Contact Forms vs Sign up Forms

Recently I meet with someone that was interested in the automation of Mail Chimp and we ended up discussing the differences between Contact Forms and Sign Up Forms.  A contact form is created and resides within your website.  Within Wix and Weebly you can take those contacts and export them as an excel spreadsheet.  (See the screen shots and links below on how to do this).  The resulting list can be used with either a Mail Merge or other CRM software like Mail Chimp to create a direct correspondence with your potential followers/clients.  Ex) Newsletters.  This all sounds fantastic and I would definitely encourage you to do this with any contacts you've gathered so far.

However, in the future, why not skip the step of manually exporting and appending those contacts to your existing list...  Wouldn't it be nice if the list would just grow on it's own, and automatically filter out duplicate entries?

Creating a Sign Up form in Mail Chimp and adding it to your website as either a landing page or as a link saves you that extra step.  Don't forget that you can also check out the FREE automation feature in Mail Chimp so you can even send a personalized welcome message to your new subscribers.

Speaking of which you can try out mine if you like:  Officeology Sign Up

Wix Dashboard

Export Contact List

I was not able to do/find a screen shot of how to export contacts from a Weebly Site as I don't have any myself.  However this forum question can walk you through it:

https://community.weebly.com/t5/Promote/Export-a-Contact-Form/td-p/17682