Hey, y’all. My name is Kori Ashton. Welcome to another WordPress Wednesday. I am in the beautiful area of San Antonio, Texas, at WebTegrity.
Today I’m going to continue our series on Gravity Forms. We’ve already talked about basic install. We’ve talked about styling. Today we talk about confirmation and notifications. It’s going to be really amazing. You’ll want to be able to take notes and be able to pause the video and watch this because you’re going to learn a lot, hopefully. Stick around, too. Be sure to subscribe (over here) subscribe to our channel because next week and for a few weeks down the line now every single Wednesday we’re going to be releasing more on Gravity Forms. We’re going to talk about add ons. We’re going to talk about the shopping cart environment actually that Gravity Forms has inside of it. Conditional logic. And all sorts of really cool stuff. Come get nerdy with us every Wednesday for WordPress Wednesday.
I definitely want to mention our incredible partners. We’ve got WP Engine. WP Elevation. And WP 101. You know what the WP stands for—that’s WordPress. Each of these are incredible resources for your if you’re working in WordPress. WP Engine offers hosting. WP Elevation offers Freelance Track, business advice, sound advice, incredible blog over there, as well as great tracks that you can take. And WP 101, like us, we do great tutorials. They do great tutorials. And they’re always up to date. If you’re struggling with anything, be sure to jump over to their library, take a look and see what sort of resources they’re going to have for you. Be sure to tell them that Kori Ashton sent you their way. I would appreciate it. That would be amazing.
We’re talking about Gravity Forms. We already done the install, like I shared. Today we’re just going to move straight forward into how to set up notifications and confirmations. Let’s say you have a form already built on your website. I’m going to slide off the screen for a second so you can see this. We’ve got just a simple field here of Your Name, your Email, a drop-down option for the Subject line, and then your message. They’re able to do this. This could say Register Now. This could say Submit Form. This could say anything we want.
We’ve already learned how to change that button text. In our very first video we learned how to go in and change whatever our submit button looks like. Let’s talk today about setting up our confirmations and notifications per form. If you go to your forms, and you’ve got all of them listed down here. We’re going to go into our Demo. That’s the one we’re working on right now. We can just hover it and it provides the secondary menu and it gives me confirmations. I’m going to click on that.
Notice, right away, that every single form that you create has an opportunity to have a custom confirmation as well as a custom notification system. Confirmation is what happens as soon as [clapping sound] you click submit. What’s the message that appears? What’s going to happen? The notifications are actual notifications that get auto sent out. An auto responder goes out to the person who filled out the form and could go out to those that run the website. We want to set up how those work, what they say, all that fun stuff. That’s what we’re doing. We’re going to talk about confirmations first. I’m going to slide off the screen so you just pay attention here to the actual screen and see everything I’m doing.
Confirmations. There’s a default confirmation that takes place. It’s just this message that says, “Thanks for contacting us! We will get in touch with you shortly.” I’m going to come back on the screen because you and I need to make eye contact for a second. Please do not just say “shortly.” It is extremely subjective and open ended. It gives them no concept of when you will actually be connecting with them. I would ask you to take that out and say something along the lines of, “We’ll be in touch with you within 24 business hours” Or “We’ll be in touch with you in the next day.” Or “Look for an auto responder in your mailbox now.” You need to give them an idea of when you’re going to be connecting with them.
Also, don’t just say, “Thanks for contacting us.” Go ahead and put in there something specifically about your company. Say who, specifically, might be responding back to them. That would be a pretty cool personal touch. We actually don’t even like just leaving this area here—the confirmation type being text. We don’t really like that. We want to give our clients a lot more options and we want to be able to track a confirmation page. A thank you page in a sense.
So what we’ve done is we’ve created a page which you can set this to. Then you go create a page. Put whatever you want on it. And then you’re able to come through here and actually select that page. Thank you! – Message Received. You can then click Save Confirmation. And now whenever that person clicks submit on this field, they’ll actually see this page. Let’s see if I can show you. They’ll see this page. It says “SUCCESS! Thanks for filing out our form. Check your email for further details. We will connect with you within 1 business day.” So they have an idea that if they haven’t heard back from me, something has gone wrong and they need to reconnect with me. Right away I say, “Here are your 7 tips on improving your website.” They can click that link. Or, I challenge them to come over to our YouTube channel because we’re always doing something fun and interesting over there. They can click on that and go over to our YouTube channel.
One of the reasons why this is so important is because what just happened was a person just gave you—a customer, a potential lead—just gave you their contact information. We want to reengage them. We do not want them to leave our website. We want to put something here that [smack] immediately triggers them to reengage with us. That’s why we’re saying go ahead and check out 7 ways to improve your website or get social with us and go be a part of our YouTube channel. You want to redirect them. That’s how you can set up confirmations. You can redirect them. If they’ve done something that you like, you want to redirect them to a totally different website, you can just drop in whatever URL you want right there.
Notifications. These are the things that go out to them and go to you or whoever you need them to go to dynamically. These are super, super important for you to set up and have the correct type of information inside of here. The other thing that is really cool is that you can set up really cool conditional logic inside of here. Ahh! Time to get nerdy. Let’s go figure it out. By default, the only thing they have set up for you… Gravity Forms sets up this admin notification that basically shoots an email over to whoever the admin for this website is set up to be. It just says Admin Email.
