With Typeform, you’re able to grow and manage Contact lists through form responses. You can then set up personalized Automations that are triggered by Contact updates to send emails to your Contacts, yourself, or anyone else. Add a time delay to your Automation to create multi-step email campaigns. Send an email to a Contact that has been created and then send another email to them 1 day later. Contacts & Automations work together to help you save time and stay in contact with your customers and team.
Contacts & Automations is available as an add-on feature on the Plus, Business, Growth Essentials, Growth Pro, Talent, Growth Custom and Enterprise plans.
In this article we’ll walk you through how to create Automations that react to the changes in the Contact that have been added to your Typeform account. We’ll use an example of a hair care company called Glossy Locks that is collecting leads through a product recommendation quiz. With the leads collected, we want to add them to our Contacts database in Typeform, then create an Automation to send an email to the Contact, and then send another email to them a few days later. To set up this flow, you’ll need to create your form, create and map properties to your Contacts, and then create Automations from Contact updates.
To send emails from Automations, you’ll need to configure your DNS record to send emails from a custom email domain. Learn how to set up your custom email domain here.
Set up your form
We’ll first need to set up our form that collects contact information to create Contacts in our Contacts database. We’ve created a product recommendation quiz that matches products to the answers in the quiz. We’ll use the Match quiz mode to easily match the answers in the quiz to a recommended product in the form’s ending.
An Email question or an email address in the Contact info question is required to create a Contact.
Add a Yes/No question to ask if they want to receive marketing communications. You can then map the answer to this question as their subscription status in Contacts.
We’ve also included a Multiple Choice question asking which region they live in. We can use this information later as a region custom Contact property to segment respondents into different Contact lists based on which region they live in, or use the Contact property as a filter to send targeted emails to a specific region.
We’ve also added a question asking for their hair type. We can use the answer to this question as a hair_type custom Contact property to target emails to customers with a specific hair type.
Create and map properties to your Contacts
Next, we’ll need to set up Contacts in our Contacts database. We’ve added some custom properties to our Contacts database to customize it to our use case. We’ve added a Region and hair_type property to segment our Contacts and to target our emails later on. Learn how to create and manage your Contacts properties here.
After creating our properties, we’ll set up how Contacts will be added to the Contacts database. We’ll add Contacts from form responses, so whenever someone completes the form, a new Contact will be created. We’ll also map form questions to properties to store details about the Contact. More information on how to create Contacts can be found here and more information on how to map form questions to Contact properties can be found here.
Create Automations from Contact updates
Automations are created with Triggers and Actions.
- Trigger - An event that triggers an Automation to start. For example, when a Contact is created.
- Action - What happens after the trigger event occurs. For example, send an email.
In our example, we want to create an Automation to send emails to a Contact when the Contact is created. We’ll also set up the Automation to only send emails to Contacts based in North America with dry hair as we’re trying to build our customer base in North America and want to promote products for dry hair. The first email will contain a 10% discount code for products recommended for dry hair. Then we want to send another email 2 days later with hair care tips specifically for dry hair types.
1. To create an Automation, click on the Automations tab from your Workspace.
This will open your Automations manager where you can see all the different types of Automations created.
2. Under Contact updates, click + Create automation.
3. Next, select when this automation gets triggered:
- Contact is created
- Contact property is updated
- Contact is added to a list
- Contact is removed from a list
- Form submission - This trigger will redirect you to set up Messages.
- Specific date and time (coming soon)
- Recurring event (coming soon)
We’ll select Contact is created.
4. Give your automation a name by clicking the default name in the top left corner.
If you need to change your Trigger, click the dropdown on the right side menu.
5. We’ll add a filter to only send emails to Contacts in the North America region. Click + Add filter.
Click the Filter by dropdown and select which Contact property you want to filter by. We’ll select Region.
In the next dropdown, we’ll select an operator for the filter. We’ll select is equal to.
Then we’ll type in North America as the value for the Region.
Note! Make sure to type in the value exactly how it is formatted in your form. In our form, the answer option that maps to the Region Contact property is North America. We would need to type in the value exactly as North America (north america, US, or North america would not filter properly).
We’ll click + Add filter again to add a second filter. You can select the AND or OR operator for the additional filter.
- AND - Both conditions are true.
- OR - One or the other condition is true.
We’ll select AND.
Then we’ll create another filter for the hair_type Contact property with the value Dry.
6. Next, we’ll add an Action. Click the + icon in the middle.
7. Select Send email.
8. In the right side menu, you can select who you want to send your email to, Contact or Myself/team. We’ll select Contact.
9. Next, enter the email address you want to send Automation emails from. You’ll need to configure a DNS record to set up a custom email domain to send emails through Typeform.
10. Edit your subject line for the email and click Design email.
11. The email builder will open where you can customize the email.
You’ll see placeholder text in the body of the email. You can edit the placeholder text and Recall information from your Contact properties to make it more personal. Type the @ key and select the information you want to recall from the list.
You can add different content blocks to your email such as title, text, and button. You can add a total of 10 content blocks in your email.
12. To add a content block, click Add Content. Then select the content you want to add, we’ll select Button.
13. Edit the text of your button and add a button link in the button settings on the right.
You can rearrange the order of the content blocks by dragging and dropping them in the left side bar.
You can format the text in your message by highlighting the text, then a pop up will appear. Select if you want to bold, italicize, or add a hyperlink to it.
15. Click the 3 dots on the content to Duplicate or Delete the content block.
To customize the colors and font of your email, click the Design button to apply a theme to your email. More information on how to add a theme to your email can be found here.
16. When you’re done with designing your email, click Save and exit.
17. Next, we’ll add a time delay to send another email 2 days later. Click the + icon and select Time delay.
18. In the right side menu, select the time delay for when you want the Automation to continue. In the dropdown you can select to delay by Minutes, Hours, or Days. We’ll select Days and enter the number 2.
19. Then click on the next + icon and select Send email.
20. Repeat the steps of creating and sending another email. When you’re done with setting up your Automation, click Activate.
Now when someone that is located in North America with dry hair completes our product recommendation quiz, they’ll receive an email with a 10% discount and then 2 days later they’ll receive another email with hair care tips.
Back in your Automations manager, you can view the Automation you just created with the Status Active. You can toggle the Trigger off, this will stop any additional contacts being added to the Automation. Any contacts that are already in the Automation will continue through the flow until they reach the end.
Click the 3 dots on an Automation to Stop the Automation, Rename it, or Delete it.