Every email list starts the same way: a form somewhere collecting an address and, hopefully, permission to keep in touch. It’s easy to treat this step as an afterthought, but a well-built signup form is the front door to your entire email marketing program — get it wrong, and even the best welcome sequence or newsletter never gets the chance to prove itself. Brevo (formerly Sendinblue) offers a genuinely capable, no-code form builder that covers everything from a simple embedded field to a full popup with GDPR compliance baked in.

This guide walks through building a signup form in Brevo from start to finish, covering both the standard subscription form and the popup variant, along with the compliance details that matter if you’re collecting contacts from audiences covered by GDPR or similar privacy regulations.

Choosing the Right Form Type for Your Goal

Brevo supports a few distinct form formats, and picking the right one for your specific placement matters:

Embedded (full page) forms sit directly within a page’s existing layout — think a form built into your homepage footer, a dedicated landing page, or a sidebar widget. These tend to feel more native and less intrusive, and work well for someone who’s already engaged enough with your content to be reading the page.

Popup forms appear as an overlay, interrupting the page to grab attention. These generally convert at meaningfully higher rates precisely because they’re harder to miss, but they need to be used thoughtfully — a popup that’s too aggressive, appears too quickly, or is difficult to dismiss can hurt user experience and, indirectly, your brand’s credibility.

Most mature email programs eventually use both: an embedded form as a permanent, low-pressure fixture somewhere on the site, and a popup for higher-intent moments, such as exit intent or after a visitor has scrolled through a meaningful portion of an article.

Step 1: Start the Form Creation Process

Log into your Brevo account and navigate to Contacts in the left-hand sidebar, then click into the Forms section. From here, click the button to create a new form — typically labeled Create a Subscription Form for the standard embedded/landing page format, or a separate option for creating a Popup if that’s your chosen format.

Give the form an internal name. This name is purely for your own organization inside Brevo — subscribers never see it — so make it specific enough to identify at a glance later, especially once you have multiple forms running across different pages.

Step 2: Decide on GDPR Fields

Before moving into the visual design step, Brevo will ask whether you want to include GDPR-specific fields on your form. If you have any subscribers based in the European Union, or you simply want to follow best practice regardless of audience location, it’s strongly recommended to enable this option.

Enabling GDPR fields automatically adds a GDPR consent checkbox and a GDPR declaration block to your form, both of which make clear to the person signing up exactly what they’re agreeing to and how their data will be used. This isn’t just a legal formality — clear, honest consent language also tends to build trust with subscribers, since it signals you’re taking their data seriously rather than collecting it carelessly.

Step 3: Design the Form

Once you move past the initial setup screen, you’ll land in Brevo’s visual form builder, which comes pre-loaded with a basic starter template. The builder is organized into two main areas:

The Build tab contains the blocks and fields you can drag and drop directly onto your form — text fields, dropdowns, checkboxes, image blocks, and descriptive text blocks, among others.

The Form design tab contains the visual styling controls — colors, fonts, spacing, and button styling — letting you match the form’s appearance to your brand without needing any custom code.

You don’t need to use every available block. In fact, for most signup forms, less is more: a name field and an email field, plus the mandatory GDPR blocks if you enabled them, is often the ideal balance between capturing what you need and minimizing friction for the person signing up. Every additional field you require reduces your conversion rate to some degree, so add fields only when you have a genuine, specific use for the data they’ll capture.

If you do want to collect more than the basics — for example, a dropdown asking what topic someone is most interested in — that data becomes directly useful for segmentation later, so it can be worth the small conversion tradeoff if you have a clear plan to use it.

Step 4: Add a Compelling Introduction

Use a Text block near the top of your form to include a short, persuasive description of what someone gets by signing up. This is your chance to answer the visitor’s unspoken question — “what’s in it for me?” — before they commit their email address. A vague “subscribe to our newsletter” tends to underperform a specific promise like “get one practical tip every week to grow your online store,” because the second version tells the visitor exactly what to expect.

Keep this description short. A signup form is not the place for a long pitch — a sentence or two, paired with a clear call-to-action on the submit button itself (something more specific than a generic “Submit,” such as “Send Me the Guide” or “Join the List”), tends to outperform generic phrasing.

