Struggling with sending timely notifications to the right people? Conditional email and smart forms are your solutions for efficient communication and faster responses.
In any organization, connecting customers and users to the right experts is crucial. However, creating an effective notification system can be a challenge. Traditional methods like assigning someone to monitor communications or listing contact information on your website can be unproductive and confusing.
Smart forms with conditional email simplify the process. By guiding users with targeted questions, you can quickly identify their needs and connect them to the appropriate contact.
Setting up conditional email is a breeze, and we’ll guide you through the process in no time. So let’s get started!
How to Create a Smart Form for Sending Conditional Emails to Individuals and Departments
The process involves just two steps: creating a single form to collect user information and configuring the form to send conditional emails to the appropriate department based on user needs.
Let’s begin by examining the necessary tools.
- Our free Ninja Forms core plugin ( download here ).
- Ninja Forms’ Conditional Logic add-on.
Step 1: Build out a single, smart form to learn what users need
Depending on what YOU need, this form may be considerably more or less complex. We’ll use the Ninja Forms prebuilt General Enquiry form template as an example below.
As you can see, it simply asks the user their occupation, the reason for the inquiry, and the best time to call them back to respond to their inquiry.
If you require something more complex, the form doesn’t have to look more complex (and more intimidating) to the user on first contact. You can set your form up to hide extra fields initially and show them only when they become relevant based on your users’ choices.
For example, if you have multiple products that a user may need support with, you can display a list of those products if and only if the user clicks the Support option from the list. These are called dynamic fields, and you can learn how to set them up at that link!
Now that we have a form set up let’s look at creating conditional email notifications for it.
Step 2: Setting up conditional email notifications to be sent to specific people or departments
Setting up an email to fire out when the form is submitted is as simple as adding an email action to your form. First, you’ll want one email action for each person or department that may need to be notified:
- Click the Emails and Actions tab in the form builder
- Add one email action for each department.
- Name each action and configure it appropriately. Most importantly, you’ll want the To address to be set for the department that needs to receive the email if and only if this option has been selected by the user.
Next, and finally, we’ll configure the conditional logic that turns each email action into a conditional email. Click on any email action and expand the Conditional Logic settings of that action:
I’ve chosen the Enquiry Type for this example, and we’ll set it up to send only when this option has been chosen by the user. Here is the logic you want to apply:
[Process This] action WHEN [Enquriy Type] [Has Selected] the [Choice 1 ] select list option.
This action will now fire only when the user has selected Choice 1 from the form’s select list. Now apply the same logic to each email action, subbing out [Choice] for the relevant inquiry in each.
BONUS: Conditional SMS/text notifications and more!
In Step 1 above, we built out the form to allow the user to indicate the urgency of the request. If a user reports a high-urgency support situation, you might want to have a key individual, like the department head, notified immediately. Email works, but you can also send notifications through other more personal channels.
Twilio and Clicksend will both trigger SMS/text notifications to an individual’s cell number. Each extension adds an action to your form that can have the same conditional logic as described above applied to them. In this scenario, a high-urgency request or lead submission can ping an individual’s phone directly.
You can even ping channels in Slack or create Trello cards! 🙂
Enhance Productivity and Communication with Conditional Emails and Smart Forms
Save time and resources by eliminating manual filtering and routing of form submissions. By following the steps above, you’ve created a form that efficiently collects user input and sends conditional emails to the right people.
In addition to determining recipients, Conditional Logic allows you to:
- Show & Hide Fields
- Modify Lists
- Change Values
- Set redirect destinations conditionally
- And much more.
Try Conditional Logic risk-free with a 14-day money-back guarantee! Get it for free with the Plus membership, or choose from a one-, five-, or twenty-site license. Don’t wait. Try it today!
