Since the release of Forminator’s new PDF Generator Addon, the team has been hard at work cooking up even more handy features, and today we’re excited to announce the first of our time-saving PDF templates!
A PDF receipt/invoice template was highly-requested by Forminator users. Learn everything you need to know about the new addition and see it in action in this post.
But wait, there’s more… Forminator 1.29 also added another handy ‘slider’ form field feature, perfect for forms where selecting a range is required or beneficial – you can now add one in a few clicks!
So, we knew it was essential for us to provide an easy and streamlined way for you to create professional receipts/invoices for clients.
The new PDF receipt template does exactly this…
You can easily create professional PDF receipts that automatically and accurately output with form data and can be sent to clients after on-site form payment.
No more manual work or sending receipts via a third-party payments provider – now it’s all easy and automated for you.
Use a form with a Stripe or PayPal payments field.
Cool? Let’s continue!
After creating your on-site payment form, navigate to Edit Form > PDF, then click Create New PDF.
Creating a new PDF couldn’t be easier thanks to Forminator’s integrated addon.
…Give your PDF a name.
…Select the brand new Receipt PDF template.
Choose from a selection of unique templates, including the new Receipt option.
Next, enter the payee and payer data you want included on your receipts.
You will notice you can add dynamic data merge tags, which automatically pulls and outputs data from your forms.
For example, you can dynamically include form fields like Name, Email, or Phone Number, and these will automatically populate in your PDF receipt.
Easily add payee and payer info, including dynamic field population that automatically outputs in your final PDF.
After confirming the details, you’ll be taken back to the Edit PDF screen where you can also edit your PDF header, footer, and add any additional fields if needed.
On top of the default template settings, you can edit the header, footer, and add more fields.
Next, you can customize the appearance of your PDF and adjust page size and margin settings.
We’ll be adding more advanced customization options soon. In the meantime, you can manually adjust the appearance of your PDFs with the Custom CSS option.
Adjust the appearance of your PDF with some basic customization options.
When you’re happy with the appearance, layout, and info included, you can preview your receipt with one click.
Easily preview your PDF before you set it up for clients.
That’s it! Your PDF receipt template is now ready to be sent to your client via email.
To do this, just go to Edit Form > Email Notifications.
Here you can add and edit email notifications to be sent to admins or form users.
Simply create a new email notification and you’ll see you can add your newly created PDF as an attachment to your confirmation email.
Easily attach your newly created PDF receipt to a client email.
You can also edit more settings, such as the recipients and conditions of the email, depending on your particular form.
Try Forminator’s new free slider form field!
As mentioned earlier, another handy feature Forminator 1.29 introduced was a new slider form field.
This was another hotly requested addition and it’s available with the free version of Forminator, so anyone can use and benefit from it.
You can use the slider field for anything from mortgage or loan calculators and donation forms, to price filtering and product customization.
Adding a slider to a form is easy, just go to Edit Form > Fields > Insert Field, and select the Slider field.
Easily add a convenient slider functionality to forms that could benefit from it.
…Edit the type of slider you want to display, and label it.
Choose the type of slider you want to add and label it.
…With Settings you can also adjust the slider size, values, and advanced settings like default value, and suffix/prefix text.
Adjust the settings of your range slider to suit the unique needs of your form.
…You can also choose whether or not to enable calculations, and set your own visibility rules based on your form.
Choose whether or not to enable/disable calculations for your field.
Easy as that! Here’s an example of a simple rating slider in action:
Upgrade your forms with these new game-changing additions
We hope you enjoyed this overview of Forminator’s new PDF Receipt Template and Slider field features.
Forminator Pro also comes free with any paid WPMU DEV membership, along with a whole lot of other amazing WordPress tools, services, plugins, and 24/7 support from our expert team.
Or, if you’re looking for the lowest barrier of entry, trying the free version of Forminator is also a great option. Just note that the free version will not have the full functionality available with Pro (including the new PDF Receipt Template).
Want to know what’s coming next for Forminator? Check the WPMU DEV Roadmap, where we add regular progress updates.
Do you want to set up email notifications for the latest WordPress updates?
By default, WordPress only shows you update notifications when you log in to the admin area. Unless you enable automatic updates, you may not realize that your website needs updating.
In this article, we will show you how to set up email notifications for WordPress core, theme, and plugin updates.
Why Set Up Email Notifications for WordPress Updates?
