How to embed a Google Form in an email

One of the easiest, most effective ways to grow and scale your business is by engaging with your existing and prospective customers. You can interact with them on social media, host a webinar, or even just reach out via email through a fun quiz, customer feedback survey, or e-newsletter.

While email marketing services like Mailchimp, ActiveCampaign, and MailerLite are great options for creating and embedding creative content into emails, they’re not the only ones.

An online form builder like Google Forms can also help elicit customer feedback and foster engagement, and it’s much simpler to use than a mass mailer solution. Google Forms is also free and includes a good selection of templates and design tools to customize your forms.

To take advantage of the platform as a customer interaction tool, all you have to do is embed a Google Form in an email.

How to embed a Google Form in an email

Here’s how to embed a Google Form in an email:

1. From your Gmail, open Google Drive. While you can use another email platform to send your Google Form, it would have to be in the form of a link. You can only directly embed a Google Form in an email using a Gmail account.
2. Select New in the top left corner.
3. Hover over Google Forms from the dropdown. You’ll see three options: Blank form, Blank quiz, or From a template.
4. To keep things simple for this illustration, select From a template. (Keep in mind that you can use Google Forms to create a form or quiz from scratch.)
5. Select Customer Feedback.
6. Once you’re satisfied with the form, click Send in the upper right corner.

Pro Tip

Before you send your email, check out the Responses and Settings tabs for even more form customization. For example, you can opt to receive email notifications when forms are submitted or edit the confirmation message that lets respondents know their answers were successfully submitted.
7. Enter the recipient’s email address as well as your subject line and message. (This is also where you’ll copy the Google Form link if you use a different email provider or if you’d like to share your form on social media.)
8. Select the box next to Include form in email.
9. Click Send.

Congratulations! You now know how to embed a Google Form in an email.

How to use a Google Forms alternative: Jotform

Google Forms isn’t the only online form builder on the market. Jotform is one of Google Forms’s biggest competitors, thanks to its library of 10,000-plus form templates, drag-and-drop functionality, mobile payment processing capabilities, robust integrations, powerful Report Builder, and top-notch security. 

Jotform is simple to use, fully customizable, and completely code free, helping even those with no design or coding experience make professional-looking forms. However, unlike Google Forms, you can’t embed a Jotform in an email, and that’s for security reasons.

Jotform prides itself on the way it protects forms and user data — thanks to encrypted forms, Payment Card Industry (PCI) certification, and spam protection — and embedding a form into an email compromises Jotform’s security standards.

Instead, for a safer, more reliable user experience, you can share a link in an email that will allow respondents to access your form with a single click.

Here’s how to do it:

1. Go to the Jotform Form Builder and choose from one of the premade templates or build your own from scratch. Sticking with the earlier Google Forms example, let’s select a template.
2. Customize the form by changing its colors and fonts and adding your logo to match your brand. You can even add more questions or edit the ones listed if you have some specific topics you’d like your email recipients to provide feedback on.
3. Once you’re happy with your form, click Publish at the top of the Form Builder.
4. Under the Quick Share tab — this is the default, so you should already be in it — click the green Copy Link button to copy your form URL.
5. Finally, paste the form URL into your email so your respondents can access your form.

That’s it! You’ve successfully created a form with Jotform and shared it with your respondents via email.

Create a form and send it to respondents via email to collect valuable customer information and feedback. With the right software, it’s easy to do. So whether you use Google Forms or Jotform to create and share your forms, you can trust that they’ll impress your respondents and supply you the feedback you need to boost customer loyalty and grow your brand.

Photo by Alizée Baudez on Unsplash