Learn why Contact forms are great for starting conversations from your website, social posts or email in the video below or keep reading to get the full scoop 👍
Otherwise, feel free to get in touch with our Sales team for more details regarding our Forms feature.
Quick Read Guide:
Contact forms are hosted webpages that ask visitors to submit information. Once the visitor submits the form, MessageDesk will automatically send them a personalize text message.
This means forms are great for starting conversations from anywhere you can embed a link to a website - such as email exchanges, social media posts or inline on your website itself.
In fact, MessageDesk Contact Forms can be embedded directly on your website too!
In this article I'll go over how to create Contact forms, update their styling to match your brand and the best ways to use forms.
If you have any questions simply click on our chatbot in the bottom right corner or email me at josh@messagedesk.com 👍 .
Creating Contact Forms
To create a contact form first navigate to Plugins -> Forms. Here you'll see the following where you can click "New Form".
After clicking "New Form" you'll land on a 4-step process where you can finish creating this new form.
Step 1: Form Fields
Form fields are the different fields your contact will need to fill out before successfully submitting the form. You can delete pre-selected fields or change their order by interacting with the different icons.
You can make some fields optional - meaning a contact doesn't have to fill them out - by toggling the checkbox next to the field labeled "Required".
Step 2: Form Styling
In this section you can edit the styling of the background color, Form field styling, Form title, and the styling of the success page (the page that's shown after someone submits the form).
I'd suggest watching the video above to see this step in action because there's a lot of styling options you can choose. Otherwise, feel free to click around and see what color combos you like best! No one will see this form until you send it to them anyway.
Step 3: Form Message
This is the text message contacts will receive automatically once they submit the form.
It will look something like this:
Step 4: Sharing your Form
By default, there's 3 ways to share your form. You can send it to contacts directly by linking to it in emails, social posts or in text messages.
Or you can embed the form on your website using our iFrame. I suggest asking your website developer which is best for you.
You can also manually send the form to contacts or groups by using the {{ Contact Form }} Tag as pictured below. By default, each form you make will generate a new {{ tag }} that will share the name of the form. When this tag is used in a message, MessageDesk automatically replaces the tag with the link to the form.
Create a Form
Forms are used to collect additional information from Contacts that you might not already have.
By default you will already have one form created for you. This will be labeled under the name "Contact Form." This is the form that is sent to anyone who texts you but doesn't already have a Contact in MessageDesk.
You can create additional forms to send out manually by navigating to Plugins -> Forms and selecting "New Form" in the top right.
Managing Your Forms
Viewing Submissions
By default, all contacts who submit your form get added to a group. You can view this group by clicking "View Submission" button in the form edit page.
Lead Collection Form:
When you first start a MessageDesk account, we automatically create a Lead Collection Form for you. This form will get sent to any contact who texts your number and IS NOT already saved as a contact.
This serves as a way to qualify contacts before they enter your inbox and disturb your operations.
You can choose to turn this automation off by going to Plugins -> Forms -> Lead Collection Form.
Once you click into the form simply toggle it on/off in the top right corner like pictured below.
"Active" (Purple) means we'll automatically send the 'Anonymous Lead Message' to unknown contacts when they text you and follow up with the Thank you text once they submit.
By turning the form to "Inactive" (toggle is Gray) you'll need to manually send the Form via the {{ ContactForm }} tag.
