Do you want to send emails automatically when your form is submitted? Nelio Forms makes it incredibly simple to set up email notifications and send them whenever a user fills a form on your site.
In this article, we’ll go through all of the notification email possibilities in Nelio Forms.
Before you begin, make sure that Nelio Forms is installed and activated on your WordPress site. Then you may access the form editor by creating a new form or editing an existing one.
Setting Up an Email Notification
After opening the form editor, go to the Submission Actions panel in the right sidebar to access all of the options for your form.
By default, an email notification will be enabled for your form. To disable it, click the toggle next to the name of the email notification to the off position. Or, leave it toggled on to set up your first email notification.
To edit the settings of the email notification, click the gear icon at the right side and then a list of options will appear. There, click the Edit action option to start editing the settings of the email notification.
First, if you would like to change the name of this notification, you can do so by changing the Action name in the Edit action dialog:
Then there are several fields you’ll need to fill out to set up your email notification. We’ll explain each in detail below.
Send To Email Address
In this field, you can add one email address as the recipient of this email notification. By default, the Send To Email Address will be set to the {admin_email} tag, which pulls the administrator email from your WordPress settings.
However, you can change the default recipient by typing a different email. Or you can click on the tag icon to open a list of available field tags you can include as Send To Email Address values.
In the previous example, you can select the Site Administrator Email, which is the {admin_email} already set, or use any email field included in your form. In the screenshot, there is only one email field named Email. If you select it, the value of Send To Email Address will change to {email-1}.
From Email Address
By default, your forms will set the From Email Address to the {admin_email} tag. If there is a different address you would like to use as the sender’s email, you can simply enter it in this field.
Note: If you’re using an SMTP plugin to ensure email delivery, make sure your From Email Address follows your mailer’s requirements. Some SMTP mailers require your notifications’ From Email Address to match the email address you used in your SMTP settings. Others require a domain-specific email address.
Reply-To Email Address
The email address entered into this field will be used as the recipient of any replies to the email notification that’s sent on form submission.
For example, if you’ve set the From Email Address to your own email address, it may be useful to set the Reply-To Email Address field to a tag that pulls the user’s email from an email field of the form. That way, if you have questions about a users’ form, you can simply reply to the notification email to get in touch with them.
Or, if you’re sending a notification email to your users, you could make the reply-to email your own email address so that they easily can reach out to you.
There can only be one Reply-To Email Address.
Email Subject
When you create a new form, the default Email Subject will read “New Email Notification”. If you’d like to change this, you can add text as well as tags. Just click on the tag icon to see different user and site data you can pull into your notification email’s subject.
Email Message
The last step is to set up your email notification’s message, or body text. By default, the Email Message field will contain the {all_fields} tag, which displays all user-entered fields and their labels.
If you’d like to customize the email notification’s content further, you can add additional text or tags directly into the Email Message field.
Adding Multiple Email Notifications
Nelio Forms makes it easy to create multiple email notifications for a form. Whether you’d like to send out unique emails to different recipients or set up several notifications based on users’ fields, multiple form notifications are a great way to make your emails feel more personalized.
To add an additional notification email, click the Add Action link after the list of submission actions and select the Email notification option in the floating list of options.
Then, you can edit the settings of the new email notification as described in the previous steps. When you’re finished, click Save to store your changes.
If you’d like to duplicate a notification, click the Duplicate action option. And if you want to remove one, just click the Remove action option. Remember that this list of options appear after clicking on the gear icon on the right of the action in the list of actions.
Sending an Email Notification to the Person Who Filled Out the Form
Sending an email to the user who submitted the form is a great way to quickly acknowledge that you’ve received their data.
To set this up, you need the Send To Email Address to pull the user’s email from their data. You can do this using a tag referencing an email field of your form.
Look to the right of the Send To Email Address field and click the tag icon. This will open a list of available tags. Under the Form Fields section, select the Email field.
The appropriate tag will automatically be added to the Send To Email Address field for you. When the email notification is sent, this tag will automatically pull the email address that the user entered into your form field Email.
Testing Email Notifications
Once your email notifications are configured, we recommend trying them out. Testing your forms is super useful because it allows you to share in the user experience. It also provides an opportunity to make sure everything looks and works exactly as you’d like.
For all the details on testing email notifications, as well as other aspects of your forms, please check out our pre-launch checklist and form testing tutorial.
That’s it! Now you can set up and customize notification emails for all of your forms.