Rainmaker comes with the ability to create membership sites and sell once off products such as Ebooks and courses, where people would create a login profile to access the content. You may not be at the stage where you can sell access to your site and you just want to build an email list. Luckily there is a way to set up a simple opt in incentive in Rainmaker, where you can offer visitors a free incentive in exchange for their email address.

In this tutorial I want to show you how to create a simple email opt in incentive using the RainMail email features that come with the Rainmaker Platform.

Video Instructions – click play below

Text instructions

To set up the free opt in incentive there are a few steps that we need to go through and I have broken the steps down into two videos.

The steps involved require us to:

1. Set up an email list in RainMail
2. Create a form for the opt in
3. Create a ‘Thank You’ page for when the customer submits the opt in form
4. Upload the incentive to our Rainmaker Site
5. Create a ‘Download’ page and embed the download
6. Adjust the email list settings to direct customers to the download page after they click the confirmation link in the email

In this tutorial, we will complete the first three steps.

Follow the text instructions below.

1. To create the email list, hover over the cog icon in the blue admin bar and click ‘Email’. Click ‘Add New Email List’. In the pop up screen, you will be prompted to add a name for the email list and a description. Leave the other settings for now as we will come back to them once we have the other steps created.

2. After the list is created, the next step is to create the custom opt in form. Hover over the ‘Manage’ link in the blue admin bar and select ‘Forms’. Click ‘Add New Form’.

Give the form a name and save the form and then go into the ‘Field Settings’ and add the fields for the details you want to collect from the subscriber.

3. In the ‘Email Marketing’ tab, select your email service provider and the list your customers will be added to.

4. The next step in the email opt in process is to create the ‘Thank You’ page customers will be directed to after they complete the form. You can use this page to thank them for their interest and to check their inbox for the confirmation email and click the link to confirm their subscription.

As promised, here is the text I used for the thank you page message:

5. Once you have the thank you page created, go back to your form and go to the ‘Notifications’ tab. Click ‘Add New’. Give the notification a name, select the ‘Type’ as ‘Redirect’ and paste in the URL of your thank you page into the URL field. Save the notification.

6. Now that you have everything created, I would recommend to test the opt in process, and you can do that by clicking on ‘Form Preview’. If you don’t have a spare email address to use, and you use Gmail, add your handle with ‘+test’ appended to it. The confirmation email will go to your normal Gmail inbox, but just with the ‘+test’ added to it.

And that is it for part one.

In the next tutorial, we will complete the free opt in incentive and set up the ‘Download’ page and adjust the confirmation email so that the confirmation link directs the customer to the download page.