Newsletter signup on your storefront

A newsletter popup, an email box in the footer, an exit-intent offer: the ways you collect addresses from people browsing your shop before they buy anything. Brainerce holds the contacts, sends the confirmation, and keeps the consent record; the form itself lives on your storefront.

Getting the form onto your site

There is no switch for this in the dashboard, and no builder. Whoever built your storefront adds the form, using a few lines of code calling marketing.subscribe() from the Brainerce SDK. Send them to the integration guide and they will find it under "Newsletter signup".

This is different from Contact forms, which you do build yourself under Inquiries. Those two are not interchangeable. See below.

A storefront scaffolded recently with npx create-brainerce-store already has the form in its footer, wired up and working, so there is nothing to ask for. An older shop, or one built by hand, does not have it and does not gain it by itself. See Connect with the CLI scaffolder.

Every signup needs a confirmation click

When someone enters their address, Brainerce emails them a message asking them to confirm. Until they click the button in that email, they are not subscribed and your campaigns will not reach them.

You will see the contact in your Customers list straight away, marked Not subscribed. It flips to Subscribed the moment they click.

This is not something you can switch off. Without the click, anyone could sign up anyone else's address, and, for an Israeli sender under Amendment 40, the click is your evidence that the person themselves asked for your email. It is also what protects your sending domain from the complaints that follow mail nobody asked for.

Why your subscriber count is lower than your signup count

Because most people never click the confirmation.

A signup form that "worked" 200 times might produce 120 subscribers. That gap is normal and it is not a bug in the form. Compare Subscribed customers against your own signup analytics, not against each other, and judge the popup by confirmed subscribers.

If the gap looks extreme, there are two usual causes and both are fixable. The confirmation is landing in spam, so your success message should name the spam folder, not just say "check your email". Or the storefront is telling people "You're subscribed!", so they never go looking for the email at all. Both are one sentence of copy on your storefront; ask whoever built it.

Remember the resend cooldown while you are debugging this: an address that already got a confirmation in the last 24 hours gets nothing on a second attempt, and the visitor still sees your success message. Test with a fresh address each time or you will conclude the form is broken when it is working.

What the confirmation email says, and can I edit it?

No, and deliberately. It is the one message in Brainerce you cannot reword, because its accuracy is the legal basis for every campaign you send afterwards.

It goes out in Hebrew or English, chosen from the language the shopper was browsing in, falling back to your store's language. Any other language currently receives the English version.

Getting them a discount code for signing up

"10% off your first order" is the usual offer, and Brainerce can hand out a personal, one-time code to everyone who confirms. Set it up under Coupons → Newsletter welcome offer: see Welcome discount for newsletter signups for the full guide.

Two things to know here, because they surprise people:

• The code is created by the confirmation click, not by the signup. Nobody sees a code on your website, and there is nothing to show them there. It appears on the confirmation page and arrives in a second email. That is what stops your popup being forwarded around.
• Your storefront still has to advertise the offer. Switching it on does not put anything on your site; whoever built the storefront displays the terms beside the signup box. A shop scaffolded recently with npx create-brainerce-store already does.

If you would rather hand out one shared code yourself, that still works: create an ordinary coupon under Coupons with the condition first order only and have your developer show it after a successful signup. It is the same code for everyone who sees it, so anyone can pass it on.

A contact form named "newsletter" is not a mailing list

You can create a contact form and call it "Newsletter" under Customers → Inquiries. That form still files a message in your inbox. It does not create a subscriber, does not record consent, and the addresses it collects can never be sent a campaign.

If you have been collecting emails that way, those people are not on your list. Moving them across is not something a re-import fixes either, because an imported contact also has to confirm before you can mail them.

What you can and cannot do from the dashboard

• You cannot subscribe someone yourself. Editing a customer, importing a CSV, or ticking a box on their profile does not put an unconfirmed address on your list.
• You cannot re-send a confirmation. There is no button for it anywhere. If someone lost the email, they have to use the signup form on your site again, and that only sends a fresh one once every 24 hours per address. (The Send again button on the welcome-offer list is a different thing: it re-sends a discount code to somebody who already confirmed. It cannot help anyone who has not.)
• You cannot see who was sent a confirmation and did not click. They appear in Customers as Not subscribed, the same as anyone else who never opted in.

Addresses that will never receive the confirmation

Some signups silently send nothing at all, and the visitor still sees your success message:

• The address hard bounced, was reported as spam, or was suppressed by hand. Those are permanent. See Email campaigns.
• The same address already got a confirmation from your store in the last 24 hours.
• The person is already subscribed.

Your storefront cannot tell these apart, and that is on purpose: if the form said "you're already a customer here", anyone could use it to find out who shops with you.

Someone who previously unsubscribed is the exception that does go through: signing up again is them changing their mind, and clicking the new confirmation lifts the old unsubscribe.

What's next?

• Email campaigns covers sending to the list once it exists.
• Customer profiles is where the contacts land.
• Welcome discount for newsletter signups covers rewarding people who confirm.
• Manage contact inquiries covers the other kind of form.