Updating your WordPress core, plugins, and theme is like giving your site a protective shield. It fixes bugs and keeps everything running smoothly. Plus, the older your software, the less likely the developer support team will handle it, making it slower and riskier.
If you let WordPress do automatic updates, it will send you an auto-update email notification. But sometimes, you might want to take a peek at the release before hitting that update button in case it clashes with your WordPress site.
Unfortunately, WordPress doesn’t ping you about available updates via email. You will have to log in and check, which can be a hassle and means you might miss out on some updates.
The good news is there is an easy way to set up email notifications for WordPress updates. We will show you how to do it in this guide.
How to Set Up WordPress Update Email Notifications
The first thing you need to do is install and activate the WP Updates Notifier plugin. This plugin will send you a WordPress update email notification telling you which core, plugin, and theme updates are available, like this:
Note: Even though this plugin hasn’t been updated by the author for some time, it still continues to work and is the best available free option. You can read our article on using untested plugins for more information.
After that, simply head to the Settings » Updates Notifier page from your WordPress dashboard.
In the Settings section, you need to select how often you want the plugin to check for updates. The default is set for once every hour, but you can change that to once daily, twice daily, or once weekly.
Next, you can choose whether to get plugin and theme update emails. It’s also possible to receive notifications for active plugins and themes only, so your email inbox won’t get overwhelmed.
Below that, make sure to tick the checkbox that says ‘Notify automatic core updates to this address?’ This is to ensure you receive notifications in the admin email address used for your WordPress website.
This next setting is optional, but you can choose to hide core WordPress update notifications in the WordPress admin area from non-admin users. This may be useful if you want to prevent other users from acting on these notifications.
Scrolling down to the Email Notifications settings section, you can specify which email addresses to send the notifications to and from.
It’s possible to insert multiple addresses in the email field if you run the website with a team. Just make sure to separate the addresses with a comma.
If needed, you can also set up Slack Notifications, but we only recommend doing this if you have the skills and knowledge of the Slack API.
Once you are done, just click ‘Save settings.’ Alternatively, you can click ‘Save settings with test email’ to see what the notification email will look like.
And that’s it!
If you save the settings with a test email, you should receive the following message in your email inbox:
Bonus Tip: Use SMTP to Receive All Email Notifications From WordPress
One common issue our readers face is that WordPress emails often fail to deliver. Many times, they end up lost in the spam folder.
In our experience, the main reason for this problem is your WordPress hosting is not configured properly to use the PHP mail() function, which is responsible for sending emails.
If you are having trouble receiving emails from WordPress, then we recommend installing WP Mail SMTP. This plugin configures your WordPress site to send emails using SMTP instead of the PHP mail() function. This way, you will receive all the emails sent from WordPress.
What’s more, you can connect WP Mail SMTP with popular email services like Gmail, Microsoft 365, Amazon SES, and so on.
Do you want to email authors when their articles are published in WordPress?
If you run a multi-author blog, then notifying authors when their blog posts are published keeps them informed. Plus, it can also help increase engagement on your website since authors can quickly share their content and participate in discussions.
In this article, we will show you how to email authors when their articles are published in WordPress.
Why Email Authors When Their Articles Are Published in WordPress?
By notifying authors when their posts are published on your WordPress blog, you allow them to immediately promote their work on social media platforms and communicate with readers in the comments section.
Additionally, notifications keep authors updated about the publication statuses for different posts. This helps build trust among your team by showing that you value the writer’s contributions to your multi-author blog.
By alerting authors immediately upon post publication, you also give them the opportunity to view their content and correct any typos or errors before visitors have a chance to read it.
Having said that, let’s see how to easily email authors when their articles are published in WordPress. You can use the links below to jump to the method of your choice:
Upon activation, you need to visit the Planner » Settings page from the WordPress admin sidebar and switch to the ‘Notifications’ tab.
Once you are there, type in the admin email address that will be used to send emails to your authors next to the ‘Email from’ option.
After that, check the ‘Always notify the author of the content’ option to send emails to authors every time their posts are published on your website.
If you also want to notify the users who edited the post, then you can check the ‘Always notify users who have edited the content’ option.
Once you are done, click the ‘Save Changes’ button to store your changes.
Now, when you publish an author’s post, they will receive an email notification that looks like this:
Method 2: Email Author When Their Article Is Published in WordPress Using Code
If you don’t want to use a plugin, then you can also automatically send emails to authors by adding code to your theme’s functions.php file.
