The “forms” in ConvertKit are a departure from the classical model of “lists” that other email service providers employ.
While in MailChimp and others, your subscribers are neatly organised in ‘lists’, similar to folders, and in many cases, you can have duplicates with the same subscriber appearing in more than one, ConvertKit uses a different, more fluid concept.
ConvertKit forms are just a way to get the subscribers into your list. Period. They act like little channels through which your visitors or customers flow into your list, each one just once.
You can create as many forms as you want, they will all be adding subscribers to the same central database - no duplicates, no fuss. If you delete a form, that doesn’t mean you delete the subscribers that were added through it.
Another upside of having this unified subscriber model is that your list is no longer confined to these ‘lists’, and therefore you can send a message or broadcast to any combination of subscribers (based on segmentation, tags, etc.), regardless of the form through which they were added to your list in the first place.
Forms can have many shapes and sizes, you can add your own fields, and can be embedded anywhere on your website or hosted by ConvertKit (as a “landing page”). You could have one in the footer of your blog, one on each blog post where you want to offer a content upgrade, and so on.
Each form includes handy analytics showing the ‘visitors’ (how many times it’s been displayed to someone), the ‘subscribers’ (how many people subscribed through it) and the conversion rate.
