Question About Email Population in Recommendation Widget Usage

I am using the recommendation widget on an external page, using the on page load scenario. It works as expected, but I do have a question about email population. Am I supposed to be passing a subscriber's email address to the object. There are videos showing what the widget looks like, but not what the experience should be when someone does click through to subscribe so I am not sure if the dialog requesting the email address is expected or a misconfiguration on my part