Step 5: Configure the Confirmation Flow

Decide whether your form will use single or double opt-in. With double opt-in enabled, anyone who submits the form receives an automatic confirmation email containing a link they must click to be fully added as an active subscriber. This is widely considered best practice: it confirms the email address was entered correctly, proves genuine consent (which matters significantly for GDPR compliance), and keeps your list quality higher over time by filtering out mistyped addresses and low-intent signups.

Set up or customize your double opt-in confirmation email within the form’s settings, and likewise customize the “thank you” page or message that displays immediately after someone submits the form — ideally reinforcing what happens next (for example, “check your inbox to confirm, and your guide will be waiting”).

Step 6: Building a Popup Version

If you’re building the popup variant instead of (or in addition to) the embedded form, the process is broadly similar but with a few popup-specific considerations. From the Contacts → Forms section, choose the popup option, then click Create Design to enter the popup-specific builder.

The Form tab here lets you design the actual popup content using the same block-based approach as the standard form builder. Because popups interrupt the page, effective ones tend to be shorter and punchier than embedded forms — a strong headline, one or two sentences of supporting copy, the email field, and a clear submit button, without unnecessary extra fields that add friction to what’s already a slightly interruptive experience.

As with the standard form, enabling the GDPR opt-in, GDPR declaration, and a CAPTCHA block is highly recommended to stay compliant and to filter out bot signups, which can otherwise quietly pollute an otherwise clean list.

Step 7: Configure Display Rules for Popups

Popups typically include additional settings controlling exactly when and how often they appear — for example, after a delay of several seconds, after a visitor scrolls a certain percentage down the page, or when their cursor movement suggests they’re about to leave the page (commonly called exit intent). Choosing display rules thoughtfully makes a significant difference in how a popup is received: appearing instantly on page load, before a visitor has had any chance to engage with your content, tends to feel aggressive and often gets dismissed reflexively without ever being read.

A moderate delay, or an exit-intent trigger, generally strikes a better balance — capturing attention at a moment when the visitor has already shown some engagement or is about to leave anyway, so there’s little downside to the interruption.

If you’re running the popup across multiple websites, Brevo recommends starting by adding your primary domain’s URL and installing the popup script there first, then repeating the installation process for each additional site.

Step 8: Publish and Install the Form

Once your form design and settings are finalized, Brevo generates an HTML snippet (sometimes referred to as an HTML fragment) that you install on your website to actually display the form. For an embedded form, this typically means adding a custom HTML or code block to the specific page or section where you want the form to appear, and pasting in the provided snippet.

For a popup, the installation snippet usually needs to be added once, sitewide — often in your site’s header or footer template — so it can trigger according to whatever display rules you configured, regardless of which page a visitor happens to be on.

If you’re using a website builder or CMS platform, check whether Brevo has a dedicated plugin or integration for your specific platform, which can simplify installation considerably compared to manually placing raw HTML.

Step 9: Test the Form Thoroughly

Before considering the form live, submit it yourself using a real, checkable email address. Confirm:

• The submission is received correctly in your Brevo contacts, added to the correct list.
• The double opt-in confirmation email (if enabled) arrives promptly and the confirmation link works.
• The thank-you page or message displays as intended.
• The form displays correctly and functions properly on both desktop and mobile screens — a form that looks perfect on a laptop can sometimes break or become awkward to use on a phone, where the majority of your traffic likely originates.

Where to Place Your Forms for Maximum Signups

Once your form is technically working, placement determines how many people ever actually see it. High-performing locations typically include:

Your homepage, ideally above the fold or in a clearly visible section rather than buried at the very bottom.

The end of blog posts or articles, where a reader has just finished engaging deeply with your content and is a naturally warm audience for a related offer.

A dedicated landing page, built specifically around a single lead magnet or offer, which you can then link to from social media, paid ads, or guest content elsewhere.

Your site’s footer, as a low-pressure, always-available option for visitors who didn’t convert elsewhere but are still browsing.

Bringing It All Together

A signup form might feel like the least glamorous part of an email marketing setup — no clever automation logic, no elaborate email design — but it’s the single point every future subscriber, welcome sequence, and campaign depends on. A form that’s simple, clearly explains its value, respects visitor consent through proper GDPR handling, and confirms subscriptions through double opt-in sets every automation you build afterward up for a genuinely engaged, trustworthy list. Brevo’s form builder makes each of these pieces achievable without any code, leaving the real work to the strategic choices: what you’re offering, where you place the form, and how clearly you communicate the value on the other side of that email field.