However, the smallest error when adding code can break your website and make it inaccessible.
That is why we recommend always using WPCode. It is the best WordPress code snippets plugin on the market that makes it super safe and easy to add custom code to your website.
First, you need to install and activate the WPCode plugin. For details, you can see our step-by-step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.
Note: You can also use WPCode’s free plan for this tutorial. However, upgrading to the pro version will give you access to more features like a code snippets library, conditional logic, CSS snippets, and more.
Upon activation, simply visit the Code Snippets » + Add Snippet page from the WordPress dashboard. Then, click the ‘Use Snippet’ button under the ‘Add Your Custom Code (New Snippet)’ option.
This will take you to the ‘Create Custom Snippet’ page, where you can start by adding a title for the code snippet.
After that, select the ‘PHP Snippet’ option from the Code Type dropdown menu on the right.
Now copy and paste the following custom code into the ‘Code Preview’ box:
function notifyauthor($post_id) {
$post = get_post($post_id);
$author = get_userdata($post->post_author);
$subject = "Post Published: ".$post->post_title."";
$message = "
Hi ".$author->display_name.",
Your post, \"".$post->post_title."\" has just been published.
View post: ".get_permalink( $post_id )."
Thanks"
;
wp_mail($author->user_email, $subject, $message);
}
add_action('publish_post', 'notifyauthor');
This code runs when a new post is published in WordPress. It sends an email notification to the author using the subject and message defined in the code. Feel free to change the subject and message fields to meet your needs.
Once you have done that, scroll down to the ‘Insertion’ section and choose the ‘Auto Insert’ mode. The code will be automatically executed on your website upon activation.
Finally, scroll back to the top and toggle the ‘Inactive’ switch to ‘Active’.
After that, click the ‘Save Snippet’ button to store your settings.
Now, when you publish a post, the author will automatically receive an email notification.
It will look like this:
Bonus: Use WP Mail SMTP to Send Your Emails
When you send emails to your authors about their published posts, you are using the default WordPress email settings, which are not always reliable.
This means that your email may not reach the author or might even end up in their spam folder.
To fix this issue, you can use WP Mail SMTP, which is the best WordPress SMTP plugin on the market. It uses the SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) method for mail transmission and eliminates your email delivery problems.
You can easily connect WP Mail SMTP with popular email marketing services and make sure that your emails reach the user’s inbox immediately.
With WP Mail SMTP, you can easily avoid the spam folder, track your email logs, use backup connections and failure alerts, and use premade templates to send emails to your users.
Your small business or online store relies on email. However, keeping up with marketing emails, transactional emails, email notifications, and engaging with users can become overwhelming. Automating these emails can save you time and effort while delivering you better results.
In this article, we’ll show you how to send automated emails in WordPress to streamline your workflow and grow your business.
For example, you can use email to welcome new users and let them know when new content or products are available. Email is also useful for marketing campaigns and updating your customers on the progress of their orders.
You can even use email to notify yourself when there is a new post waiting for you to review, or that a WordPress update needs to be installed.
Since email is used for so many tasks on your WordPress website, it only makes sense to save time and effort by automating as many emails as possible.
With that being said, let’s take a look at how to send automated emails in WordPress. Here are the topics we’ll cover in this tutorial:
Making Sure Your WordPress Email Is Being Sent Reliably
Before you start automating your emails, it’s important to make sure that emails from your website are being delivered reliably.
By default, most WordPress hosting companies do not have the mail function configured properly. To prevent their servers from abuse, many hosting companies even turn it off completely. In these cases, your WordPress emails will fail to reach users.
Luckily, you can fix this easily by using WP Mail SMTP. This plugin lets you send your WordPress email through a reliable SMTP platform which is configured specifically to send emails like SendLayer, Gmail, Outlook, etc.
The free version of WP Mail SMTP should be more than sufficient for most websites. For more details, see our guide on how to fix WordPress not sending email.
Sending Automated Drip Emails Using Constant Contact
A good place to start thinking about email automation is the way you market your store or business. And one of the best ways to automate marketing is with a drip campaign.
What Is an Automated Drip Campaign?
Automated drip campaigns are email messages that automatically guide your users along a specific journey. They’re great for boosting user engagement on your WordPress site.
