Tip of the fortnight 5 - Autoresponder emails to improve customer engagement

Tip of the fortnight 5 - Autoresponder emails to improve customer engagement

Hello fellow form builders, 

Is it raining form submissions? Congratulations! But it doesn't end there. It's time to figure out a way to acknowledge that pile of submissions and possibly convert them into potentials.

Instead of sending emails to a mailing list, why not build your own email service to reach customers and make it a part of your lead-nurturing efforts? In this three-part series, we will show you how to use Email Notifications inside Zoho Forms. Today we'll walk you through autoresponder emails .



Autoresponders fire emails automatically to the configured To recipients when a form is submitted/updated without any need for a manual trigger. The benefit? It's quite obvious: these email notifications are extremely helpful in interacting with prospects who filled out a form. If you're looking to build stronger customer communication, this can help in following and nourishing leads, allowing you to be constantly proactive in your customer engagement. 


First, outline the sequence

Email notifications can be tailored to fit the workflow you want with your form.  Create templates and configure them as "ADDED" to trigger emails when a new form is entered or configure them as "UPDATED" templates to trigger emails when an existing form is edited.

The email can be personalized to fit your requirements. You can set the To recipients as yourself, your team, users, or non-users of your organization. To send the email to the customer who fills out the form, use an email address field as the To recipient (remember to add this field prior in your form). Take a look at the email template examples for a Registration Invite configured for the form respondent and a New Registration for the team. This contextual flow with a distinct template setup will deliver emails to the respective people. 

   



Remember, your email reflects your brand

Besides a personalized message, the body of the email can reassure customers when it includes their form answer. To do this, use the icon next to Field Labels link. The text will get replaced with the form answers when the email is sent. You can personalize it further to render as a design card by inserting your company's logo or any relevant images with information they need to know. It should look something like this: 



Provide useful information

If the data collected with your forms is your first point of contact with your new leads, send them relevant URLs or links like the product's homepage, other web pages, etc.



For a workflow that needs to reveal the entered data, you can include the entire form submission in the email's body or even include the attachment of the submitted form as a PDF. If your workflow involves a document created using the form answers, you can also include that as an attachment (read the full post
on merged documents here ).



The scope of the autoresponder emails is vast: Bring in a way to generate a Welcome message, Subscription Success message, Order Confirmation message, Thank You ecard, and more. What are the email practices for your businesses? Comment below—we'd love to hear from you. 


Until next fortnight,
Prasana 



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