How to collect email addresses with Google Forms

Google Workspace (formerly G Suite and Google Apps) is a powerful business tool. The suite includes apps like Google Drive, Gmail, and Google Forms. If you’re unfamiliar with Google Forms, it allows you to create and customize forms, share them through various outlets, and gather data and feedback — which makes it a potentially valuable tool for businesses.

Collecting email addresses from prospects is an essential step in the sales pipeline for any business. Google Forms can help with that. Depending on how you use and create forms, you can easily gather emails, download them, and then upload them to your business CRM, ensuring you stay on top of leads and direct them to the next step of your pipeline.

How to collect email addresses with Google Forms

Google Forms can collect email addresses for you, so you don’t need to worry about including a specific email field within the form. Just follow these steps:

• Log in to your Google account.
• Open a new Google Form.
• Click the Settings tab.
• Expand the Responses section and toggle on the Collect email addresses option.
• Navigate to the Responses tab. 
• Click on the spreadsheet icon to collect email addresses and store them in a Google Sheet.

That’s all you have to do. You can edit the rest of the form as needed, and when you share it with respondents, they’ll have to include their email address before they can submit their responses.

Setting your forms to collect email addresses automatically

It’s all too common to send out a Google Form and realize afterward that you forgot to set the form to collect email addresses. Depending on how you’re using the information gathered in the form, you may need to start the process over if you fail to get addresses from your respondents.

But you can prevent this mistake from happening by using automatic form settings. That way, you can be confident any form you send out will require a respondent to provide their email address before completing the form. Here’s how you set it up:

• Log in to your Google account.
• Open a new form.
• Click on the Settings tab.
• Under the Defaults section, click to expand the Form defaults option.
• Toggle on the Collect email addresses by default option.

This method changes your default settings so that all of your future forms will automatically collect email addresses. Please note that this change only appears on future forms, not the form that you’re currently working on.

You can change this setting manually in individual forms if you decide you don’t need emails in certain instances. Changing your default form settings is a good fail-safe method to ensure you’re always able to collect the data you need.

Gathering emails from submitted forms

You can gather all of the emails and responses that you collect from Google Forms in Google Sheets. To activate this setting, open a form, then click on the Responses tab at the very top of the form. From there, click on the green spreadsheet icon on the right side of the tab, and select your preferred response destination. You’ll be able to view and edit the data you’ve collected, including all of the email addresses from form respondents.

Alternatively, you can download the respondents’ email addresses and other form responses as a CSV file.

Collecting email addresses with Jotform

Jotform is another helpful resource for collecting email addresses. With Jotform’s extensive template library, you’ll likely find a customizable template — like the email signup form template — that can save you time.

Collecting email addresses with Jotform is an efficient and simplified process that ensures you gather the required data from your respondents. Adding an email field to your form is effortless; simply drag and drop the email field into your form. To ensure every respondent provides their email, you can set this field as ‘required’. This prevents the chance of submissions without email addresses.

To increase the reliability of the data, Jotform offers an e-mail validator widget. This widget validates the emails in real-time, reducing the chance of fake or incorrect email addresses by sending out a verification code to the entered email address. Additionally, you can easily assign your forms to others if they have Jotform accounts.

Using emails effectively

But gathering emails is only the first step in the process. For those emails to be valuable to your business, you need to use them effectively.

Uploading the information you’ve collected from each respondent into your CRM can help you keep that data organized. It’s also an effective way to ensure your company is sending respondents appropriate communications. You may want to reach out to new leads with introductory emails or make sure you’re adding customers who sign up for e-newsletters to the correct lists.

Gathering emails isn’t difficult when you have the right forms and the right technology in place. Both Google Forms and Jotform are useful options you can incorporate into your marketing and sales processes.