Email capture form

Email capture messages allow you to easily prompt users of your site to submit their email address, after which it will be available within their user profile for use in all your messaging campaigns.

When an end-user enters their email address to this form, the email address will get added to their user profile.

• For anonymous users who don’t yet have an account, the email address will live on the anonymous user profile that is tied to the user’s device.
• If an email address already exists on the user profile, then the existing email address will be overwritten by the newly entered email address.
• If the known user has an email address that is flagged as having hard bounced, we’ll check to see if the newly-entered email address differs to what’s on their Braze profile. If the email address provided is different, the email address will be updated and the hard bounce status will be removed.
• If a user enters an invalid email address, the user will see the error message: “Please enter a valid email.”
  • Invalid email addresses:
    • example
    • example@
    • @gmail.com
    • example@gmail
  • Valid email addresses:
    • [email protected]
    • [email protected] (with a typo)
  • For more information on email validation in Braze, refer to Email technical guidelines and notes.

More on identified versus anonymous users

In general, the logic behind the email capture form is straightforward. It will set the email address on the user profile in Braze for the user that is currently active. However, that means the behavior differs based on whether the user is identified (logged in, changeUser called) or not.

If an anonymous user enters their email in the form and submits it, Braze adds the email address to their profile. If changeUser is called later on in their web journey and a new external_id is assigned (such as when a new user registers with the service), all anonymous user profile data is merged including the email address.

If changeUser is called with an existing external_id, the anonymous user profile is orphaned and specific user profile data fields that do not already exist on the identified user are merged, but any fields that do already exist are lost, including the email address.

For more information, refer to the User profile lifecycle.

Step 1: Create an in-app message campaign

To navigate to this option, you must create an in-app messaging campaign. From there, depending on your use case, set Send To to either Web Browsers, Mobile Apps, or Both Mobile Apps & Web Browsers, then select Email Capture Form as your Message Type.

Step 2: Customize the form

Next, customize your form as needed. You can customize the following features for your email capture form:

• Header, body, and submit button text
• An optional image
• An optional “Terms of Service” link
• Different colors for the header and body text, buttons, and background
• Key-value pairs
• Style for header and body text, buttons, button border color, background, and overlay

If you need to make further customization, choose Custom Code for your Message Type. You can use this email capture modal template from the Braze Templates GitHub repository as your starter code.

Step 3: Set your entry audience

If you’re using an in-app message to capture user emails, you may want to limit the audience to users who haven’t already provided this information.

• To target users without an email address: Use the filter Email Available is false. This makes the form only appear to users who don’t have an email on file, helping you avoid redundant prompts for known users.
• To target anonymous users without external IDs: Use the filter External User ID is blank. This is useful when you want to identify users who haven’t been authenticated or registered yet.

You can also combine the two filters using AND logic, if desired. This makes the form only appear to users who are missing both an email address and an external user ID—ideal for capturing new leads or prompting account creation.

Step 4: Target users who filled out the form (optional)

After you’ve launched the email capture form and collected email addresses from your users, you can target users who filled out the form.

1. In any segment filter in Braze, select the filter Clicked/Opened Campaign.
2. From the dropdown, select clicked in-app message button 1
3. Select your email capture form campaign.