In your profile, if you’re set up to be an administrator, you’ll get an alert stating that this form was filled out. You don’t want everybody on your team to get that email. You need specific people to get that email. You can change this. I can just say Kori’s notification. Then we can enter an email address where we want it to go. Instead of it just saying Admin Email which actually is my email, you can set it up to be whatever email address you want. You can just say test@webtegrity.com or whoever needs to get that email. Then, this is a really cool part, it says From Name.
If you wanted to see immediately who filled out the form, you kind of want the person’s name to populate. You’re going to click on this little box over here and you’re going to go First Name. Put a space. Then we’re going to say Last Name. Right away that’s dynamically going to pull from the form and tell me that Joe Smith filled out this form. Then From Email.
Now, this is interesting. I’ve heard people say different things about this. You can either select the email address coming from the individual, or you can leave it as your own. I’ve heard that sometimes if you select their email address that they could easily go into your Spam folder. You might just want to leave this by default coming from your own. You would want to remember who to reply to. You want to Reply To their email so we’d fill out that part.
These fields exist in these drop downs because I’ve already created the form that has these fields in it. If your form does not have an email address in it, you cannot populate this area of the notification. If you needed this to possibly be sent out to blind carbon copy, you can add that here. You can change the subject line to whatever you wanted it to be. New Subject from, or it can just say A New Registration. Or whatever you want it to be but this dynamically drops in the form title which is Demo for now. And then this little bit of shortcode here drops in all the fields of the entire form that were filled out. And then you can just click Update Notification. Now, Kori will get a notification any time this form is filled out.
What if we wanted a notification to go out to the customer that filled it out? We would click Add New. We would give it a title and say Customer Auto Responder. Just put something like that. Something that is obvious. The customer will not see this; this is for you only. Then we’re going to send this to … We’re going to select a field. We want to send it out to their email address that they type in. We’re going to select a field, email it over to them. We’re going to say and this is going to be from WebTegrity. Kori Ashton. Then From my admin, that’s fine. Reply To: we can tell them if that’s something different, to reply to a different one. Subject line. We can just say regarding demo or whatever our form name is, or “Thanks for connecting with us.” Whatever you want it to be. “Thanks for connecting with us.” spelled correctly, “at WebTegrity.” Give them a little bit of a heads up so that they know who it’s coming from. Then check this out.
Let’s do some dynamic, fun stuff. Let’s construct our message that goes back to them.
What is we want to say, “Hello.” and actually put their name in there. How do we do that? We click on this little tab and say First Name. If we want it to be kind of informal, we can just leave it like that, put a comma after it for good grammar, and then start our message. If we want it to be a little more formal sounding, you can say: Hello First space and then drop in their Last name and then comma, and then go ahead and fill out your whole message, whatever you want that to be. You can say: “Thanks for requesting help with …” Then, depending upon whatever they fill out with the Subject line (and, if you’ll notice over here on my form I say, “What’s your Subject? Tech Support, Sales, or Demo request”), those exact words would actually sit here depending upon what they selected. This would say, “Thanks for requesting help with tech support.” You fill out the rest of it, give them some great contact information, put your name in there, and this would automatically go to them. You just click Save Notification. Now, anytime somebody fills out that form [smack sound] boom, this is automatically sent off to them.
What if we wanted to do something like, “Hey. Thanks for contacting us. Here’s the free PDF file that I told you could have when you signed up for our email list.” You can actually go here and say Add Media. If you’ve already uploaded the PDF file to your library here, I can just grab it. Highlight it and insert it in the post. Now, if I were to go to the visual mode here, this is what the person would see. Digital Flyer. We can name it whatever we want, and that’s the link. [smack] So, automatically, they get access to that PDF file. I didn’t have to spend any of my time extra trying to get them a file sent out to them. All that is there, ready to go. It saved the notification. Now they get that right away.
Check this out. Let’s go back to our notifications. Let’s go to the notifications that come in to the admin, or the people that run the company. I’m going to log in to this. What is Kori, me, I’m the one who handles all the demos … we can do this. Send this notification to Configure Routing. I’m going to select that one. Send it to test@webtegrity.com. If the subject is Demo Request. What! [explosion sound] Mind blown, right?! [smack]
If somebody chooses, in the drop-down, Demo Request, then, and only then, do I get notification that this form has been filled out. Isn’t that spectacular? You can do that and send this to anybody you want. Let’s say you’ve got two people that need to get that notification. Drop in two fields. There you go. Keep adding as many as you want. Let it all be played off of that conditional logic of whatever fields are selected in the form and people will get notifications. Isn’t this amazing. I love Gravity Forms.
Be sure, please, to click this little button right down here in the corner to subscribe to our channel because next week we’re going to be continuing to talk about Gravity Forms. What’s our topic next week? We are talking about add ons. We’re going to be able to cover how to do different shopping cart environments and all sorts of fun stuff.
Thanks so much for being here. See y’all next WordPress Wednesday.
Bye bye, y’all.
