If you run a website and do much of your marketing through email, a popular way to gain more subscribers to your mailing list is to offer a special incentive for signing up, such as access to a free ebook or magazine. You can now easily send your subscribers a download link to your document immediately after they sign up with your Constant Contact form. Follow the steps below to learn how.
Step 1: Create an email list and sign-up form in Constant Contact
The first thing you’ll need to do before creating your sign-up form is to have an email list that the form will feed into. If you don’t already have an email list set up, you can easily create a new one. Just login to Constant Contact, navigate to Contacts in the menu bar, then, on the left side of the page, clicking the + sign next to Email Lists.
After naming your new list, return to the Home page, then click on Sign-Up Tools on the right side of the screen. Now, you can either click on the existing Sign-Up Form to edit it, or you can Create a Sign-Up Form. 
Enter your form’s title and description, then select the list you want people to sign up for. Follow the remaining steps and save your form. You’ll be returned to the Sign-Up Tools page. On the right side of the page there are two important icons: the magnifying glass allows you to Preview your form and the link icon will let you either copy the URL for your form page or create a sign-up button to embed on your website. 
If you want to embed the form itself to your website, you’ll need to add an extension to Constant Contact (see Formstack or WordPress Plugin for Constant Contact).
Step 2: Create a download link to your file with Digioh
Now that you’ve set up your form, you’ll need to set up your document. First, sign up for Digioh, a service that allows you to send, track, and protect files for your Constant Contact subscribers. Once you have a Digioh account, connect it to your Constant Contact account and Add a File.
Under Security Options, you’ll see a few choices: List Grower Security (a person can sign up to view the document), Membership Security (the person must already be on your list to view it), or No Security. Since we want sign ups in this case, choose your list from List Grower Security. This way, if anyone forwards the link to your document, they’ll be prompted to join your list. 
After setting your options, move on to the next page. Your document will upload and you’ll receive the download link to copy/paste in your Constant Contact welcome email. 
Step 3: Paste your Digioh download link in your Constant Contact welcome email
With your download link in hand, go to Emails, then Autoresponders. Before we move further, there are a few important things to know about the difference between the welcome email and autoresponders.
The welcome email is sent immediately after someone signs up, but it is not list-specific. This isn’t an issue if you have only one list or can craft a welcome message that could apply to all of your lists, but if that’s not an option, you may consider using an autoresponder instead. The autoresponder is list-specific and much easier to compose (WYSIWYG editor) than the welcome email, but the downside is that the earliest it can be sent is one day after your subscriber signs up.
Since we want to send the download link to subscribers right away, go ahead and click on Welcome Email.
Use the links on the left to edit the various sections of your welcome email. In one of the paragraphs you’ll want to insert your Digioh download link.
Normally you can insert or hyperlink to your download using a WYSIWYG editor when composing emails within the site, but the welcome email editor operates a bit differently, so we’ll have to make one small adjustment to your link. When you paste your download link, replace $SUBSCRIBER.EMAIL$ with <Property name=”SUBSCRIBER.EMAIL”/>.
Now save the email and be sure to activate the changes. You can get to the activation by going through each step (recommended) or by clicking on Exit, then Finish.
Now that you have your email completed, the last thing to do is to test everything by signing yourself up through your sign-up form.
This is an interesting article. I wonder what your thoughts are…I’ve been using Constant Contact for a little while, but recently customized the welcome email. I think that I want to add a file link to it, but do I need to keep replacing the link whenever I need to update the document? Would it be better to create separate lists with each their own autoresponder so I can use different file links?
Thanks.
Hi CCU,
I think the answer here depends a little bit more on your needs. If you just need to update the document every now and then, you can simply re-upload it in the Digioh dashboard and you don’t need to change anything in the welcome email. However, if you have more than one document that you want to send to two different lists, then autoresponders are a better option. Let me know if you have any follow-up questions.
You can just keep updating the file within your Digioh account – no need to change the link.