For those in the northern hemisphere, this time of year brings warmer temperatures and springtime. Spring cleaning is a great time to perform some maintenance on forms and surveys, too.
Suggested areas for review include:
Form owners with the need for multilingual forms and surveys have options with Formsite. Many organizations have users who speak different languages due to location or targeted market. Solutions for multilingual forms include creating multiple manual versions or automating the translation.
The method used depends on whether the translated text exists or if it is possible to get easily. If the translation is not easily obtained, the translation service is usually the best option.
The most common methods for making multilingual forms and surveys are:
Forms use Notification emails to send messages after each successful form submission. These emails can go to many recipients including those entered into the form and defined addresses.
Additionally, addressing email Notifications can use routing items for addresses based on selected form answers. Sending only the needed email helps to prevent spam complaints and only send high-value messages.
One of the most popular articles shows how to make appointment scheduling forms. Form owners can add links for the appointments as events to Google Calendar, too.
The best method is to provide a link in the Success Page or Notification email to add the event to Google Calendar.
This is good for organizations to track appointments without needing to view each result, and also is a good solution for letting form users or managers add the event to their own calendars.
A powerful tool for Formsite form owners is the Success Page. Choosing from the variety of formats, the form owner can show a basic message, add custom HTML and scripts, or redirect the visitor to a different place. The Success Page always appears after the form’s submission and there are three available formats.
A previous article about pre-populating embedded forms has generated lots of attention. Based on customer feedback, we have added the ability to pre-populate embedded forms through the URL.
The previous method involved a script to insert the URL parameters as the page loaded. The new solution removes the need for the custom script.
A popular use for the Workflow features is to collect an approval for a form submission. The approval Workflow begins with the initial form submission, triggering the Notification email. The email contains the link for the approver to view the request and approval items.
Creating a copy of the form just for an approval can take up valuable form space, though. Using the same form for the approval Workflow is possible using Rules to show the approval items.
The payment integrations offer form owners the ability to collect payments with their order forms. By connecting to the payment processor, collecting payments makes online transactions much safer. Most services add a small processing fee to each transaction (although Formsite doesn’t), and some form owners ask how to add transaction fees to each order.
Most payment processing services charge around 3% for each transaction. While that’s not a large amount on individual amounts, those fees add up with many transactions. Other times the organization's funding or reimbursements only cover the amount of the order. These cases may not be able to absorb extra fees.
The Pre-populate link works to load forms with values already entered. Using the form’s Pre-populate link, form owners can set the values of form items. Pre-populating Dropdown items and other multi-select items can be tricky for new form builders.
Multi-select items include Radio Button, Dropdown, Checkbox, and the Matrix items. These are pre-populated using the position of the answer, not the text. For most cases this isn’t a problem, but there are some situations where that’s not obvious.
For example, one popular use of the Pre-populate link is to send a Notification email with a link to repeat the form. This could be in response to an online order and the link labeled ‘duplicate this order’.
Another use for the Pre-populate link uses the Success Page’s Redirect URL format. The Success Page passes the visitor and their information to the second form after submitting the first. Both uses require adding pipe codes in place of the Pre-populate link’s placeholder text.
The problem occurs when trying to Pre-populate a multi-select item using a multi-select item. In other words, a Dropdown item's pipe code will result in its text value. Pre-populating Dropdown items needs the choice position, not the choice text.
Some form owners ask if it’s possible to send their forms through email for their recipients to complete. Instead of sending the actual link, the desire is to send the form in the body of the email message. Unfortunately, the short answer is no. The ability to email forms is not currently supported by most email clients.
Online forms in general appear as a graphical front-end to a database and need an actual web page to run the needed parts. For example, Rules to show and hide elements, multiple pages, Calculations, etc. need to track and respond to user input.
Email messages are simple text and basic HTML that are not able to perform these higher-level processes. In fact, many designers and email marketers know the struggle to design and develop email creative. Many styling and positioning techniques that seem simple are unusable in email creative.
Does that mean there's no way to use forms with email? Not exactly, no.