Properly Setting Up Gravity Forms Notifications for Best Deliverability
It might seem like an easy thing but a little bit of an incorrect set up for Gravity Form email notifications means your email notifications never arrive or just generally have email deliverability problems.
Let’s go through some tips for how to get good deliverability out of you admin or user form notifications!
The Notification Form Options
Here is what the Gravity Forms notification settings screen looks like:
Oftentimes these notifications will be “admin” emails and internal to your organization or they might also be notifications sent to the person who submitted the form. We usually recommend setting up a “user” notification email that gets sent to the form submitter, here’s why;
- It lets them know you have received the email and they don’t have to worry about if they actually submitted it correctly.
- It lets them review what they sent for accuracy if you include their submission details in the email
- It makes sure people aren’t abusing the form by pretending to be someone else. This isn’t foolproof but it is much more likely that if I get a user notification email showing I submitted some request on a site I then have an opportunity to email the organization to let them know it wasn’t me.
Let’s review the form field options. Some are pretty self-explanatory but let’s go through them and identify any tricky spots.
Send to Email
This is the recipient email address the notification gets sent to. It might be someone in your marketing department, a merge field with the customer’s submitted email, or even several emails separated by commas.
From Name
This is the “from name” your email will appear to be coming from. This should be something recognizable to the recipient like your company name or even a person’s name if it is a personal email address in the “From Email” field.
From Email
We’re here! This is the tricky one! This is the email address your email appears to be “from”. This is tricky because you can put anything in here but that doesn’t mean the recipient’s email program will like it.
Your WordPress site is likely sending this notification email from the web server using PHPmailer. Alternatively, WordPress can be set to send via SMTP or a transactional email delivery tool like MailGun, SendGrid, or Mandrill. In any case, this method needs to be approved to send email for the domain of this sending email address!
How do you identify which servers and services can send email on behalf of the domain? Using a DNS record called the “SPF Record” you can make broadcast which server or email delivery services are authorized to send email. Here’s where you can check if you already have a valid SPF record in place.
The big mistake people make is using a “from email” that they don’t control. For instance, if you use the merge code to use the email address of the person who submitted the form as the “from email address” then you might be in big trouble. Once that email from an @aol.com or @yahoo.com address gets to a receiving email program, if it checks that SPF record and your server IP or email blast tool isn’t listed (they won’t be) then it may not even deliver that email or just dump it in spam. It will consider it a spoofed email.
Reply To
This is often the email address of the person who submitted the form – so it is often a merge code.
BCC
Obviously, Blind Carbon Copy – which would let you include other email addresses without being visible to the email recipient.
Subject
I’d recommend always making this semi-unique per email. This can be done by including the form submitter’s name in the subject line or the date. That way email systems like Gmail won’t group several unique emails just because they have the same subject line.
It is also a good idea to identify which organization, site, or form this was from.
Message
This is what we’d consider the email body or contents of the email. Often you might include all the info submitted from the form.
One little tip, if your form is in a sidebar, footer, or something where it being submitted from different pages, include the {embed_url} in order to see from what actual page someone was on when they decided to submit the form.
Another good idea is to include a little prelude to set the email up for someone. If this is a notification being sent to an inside sales rep you might say something encouraging like: “Seize the day! Here is another potential customer that might just love our product. Go get ’em!”
Actual Examples of Form Notifications
Here are two notifications we have on our own web dev agency site. One is an admin notification email and the other is a notification email to the user.
Final tips for Form Notification Deliverability
- Make sure you have the details for the notification set up well. Particularly the “from email”!
- Use SPF records correctly
- Use a transactional email delivery service like: MailGun, SendGrid, or Mandrill. These services are dedicated to making sure email gets through and isn’t flagged as spam. There are usually helpful analytics tools that show if an email was sent, what it looked like, and even if it was opened!
Any tough questions on Gravity Form notifications please leave in the comments.