Staying connected with your respondents is essential for maintaining engagement and communication. With Typeform, you can use Messages or Automations to reach out to your audience. Both allow you to send emails, not only to your respondents, but also to yourself or other team members. While they are both similar, they function in different ways. In this article, we’ll break down the key differences between Messages and Automations to help you choose the right approach for your needs.
With Messages, you’re able to send follow-up emails to respondents that have completed or partially completed a form. Automations let you reach a larger audience as you’re able to automate sending emails to Contacts that have been added to your Typeform account. Contacts can be added to your Typeform account from form responses, imported from a CSV, or can be manually added individually.
Both Messages and Automations are created with triggers and actions.
- Trigger - A condition that needs to be met for an email or message to be sent.
- Action - What happens once the trigger condition has been met (send an email).
Differences between Messages and Automations
Below is a quick breakdown of the differences between Messages and Automations.
| Messages | Automations |
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Plan availability:
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Plan availability: |
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Triggers available:
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Triggers available:
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| Triggers can be filtered by Contact properties to target specific Contacts. For example, if you have a Location Contact property, you can set a Trigger to start an Automation when a contact is created and their location is in Europe. | |
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Actions available:
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Actions available:
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| Able to send multiple emails to contacts with time delays in between. For example, drip campaigns, onboarding flows, and lead nurturing flows. | |
| Emails are sent from either notifications@followups.typeform.io or from an email address associated with your Gmail account. | Emails are sent from a custom domain that’s set up by the Typeform account owner or admin. |
| Form respondents are opted-in by default and can opt-out by clicking unsubscribe from the email. | Emails are sent exclusively to subscribed contacts, who may unsubscribe via the included ‘Unsubscribe’ link. |
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Limitations: You can create a maximum of 50 triggers per form. Each trigger can have a total of 30 actions, of those 30 actions you can have 1 action to send emails to respondents and 1 action to receive email notifications for yourself or your team. For example, you can create a trigger with 28 actions to deliver a webhook, 1 action to send an email to respondents and 1 action to receive email notifications. |
Limitations: Each Automation can have 1 trigger and up to 100 actions. |
Messages
Messages can be used to send emails to your respondents, yourself or your team when a respondent completes or partially completes your form.
Access Messages from the Workflow panel of a form. Click on the + button under Messages.
Then set up your triggers and actions to send emails to your respondents on a form level. More information on how to set up Messages can be found here.
Messages are sent from notifications@followups.typeform.io or from an email address associated with your Gmail account.
If your Typeform account has been verified or if you’re sending messages from your Gmail account, you can edit the default email message.
Respondents are opted-in to receiving your emails by default. If they would like to opt-out, they can click unsubscribe when they receive your first email message.
Below are some examples of Messages you can create:
- When a respondent completes your form, send an email to yourself.
- When a respondent is tagged with a High Lead quality, send a message to a Slack channel.
- When a respondent lands on a specific ending for a product, send an email to the respondent with a coupon code.
Automations
Automations work together with Contacts in your Typeform account. When a contact has been added or updated in your Typeform account, you can create Automations to build and send emails to either the contact, yourself, or anyone else. Additionally, you can send emails to a specific list of Contacts from your Typeform account. Create targeted and personalized automations from your contacts database in Typeform.
Access Automations by clicking Automations in your Workspace.
Automations are categorized into the following:
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Always on
- Contact updates - Automations that are created from Contact updates.
- Form submissions - Currently, forms under Form submissions use the Messages feature. When you click on a form under Form submissions, you’ll be redirected to the Messages feature.
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Scheduled (Coming soon)
- Specific date/time
- Recurring event
Below are some examples of the Automations you can create:
- When a contact has been updated, send your team an email.
- When a contact has been added to a list, send the contact an email.
- When a new contact is added from a form response, use the trigger Contact created to send an email to the new contact.
- When a contact property has been updated, send an email to the contact and then send another email 1 day later.
With Automations you can send multiple emails to contacts with time delays in between. For example, when you create an Automation to send an email to a list of contacts, you can send another email a few hours later, and then send another email a few days later, creating a drip campaign, onboarding, or nurturing flows.
Emails created through Automations are sent from a custom domain that is set up by the account owner. You can then use the email builder to customize the emails to be sent. More information on how to set up Automations can be found here.