Contacts and Automations work hand-in-hand to help you manage customer relationships, personalize email communication, and streamline your marketing efforts.
Collecting form responses is the first step towards building customer relationships. It gives you the information you need to understand your audience and follow up in a personalized and relevant way. But when contact data is scattered across spreadsheets, inboxes, and different tools, it can be difficult to keep your communication relevant, scalable, and deliver the right message at the right moment.
Contacts and Automations bring everything together in one centralized place. You can store and grow your contacts, segment people based on the details they share in their form responses, and send automated communication that feels personal and timely, all within your Typeform account.
Automations let you build simple or multi-step message flows based on the information you collect, so each person receives communication that matches their needs, interests, or stage in the customer journey.
You can welcome new sign-ups the moment they complete a form, send helpful resources to people who request more information, follow up with reminders or next steps after a time delay you choose—whether that’s a few hours or several days—or share targeted offers with specific segments to help convert prospects into customers. These personalized flows help you nurture leads, onboard customers, encourage engagement, and guide people toward conversion, all without switching platforms.
- Contacts is available on all Typeform plans. Enterprise customers can activate it by contacting their Customer Success Manager.
- Automations is available as an add-on feature on the Plus, Business, Growth Essentials, Growth Pro, Talent, Growth Custom, and Enterprise plans.
Contacts: a centralized hub for customer data
The Contacts tab in your Workspace is where you’ll find your centralized contact list, a single source of truth for all the customer data you collect with typeforms. Whenever someone submits a form that includes an email address, you can automatically add them as a Contact to your Contacts list. You can also bring in your existing customer data from other systems, by importing it from a CSV file, or add contacts manually.
Other details you collect about your contacts from your forms can be mapped to Contact properties. You can choose from predefined Contact properties or create your own custom Contact properties.
All members of your Typeform account will be able to view contacts you collect.
You can create Contact properties to match your specific business needs. Examples of custom properties might include:
- Birthday
- Hair type
- Favorite product
For example, if you run a hair care company, you might add a custom property called Hair Type. When a customer fills out your form and selects their hair type, that data can be mapped to their contact profile. This lets you easily filter and segment your contacts based on their hair type or any other property you define.
You can then use Contact properties to:
- Filter your Contacts by specific criteria (e.g. all customers with dry hair type).
- Segment your Contacts into different contact lists for targeted communications.
- Personalize automations and email content.
- Sign people up for newsletters or to receive email content from you. You’ll need to ask respondents for consent to receiving emails and you can map their answer as Subscribed or Unsubscribed to the Subscription status Contact property.
Automations: personalized communication at scale
Automations take your contact data to the next level by enabling you to automatically send emails to the right person at the right time.
For instance, when someone fills out your form and becomes a new contact, you can set up an automation to send them a welcome email right away. If their profile includes specific data in a contact property such as having a dry hair type, you can customize that email with targeted content or product recommendations. Additionally, you can add a time delay to your Automation to create multi-step email campaigns such as drip campaigns (a series of pre-written emails sent to specific customers over a set period of time).
You can build multi-step workflows for things like:
- Sending another email two days later with a discount code.
- Triggering special offers for customers who meet certain criteria.
- Send lead nurturing emails to guide potential customers with educational content until they are ready to purchase.
Automations are created with Triggers and Actions:
- Trigger - An event that triggers an Automation to start. E.g. when a Contact is created.
- Action - What happens after the trigger event occurs. E.g. send an email.
You can decide what will start the Automation from one of the following triggers:
- 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)
How Contacts and Automations work together
Below is an example workflow of Contacts and Automations:
- A respondent fills out your form and becomes a Contact, because you’ve set up the form to automatically create contacts from submissions.
- If the contact’s hair type is dry, they’ll be sent a personalized email with product recommendations for dry hair, based on an automation that you’ve set up for the dry hair segment.
- Two days later, the Automation sends another email with a discount code.
These automated sequences save time and make every customer interaction feel personal, without the need for manual effort. Check out this guide for step by step instructions on how to create Automations from Contact updates.
Put simply, Contacts keeps the data you collect from your audience organized, and Automations help you use that information to automatically send targeted email communication at just the right time.