This category covers topics like the creation of automated emails.
For example, you can set up a welcome mail that is sent to your users automatically after they submit a form. You can also have the system notify you when new submissions are received.
And you’ll find out how to set up double opt-ins and their associated confirmation emails.
The double opt-in subscription method can be used on any form, and is activated and set up in the Settings area. Double opt-in is now a standard approach for handling subscriptions. When you register to receive a newsletter, for example, you need to complete an additional step in the subscription process before you are added to the newsletter’s distribution list. This step involves clicking a link, and is referred to as a ‘double opt-in’. So why is this two-stage procedure used and what are the benefits? To get a better idea, let’s look at the bigger picture. We can of course use a single (instead of a double) opt-in. A single opt-in is simply a one-step registration procedure. So it merely involves entering an email address into a registration form. Once the form is submitted, the email addresses is registered and the subscription process is complete. However, this simple procedure has a significant disadvantage because it can be abused by third parties. Unauthorised individuals or even automated bots could simply enter any contact details into a registration form. As a result, mail would then be sent to these email addresses, despite the fact that the email address owner had not actually requested or approved the subscription. In this case, no consent is obtained for the newsletter subscription. However, the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) states that email address owners must actively and expressly agree to receive advertising mail. This is where the double opt-in method is an excellent choice, because the newsletter subscription is not successfully completed until the user has clicked the link in the confirmation mail and therefore given their consent. Only then is the email address added to the distribution list for the newsletter. The confirmation mail is sent to the same email address, so misuse by third parties is only possible if they actually have access to the email account. The consent given to the newsletter subscription is also logged automatically.
When users submit your form, they will be shown a standard page with the following confirmation message: “ Thank you! We have received your form submission and will attend to it as soon as possible.” You can change this confirmation message to something else. You can enter your own text and make the message more appropriate for your business. You can also use the standard confirmation page to redirect your users to a new page once they have completed and submitted the form.
Do you want to present your users with their form input in a PDF document – perhaps in the corporate design used by your company? Or should the data be forwarded automatically to your team for internal purposes or further processing? You can use a PDF link in both of these cases. Alongside the form itself, you will also need a fillable PDF document for linking to your form. Once the PDF document and the online form are linked together, user input is copied to the PDF document automatically. You can provide your users with the PDF document either by using a download link in the confirmation message after submitting the form or by including the PDF as an attachment to an email notification.
Once you have successfully linked the PDF document with your form, you have two simple options for making the document available to your users: via the confirmation message or as an attachment in an email notification.
Use email notifications to create automated emails for your workflow. These can be emails that forward newly received form input to your team, for example, or which inform you about new form submissions. You can also use email notifications to send an automated welcome mail in response to users subscribing to your newsletter or to send them a summary of the data they have entered in your form. With email notifications, you set up emails that forward the information that you define to the correct individuals at the moment when users submit your form – as a fully automatic process, without requiring any further intervention on your part. Apart from saving you valuable time and money, automated emails also help to avoid human error. Once you have set up email actions, you no longer risk overlooking form submissions or forgetting to send welcome mails.
You can set up email notifications to make sure that you are notified about new submissions, wherever you may be. This means you do not have to worry about missing submissions while also saving you time – you no longer need to actively check to see if new submissions have been made.
This article shows you how to set up conditions so that you can have different confirmation messages displayed after a form has been submitted. Let’s imagine that you have a contact form that your users can use to enter various kinds of details. When they get to the end, users can decide whether or not they want to download their data as a PDF document after submitting the form. They make this decision by making a simple choice between ‘Yes’ or ‘No’. An important point here is that the answer to this question must be a required field. The download link should be displayed in the confirmation message directly after the form is submitted. To find out how you can present your users with their input formatted into a PDF document, please see the article Providing PDF documents.
