Set up an automation to email your respondents based on form submissions and turn the information you collect in your form into timely, personalized email communication without manual effort.
You can build automations triggered by any full response, a partial submission, or selected ending screen(s), with the option to add additional filtering conditions based on answers. This will let you move from sending out a single “thank you” email to multi-step nurture flows with builtin delays.
What you’ll need:
- The Contacts & Automations add on that is available on the Plus, Business, Growth Pro, Talent, Growth Custom, and Enterprise plans.
- Set up a custom email domain to send emails from automations.
- A form with an Email question or an email URL parameter to send automations to respondents.
Note! We’ll be phasing out the send messages feature, and we recommend switching to Automations to send email sequences, webhooks, and more.
Create automation for when a form is submitted
To trigger an automation when a form is submitted:
- Click Automations.
- Click + Create automation.
- Select what will trigger the automation. We’ll select Form submission.
- Give your automation a name. Click on the default name in the top left corner.
- Type in the name of your automation and click Save. We’ll enter Newsletter signup welcome email.
- Click the dropdown list and select a Workspace from your account.
- Now scroll through to select or use the search bar to search for a form in that workspace.
- Choose the submission type that will trigger the automation. You can select from the following options:
- Completed: send automation when a respondent completes the form
- Partial submit point: send automation when a respondent gets to a Partial Submit Point in your form
- Ending screen: send automation when a respondent lands on a specific Ending screen
- In this example, we’ll just go with a Completed submission, and we’ll add some additional conditions to trigger the automation. Click + Add condition to do just that.
- Click the dropdown list and select a question or variable in your form. In this example, we’ll just select the Yes/No question asking people if they want to sign up to our newsletter.
- We’ll set up our conditions so the automation will be triggered if your respondent answers Yes to the question asking about signing up to your newsletter. You can also click + Add condition to add more conditions separated by AND/OR logical operators.
- Next, click the + button to add an action.
- Then select Send email.
- Select who you want to send the email to. We’ll select Respondents.
You can click the dropdown list to select which question to use to get your respondent’s email address. By default, this will be the Email question. If your form includes URL parameters, you can also choose the email URL parameter, or click + Add email question to add an email question if your form doesn’t include one already.
- Enter the email address you want to send the email from.
Note! Emails sent from automations will need to be sent from a custom email domain. Check out this article for instructions on how to set up a custom email domain in your Typeform account.
- Enter the following:
- Sender name (optional) - This will appear as the sender name in the receiver’s inbox.
- Reply to email - You can toggle it to be the same as the ‘send from’ email or toggle this off and enter a different email address.
- Subject line - Subject line of your email.
- Click Create email.
- Add content to create the email and add a theme by clicking Design.
More detailed instructions on how to create your email can be found here.
- Click Save and exit when you’re done with customizing your email.
- When you’re happy with the setup of your automation, click Activate.
Your automation is now active, and when a form that meets the conditions you’ve set up is submitted, people will receive an email to confirm that they’ve successfully subscribed to your newsletter. You can click Stop automation to stop sending automation emails.
Looking for other ways to use Contacts and Automations? Check out some other resources below: