Twitter Email Capture Guide — Step-by-Step Guide & Transcript

[00:00] Hey there, this is Dan. I convert it and I'd like to show you how to capture email addresses with Twitter using Twitter cards. First, you need to go to your Twitter account and click on this top right little cog thing and go to Twitter ads.

[00:15] If you don't have Twitter ads set up already, you can sign up. It's free. You will need a credit card. But I've left a little step-by-step checklist kind of thing in the article above.

[00:27] So go ahead and check that out if you haven't done that yet. If you have, just click on Twitter Ads and that's going to take you to the ads interface. And what you should see is at the top bar here, Creative.

[00:39] I'm going to click on that and then go down to Cards. Now I've already created a couple of cards just to test this system out. What we're going to do is we're going to create one from scratch. What you're going to see when you run on this page after having not created anything yet

[00:53] is just the option to choose a lead generation card, a website card, a basic app or an image app card. only going to be using lead generation cards because we want to capture email addresses. So create a lead generation card after that's selected.

[01:07] And what we have here is just a giant form to fill out. So what we have here on the right side is a preview, and this preview will actually populate as we fill in these form fields here.

[01:19] So for this form, I'm going to do something a bit facetious. Let's see. Bananas are awesome. Perfect. And then we're going to add an image which will show up right here.

[01:33] And the image has to be 100 pixels wide by 200 pixels high at about 72 pixels per inch. I've already created one and if you're a ConvertKit customer you'll actually have access to a

[01:46] PSD template for this so that you don't have to worry about fixing dimensions or cropping photos or anything. We going to go ahead and just launch that in and press save As you can see it pops right in for both the web and the mobile version of this card And then we need a call to action

[02:06] All right. So now that we've got a call to action, a short description, and an image, I recommend that you actually skip down to data settings. We're not going to ignore these other settings, but we need to figure out the most important part,

[02:18] which is how do we get everybody's email address when they click this button to go to ConvertKit? And that's what this form field is for. This is the submit URL. And to get this submit URL, you need to go to your ConvertKit account, log in, go to forms, settings,

[02:36] and then on the left side here, you're going to see Twitter cards. All right? If you're doing that from scratch, you just go right on your forms page. I already have a form set up for a landing page. I'm going to click on that. This is the ridiculous landing page I set up just for testing.

[02:50] Here's settings and Twitter cards, okay? What we're going to do is we're going to choose this in this number four field right here, the data settings section. This is the submit URL that Twitter is asking for. We're going to copy and paste that into the previous window.

[03:05] Make sure that it's in the right form field. It's in the submit URL field, okay? And what's going to happen here is Twitter is now going to ask you if you want to get or post it and which HTTP method to use.

[03:17] If that doesn't mean anything to you, don't worry about it. Just make sure that it's on post. If the default is get, just make sure it's on post. All right? I won't go into it any further. It's kind of geeky. All right. Now that we have that tested, now that we have that put in,

[03:31] now we can fill out this other stuff. So it looks like it didn't save our call to action. It does that sometimes when you're editing and you don't save. It's kind of annoying. So let's just type in the description again.

[03:45] I think they're still working out this interface, so there might be bugs still. Get some That right Okay Add image again As with any new rollout things tend to be a little bit buggy at the beginning

[04:05] So Twitter also requires that you have a privacy policy URL, which means that you just need a link to some page on your website that's telling people how you're using their data. In this case, I'm just going to type in convertkit.com for testing purposes,

[04:20] And then if something happens or the card doesn't work or the subscribe doesn't work or if they press get more info on the card, this is the URL that they're going to get sent to.

[04:32] So let's just say convertkit.com. And then this is kind of a neat option. If you have like a thank you page for something that you want to send people to after they press this subscribe button, it will actually let you do that.

[04:47] So if you have like a, you know, whatever your domain is, slash thanks for signing up or thanks for subscribing or just thanks, you can send them there, which is actually really cool. If you want to customize the experience or if you want to be able to track your conversion rates with Google Analytics and things like that.

[05:05] And then you can put in a submit message. After they press this button here, they'll get a little message inside the card. So let's do that. All right. So far it looks like we have all of our form fields put in.

[05:20] Just make sure lead generation, all that stuff. It looks okay, web and mobile. Now all we need to do is we need to name this card. And then accept the data use policy, which of course I read word for word before recording this screencast.

[05:40] Create card. Okay. Then it'll take you to a screen like this and actually run that post and then tell you if it worked And it did And what should happen now is in less than an hour hopefully you should get a notification from ConvertKit telling you that there been a new subscriber unless this email

[06:00] address that you use for Twitter is already subscribed to your list, and then nothing will happen. But as long as this is working, everything should work out. And whenever someone presses this button, they should automatically be subscribed to your ConvertKit list. And instead of just telling

[06:15] you that let's go ahead and go try to create a tweet using our brand new Twitter card and see what happens so we have the super banana card that I just created and we're just going to go ahead and test this on a live Twitter account

[06:30] my personal Twitter account testing the banana card okay and make sure that super banana card is selected we're just going to deliver this to all my

[06:46] followers like they have nothing better to do tweet now okay now let's go back to Twitter home and see if okay there we go there it is it's showing up right in

[07:01] my feed this is the banana card as you can see there's a button right there if If I press that, it should one-click subscribe me to this Banana Dispatch email list.

[07:14] And it's just a quick confirmation. And as you can see, it's going to pull my Twitter email address. And pressed it. There's the message.

[07:26] And there is the redirect. And the redirect just went to a random page. Bam! It worked. So what that means is when somebody clicks this button in their Twitter feed,

[07:39] if you send out a special tweet with a card in it, it should automatically subscribe them to your email list in ConvertKit. Thanks so much for checking this out, and I hope that this works out well for you.