are big possibilities in that little subscribe box, so don’t be afraid to give it your own personal touch.  And if you come up with another creative solution to subscriber collection, let us know—like the one I just shared with you, many of the best ideas come from our customers!

And as always, if you have questions, feel free to ask me!