Map form responses to contact properties

Add or update contact profiles from form submissions by mapping questions to properties in your Contacts table. You can find out more about contact properties in Typeform here. 

Choose your starting point

There are 3 different ways to access and begin mapping form questions to your contact properties. Choose from the Workflow panel, the Connect panel, or from the Contacts tab, then feel free to move on to the next section that walks you through mapping form responses to contact properties.

From the Workflow panel:

1. Open the form you want to map to your contact properties and click Workflow.

2. Click the settings button under Contacts.

From the Connect panel:

1. Open the form you want to map to your contact properties and click Connect.

2. Click Manage form mapping.

From the Contacts tab:

1. From your Workspace, click the Contacts tab.

2. Click Add contact and select Add through forms from the dropdown list.

3. Next, you'll need to select the form you want to map to contact properties. In the dropdown, select the Workspace your form lives in. You can find out more about Workspaces in Typeform here.

4. Then select one of the forms in that Workspace.

5. When you’re done with your selection, click Continue.

If you’re trying to map to a form that already has property mappings set up, you’ll see a message about this, and you’ll be able to edit the existing mapping.

Map form responses to contact properties

Now you can start mapping your form questions to contact properties. 

The Email property is mandatory to create contacts, and your form must include an Email question or the email address field from the Contact info question to map to the Email property. If the form doesn’t include an email question, you’ll see a warning message like the one below. 

If your form doesn't contain an email question, select a different form for your property mappings, or add an Email question to the selected form.

If the form you’ve selected already includes an Email question, it will automatically be mapped to the Email property. You can’t delete this row, as this mapping is required to create and update contacts.

1. Click + Map to property to map the other questions of your form to contact properties. 

2. Click the Select question and Select property dropdown lists to add your mappings.

3. You can scroll through the list of questions and properties, or type in the search bar to find what you’re looking for.

4. You can also map variables to contact properties in your form.

5. Click the trash can icon next to a row to delete mappings, or click Clear all to delete all your mappings. Click Update when you’re done with your selection.

Map to the subscription status of your contacts

Some data privacy laws like GDPR may require your businesses to ask for consent to send marketing communications to your contacts. To make sure that you’re following relevant data privacy laws, you can also map your contacts to a default subscription status.

To map your contacts to a subscription status:

1. Toggle the Map to form question switch. We recommend using this option as this will let you obtain consent from your respondents and map to a subscription status based on their answer to your opt-in question.

2. Now you can choose the question in your form that asks for consent from the dropdown list. The supported question types for this property mapping are Dropdown, Multiple Choice, Picture Choice, Legal, Yes/No, and Checkbox.

3. In this example, we're selecting a Yes/No question from our form.

4. Select the matching answers (in this example, Yes = Subscribed and No = Unsubscribed), and click Save when you’re done with your selection.

Alternatively, you can click the Subscribed radio button to set the default subscription status of your contacts as Subscribed...

...or click the Unsubscribed radio button to set the default subscription status of your contacts as Unsubscribed.

You can also toggle on Only apply default subscription status to new contacts to only apply the default subscription status to new contacts. When the switch is toggled off, like in the screenshot below, the default subscription status will apply to both new and existing contacts.

You can find more information about the Subscription status property in Typeform Contacts here.

Update your contacts with historical responses

If your form has collected some responses before you’ve set up your property mappings, under the Update contacts section is where you can send that historical data to your contacts.

Toggle the Update contacts switch and click Save. This will sync the previous responses you've received in your form to the new property mappings you've just created. 

Now that you have mapped your form questions to your Contact properties, you can sit back and wait for new Contacts to be added and existing Contacts to be updated automatically when someone submits your typeform.

Edit your property mappings

Once you’ve set up your property mappings, you can view their mapping status, and edit your existing mappings. Read on to find out how.

To edit your property mappings:

1. In your Contacts tab, click Actions and then select Manage properties. This is where you’ll see your Mapping statuses. In this case, since all of our mappings have been set up correctly, the Mapped status is displayed in green in the Mapping status column.

2. Here you can click Property mappings to create new mappings or to edit the existing ones.

3. Click Edit mapping to manage your mappings and edit issues you may have. Here you can click the trash can icon next to a mapping to delete it, or click the name of the form to view its details.

4. Edit your property mappings as needed and click Update when you’re done with your edits.

5. You can also update the default subscription status of your Contacts here, and click Update to move on to the next step.

6. Finally, you can also toggle the Update contacts switch to send contact information your form received before creating your property mappings, and click Save.

Back in your list of properties, click the three dots next to a property name and select Edit property to view its property mappings.

Here you’ll see a list of forms each property has been mapped to. You can click the pencil icon to edit your mappings.

The Mapping status column will also show you if there are any issues with the mapping of that property. In the example below, there are some mapping statuses of Issues found (in yellow with a warning icon). 

You can click the three dots to view the mappings of a specific property, which will show you which form(s) the issues were found in. You might see this status when questions with active property mappings have been deleted from a form.

When a form with active property mappings has been deleted, you’ll also see a red dot next to Property mappings.

When you click Edit mapping, this will show you that a form with active property mappings has been deleted.

You can also see which properties have been mapped to questions in a deleted form by clicking the three dots next to a specific property.

Make sure to proceed with caution when deleting forms, as deleting a form can break your property mappings. You can find out more about deleting forms here.