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 a few 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 in this article that walks you through mapping form responses to contact properties.

If you want to map form questions to contact properties while creating your form, you can do this from the Content panel. See the last section of this article to learn how. 

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. 

Make sure your form question types and contact property types are compatible.

When mapping form questions to contact properties, only compatible property types will appear in the dropdown. Incompatible property types will be grayed out and cannot be mapped to that question type.

Here’s an overview of which contact property types work with each form question type:

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 form 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 ensure you comply with relevant data-privacy laws, we recommend adding a question to your form asking for your contacts’ consent to receive marketing emails, and mapping it to the Subscription status property.

1. To map your contacts to a subscription status, choose the question in your form that asks for consent. The supported question types for this property mapping are Multiple Choice, Picture Choice, Legal, Yes/No, and Checkbox. In this example, we're selecting a Yes/No question from our form.

2. In the contact properties dropdown list, choose Subscription status. 

3. Select the matching answers (in this example, Yes = Subscribed and No = Unsubscribed).

If the respondent skips the question, or if your form doesn’t include a subscription status question, they’ll be assigned the Default subscription status.

You can set this default after you’ve finished mapping your form questions to contact properties by selecting the Subscribed or Unsubscribed radio button on the Default subscription status section, as shown in the screenshot below.

In most cases, you’ll want to update an existing contact’s Subscription status only if they answer the opt-in question, and not overwrite it with the default value. To do that, toggle the Only apply default subscription status to new contacts switch on. If you toggle it off (as seen in the screenshot below), the default subscription status will apply to both new and existing contacts who don’t answer the opt-in question.

Typeform recommends making the opt-in question a required, single-choice question to submit the form.

If the question mapped to the Subscription status property allows multiple selection, and the contact chooses more than one option, the Subscription status will be assigned using the following logic:

• If all selected answers map to the same value → assign that value.
• If any selected answer maps to “Unsubscribed” → assign “Unsubscribed”.
• If none of the selected answers map to “Unsubscribed” but any answer maps to “Never subscribed” → assign “Never subscribed”.

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.

1. In your Contacts tab, click Actions, then select Manage properties. This is where you can see which properties are mapped to forms and which properties are enrichable.

If a property is enrichable, you'll see a coin icon in the Data source column. Learn more about contact enrichment here.

If a property has been mapped correctly to a form, you’ll see a green plug icon in the Data source column.

If there’s no number next to the icon, the property is mapped to one form. If you see a number, it shows how many forms that property is mapped to.

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 green plug mapping icon in the Data source column to view the mappings for that property.

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 Data source 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 yellow Issues found label 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.

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.

Map form questions to contact properties while creating your form

1. You can also map form questions to contact properties while creating your form. Open the form question you want to map and toggle on Map to contacts.

2. From the dropdown in the right sidebar, select the contact property you want to map the question to.

3. Click Contact mapping settings to open the full mapping modal...

From here you can see and edit all mappings for this form.

If you’re mapping a Multiple Choice, Picture Choice, Legal, Yes/No, or Checkbox question type to the Subscription status contact property, you'll need to map each option in the modal view by clicking the Contact mapping settings icon...

...and matching the answer options to the Subscription status options.

Questions added via the Contact info question type must also be mapped from the Contact mapping settings modal.

4. To remove a mapping, toggle off Map to contacts for the question you want to unmap.