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Sending an email and submitting a form aren’t all that different. You enter specific types of information in certain fields – an email address in the To: field, a house number and street name in an Address field – and send that data to either an inbox or a database.
It might seem redundant, then, to prioritize two-way connections between forms and emails. Why send a form link in an email when you could ask for responses in the message itself? Or why email a copy of form responses when you could include a PDF download on a thank you page?
Integrating forms into email lets recipients apply the rules of their inbox to your messages. Then, when your messages ask for a response, a handful of powerful form settings let you define the rules of answer formatting and progress tracking. And it all starts with a form that gathers email addresses.
Collect more detailed subscriber data for list segmentation
Form builders are a must-have feature, showing up inside apps like HubSpot, MailChimp, and Klaviyo. They help you throw together a basic form in a matter of minutes, but they’re limited.
With MailChimp’s built-in form tool, for example, you can’t add tags based on a form response. What’s more, you can’t show or hide certain questions based on previous responses. For that, you need a purpose-built form builder like Fillout.
Imagine a law firm that specializes in family law and personal injury cases. They have a Get In Touch form with a field for people to indicate which specialization their case pertains to. After choosing one of the two options, a new dropdown field appears, asking for more details.
In MailChimp, synced contacts would be tagged for `Family Law - Child Support`, ‘Family Law - Divorce`, and so on, automatically added based on an individual’s response in the Fillout form. Great for list segmentation but even better for sending mass emails with dynamic content blocks that are shown or hidden based on each recipient’s tags.
Send forms in bulk via email or pre-fill important fields
Part of the problem with emailed forms, though, is that your recipients are already overwhelmed with requests for their input. On any given week, they probably receive multiple NPS surveys, appointment schedulers, and order forms. Often, invitations are little more than a link. But with some extra customization and advanced form features, the experience can be significantly improved.
When you’re emailing someone a form, the last thing you want to do is send them to a form with an empty email field. And as long as your form accepts URL parameters, you’ll never have to. Add parameters for Name and Email, and your form’s URL becomes something like pithandpip.fillout.com/t/1VQKqkbnE2us?email=ABC&name=XYZ . When someone clicks on the link, the Email field is pre-filled with ABC and the Name field is XYZ. Or, if you link to the form from a Klaviyo campaign and replace ABC with a personalization variable like {{ email }}, the link would be personalized for each recipient, pre-filling the associated fields with that person’s email address.
Another option is to send a form from within the form builder itself. In Fillout, this feature is under the Share tab, where you’d paste up to 100 addresses in the Send to field, along with other important details. For example, you might put the form’s due date or other requirements in the subject line so recipients know at a glance how to label it, snooze it, or add it to their calendars. Fillout automatically formats the email design to match that of your form – no need to transpose your brand colors or fonts from the form to your email platform.
Lastly, there are reactive forms. Some event in another app, like a shipped order in Shopify or a new employee added in BambooHR, triggers a Zapier automation that emails a form.
Three ways to send forms for three different use cases. Want to include a bunch of non-form-related information or media? Use URL parameters in a platform like Klaviyo. Want a quick and easy way to email a form to a list of people? Use Send Form from Fillout’s Share tab. Want to automate follow-up and event-based forms? Make a Zap.
Track associated emails on in-progress and finished submissions
You probably spend most of your time poring over spreadsheets or pie charts of completed responses. Partial submissions are often just as telling, though. There’s a ton of insights buried in who finished the form vs who started the form but didn’t finish vs who hasn’t even opened it yet.
A Meta Pixel gives you insight into all of those user interactions, telling you exactly which pages a user made it to. Though that requires a Facebook business account. Without one, you’ll need another submission tracking tool.
Fillout’s form emailer has tracking built in. Anyone who clicks on the link inside the form invitation switches from Not started to In progress, and a submission moves them to Finished. Click on a recipient marked as In progress or Finished and you can see their answers, as well as details about their last update, browser, and operating system.
The larger your list of form recipients, the more apparent trends will become. Things like what time of day people are most likely to open your forms, what pages have the highest dropoff rates, and how mobile submission rates compare to desktop.
Respond to form submitters with relevant, detailed follow ups
Even if you aren’t emailing your form to people, email is far and away the best channel for automated responses. Respondent notifications that list and confirm each answer, with a link in the email to edit the submission, are an obvious choice for job applications, RSVPs, and purchases. The same goes for notifications sent to you, the form’s owner, which are all but non-negotiable for lead capture and support request submissions. Not everything has to be a carbon copy of submissions, though.
Personalized follow-up emails let you write more nuanced and human notifications thanks to two features. First, you can insert form responses as variables in the subject line and message body. So an HR manager could create automated responses to an engagement survey, quoting or inserting the recipient’s answers. On top of that, there could be one email conditionally sent to employees who, say, rated their happiness eight or higher out of ten. Then, there would be a second conditional email for those who answered seven or lower.
For automated responses with more design flair, you’ll need to use an email platform, ideally one with a focus on transaction emails. With Fillout’s SendGrid integration, a notification goes out almost immediately after a submission, no Zapier or Make connection necessary. Just build out a Dynamic Template in SendGrid, connect it to a Fillout form, insert the variables where necessary, and set it to Active.
You can play by someone else’s rules and still win the day
You probably think “I should check my email” 20x per time. Most people rarely ever think “I should go fill out that form.” So make that work to your advantage. Put your forms in people’s inboxes. Personalize them. Design them well. Analyze what works and what doesn’t.
Embedding a form on a website is the best way to generate new leads and contacts. People you don’t currently have a connection to. Integrating forms into email campaigns is the best way to create deeper relationships with those people. They give your customers and subscribers a voice and make them feel heard. That is, as long as your form builder is up to the task.
Sign up for a free Fillout account today. You get unlimited forms, unlimited questions, 1,000 responses per month, and a one-of-a-kind send-by-email feature set.
Written by
Ryan Farley is a writer and co-founder of Pith and Pip. He lives in Bangkok, Thailand where he previously managed the editorial team of a web marketing agency.
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