Creating Contact, Lead Generation, Newsletter, and Support Forms

SurveyGizmo makes a great all-purpose web form that can be embedded on your web site. We may refer to everything you build as a survey, but you can actually add Contact Forms, Lead Gen forms, Support Requests, Newsletter signups, and many more. No need to get IT involved or set up custom-form processing code; just add your questions and drop a small snippet of code on your web site.

Types of forms you can create

• Contact Forms
• Newsletter Signups
• Support Forms
• Lead Generation Forms
• Sales Prospecting and Sales Qualification Forms
• Landing Pages

One huge benefit over many existing forms/form plugins is that a SurveyGizmo form can have several pages. This lets you balance the desire for a short and easy form with the need for a greater level of detail. We recommend you keep each page short (especially the first page!) and then ask for more details on the following pages.

Other benefits over a non-surveygizmo form are our tracking and action options.

After form data collection you can then:

• Track how many people view the form versus how many submit it
• Send an email auto-responder to yourself (or a service such as Aweber)
• Send an email auto-responder to the person submitting the form
• Automate posting to APIs, such as your email service provider’s subscription form. If you use Constant Contact or Exact Target or similar services, we can post the subscription while keeping the customer in your desired workflow.
• Add customer data to your SalesForce.com or your own customer database
• Act on conditional logic to branch the sending of email based on answers within the form.

Creating a Single Step Contact Form

A single step contact form means that the user fills out a single page, and then they see a thank you after submitting.

Step 1: Create a new survey using one of our templates

A. Click “Create a Survey” when you’re at your dashboard.
B. Select “Use a Pre-Built Template” under “How Do You Want to Build Your New Survey”
C. Choose one of the contact form templates that seems closest to your need.

• Contact Form – Support/Customer Service
• Contact Form – Support/Customer Service (Extended)
• Contact Form – SalesForce.com
• Contact Form – Single Page
• Newsletter Signup – with second page with profiling questions

You can and should edit the questions and layout, so just pick something similar. Read more about the basics of creating a new survey.

The templates all have examples of forms and email auto-responders.

Step 2: Edit the questions

Under the Editing tab, modify the questions to suit your needs. Clicking the small pencil icon will allow you to modify any option. You can also add or reorder questions.

Step 3: Handling the submitted data

You have to decide what happens after a user clicks the submit button. Every data form or survey in SurveyGizmo always has at least two pages. The second page acts as a Thank You page, but it can also hold actions to act on the data collected.

Send Email Actions

All of the Contact forms contain examples of email auto-responders (send email actions). You can modify these or add additional ones. You can read more about setting up Send Email Actions here.

Pushing information out of SurveyGizmo

SurveyGizmo Enterprise and Dedicated accounts have access to an Action type called HTTP Post. This is used to push data to outside services such as email lists, newsletter signups, customer databases, etc. You can transmit outside information to other services including SalesForce.com, Constant Contact, Campaign Monitor, etc.

Step 4: Modify Your Survey’s Look and Feel

When you are finished with your questions, it’s time to move on to modify the look and feel of your survey. If you used one of our Contact Form Templates, it already comes with a look and feel template that is well-suited to being embedded on a website. You may, however, want to tweak the width of the form, the font size or font family, the text color, the background color, or the Submit button text. You can change all those things under Current Project–>Publishing–>Customize. You can also select different templates or modify the HTML or CSS if desired.

You can click “Preview” to view the standard Look & Feel or modifications. For you designers out there – yes, it is also possible to modify the look of a survey by adding CSS to your site that acts on the survey’s ID and Class names.

Step 5: Embed the form on your site

When you are happy with your preview, it’s time to “Launch” (publish) the Contact Form or survey. Clicking Launch on the Publishing tab will create a live link for your survey. You’ll most likely want to add a JavaScript Embed to your Publishing tab, which you can do by clicking “JavaScript Embed” under “Add New Link/Campaign”. You can copy and paste this small snippet of Javascript code and place it on the page in your web site where you want the form.

Usually you’ll create a blank Contact Us Page using the template/design of your web site. When the page is viewed, the form will fill in dynamically and be wrapped in your site’s design.

A Special note to WordPress or other CMS users like Drupal, etc.

You can create a page or a post and paste in the Javascript snippet. You need to make sure you paste the Javascript code into the HTML, so if you are using the Rich Text Editor, click on the HTML button and paste the code in there. If you paste it in the Rich Text Editor directly, it won’t work — because the code will be interpreted as copy text.

You’re done – go visit the page and test your form.

Send Email Actions will run immediately (unless you set a time delay). Stats will begin to show up in 10 – 20 minutes. It’s useful to think of the “Abandoned” data as “views” on your form where someone didn’t fill it. This is natural on most web sites, but if you think more people should be filling out the form, you might make changes and compare the data over time to achieve a more useful form.