Jotform 3.0 Sneak Peaks: Emails

Jotform servers send around 1 million emails every month. So, the second most important feature of Jotform is “sending emails reliably”.[*]. Many people just come to Jotform, create a form, post it on their site and forget about it. They keep using Jotform for years without ever visiting our site since Jotform just works. It does what you need. When you have a new submission, Jotform instantly brings it to your inbox.

No Sign Up Required

Keeping this in mind, we are doing an interesting experiment on Jotform 3.0. We will be letting people create forms and receive the responses by email without ever creating a Jotform account! All you have to do is enter an email address while creating the form and you are all set.

We are always looking for ways to make our application leaner. Keep eliminating any unnecessary steps. If all you need to do is to create a form and get emails when someone fills it, you don’t need an account.

I always think of Jotform.com as a standalone app. Get everything done on a single page. Once we release the new version, our next goal will be to complete our API and start letting other web tools include Jotform within their own web applications. We have had couple of requests from very popular web tools but that was not possible with the old version. It is now a very real possibility and I am excited about it.

Setting Up Email Alerts and Auto-Responders

Jotform 3.0 makes it possible to completely customize your emails. You can setup response email alerts and auto-responders and change everything. Let’s see couple of screenshots on how this works.

I created this nice little contact form. I would like to receive an email when someone fills it. I also would like to send an automatic response to the submitter to thank them for contacting us. So, I click on “Email Alerts” button to see if I can accomplish that.

When I click on “Add New Email” button, an “Email Wizard” is launched. I will create my email following the steps. I first need to decide if this email will be sent to me or the person who fills the form.

Next, a screen that come up looking like an envelope. During usability tests, we have seen many people get confused when they were asked to enter the “From” and “To” questions for the email. So, we designed it to look like an envelope. Everybody knows how envelopes work: Put the sender name to the left top corner and the recipient address to the bottom.

Next, enter email contents. I can use any form answer on the subject or body of the message. Also note that I have total control over the design. I can replace the Jotform logo with my own logo or just remove it.

I save the email and I am done. My forms start sending emails right away. I can also setup more emails.

Let me share one last trick with you. Jotform’s new Conditional Logic features are very powerful. Let’s say I added a dropdown question asking why the user is contacting us. Is this query Sales or Support related? Then add new conditions to send the responses to different departments in company.

We hope that you liked the new email features. Please feel free to post your questions or suggestions using the comments section below.

[*] By the way, if you are wondering what the most important feature of Jotform is, it is to “create forms easily“.