For example, these messages can welcome new users, promote important content, upsell products, target specific geographic regions, and encourage users to register for events.
To send automated drip notifications by email, we recommend using Constant Contact because it’s the best email marketing service on the market. However, you can use any other major email marketing platform, including Sendinblue, HubSpot, and others.
To start, you can visit the Constant Contact website and create an account. The software gives you a 60-day free trial, so you can try it out before committing to a premium plan.
Once you sign up, you can visit the Constant Contact dashboard to create a contact list.
Constant Contact has already created a default list for you. However, you can create your own list by going to the ‘Contacts’ tab in the top menu, and then clicking the ‘Create List’ button.
A popup window will appear where you can enter a name for your list.
After that, simply click the ‘Save’ button.
You can add contacts to the list by going to the ‘Contacts’ tab and then clicking the ‘Add Contacts’ button.
A popup window will open with multiple options for adding new contacts.
Now you can add your contacts manually, upload them in a spreadsheet or CSV file, or import them from other apps.
Creating an Automated Drip Campaign
Once you’ve added your contacts, you need to create the drip campaign.
To do that, head over to the ‘Campaigns’ tab and then click the ‘Create’ button.
Next, Constant Contact will show you multiple options for creating a campaign.
Go ahead and select the ‘Email Automation’ campaign.
From here, you can select single-step automations or multi-step automation.
Single-step automations send just a single email, such as a welcome email. Multi-step automations let you create a series of emails that are automatically sent to your subscribers so you can let them know about your products and services, send special offers, and more.
In this tutorial, you’ll create a multi-step automation for when new subscribers join your email list. Go ahead and select the ‘A contact joins a list’ option.
Next, you will have to enter a name for your campaign.
Make sure you click the ‘Save’ button.
Constant Contact will then ask you to choose what activity will trigger the email. For example, the drip series is automatically triggered when a user joins your email list, opens an email, clicks a link, or buys a product.
You can use the default ‘Contact joins a list’ option as the trigger type. Then you can choose the email list you created earlier. Go ahead and click the ‘Save’ button when you’re done.
Creating the Emails for Your Drip Campaign
Now you need to create the emails to send in your automated drip campaign. The first one you create will be sent automatically when the user signs up.
To begin, simply click the ‘Create New Email’ option.
Constant Contact will now show different email templates to choose from.
For this tutorial, we’ll use the ‘Agent Welcome’ template.
You can customize the email template using the drag-and-drop email builder.
You can choose multiple elements from the menu on your left and place them on the template.
You also need to add the email’s content by removing the placeholder text and adding your own. Once you’ve done this, simply click the ‘Continue’ button at the top right of the editor and the email will be added to the drip series.
Next, you can add a second email by clicking the ‘+ Add to series’ button and then the ‘Create New Email’ button.
You’ll need to select a template and customize the new email as you did earlier. You can set the delay before the drip campaign sends its next email.
By default, this value is set to 4 days. You can change this by clicking the ‘Edit’ button in front of the section titled ‘Wait 4 days.’
This will open the ‘Time Delay Editor’ where you can choose when the next email in the drip campaign will be delivered. You can click the ‘Confirm’ button when you’re done.
Now, you should see all your emails in the campaign summary area.
Go ahead and click the ‘Activate’ button in the upper-right corner to launch your campaign.
Constant Contact will then show a prompt to verify whether you wish to activate your campaign.
Simply click the ‘Continue’ button, and the tool will check if everything is working properly and activate your campaign.
You’ve now successfully launched your automated drip email campaign.
Sending Automated Transactional Emails With FunnelKit Automations
If you are running a WooCommerce store, then your customers will receive different transactional emails. These help them get order confirmations, track their order status, get invoices, and find more information about your online store.
You can customize and automate these emails using FunnelKit Automations, a popular WooCommerce plugin for marketing automation. It is a sister product to FunnelKit (formerly WooFunnels), a powerful sales funnel builder for WooCommerce.
Creating Email Automation Workflows With FunnelKit Automations
Upon activation, you need to go to Campaigns » Automations (Next-Gen) to add a new automation from your FunnelKit Automations dashboard. Here you will see a library of email types that make it simple to create new automations.
You can import an email automation workflow with a single click, then use the visual email automation builder to make any customizations that you need.
Automating Marketing Emails Using Uncanny Automator
Of course, you’ll also still need to send marketing emails outside of your drip campaign. These are most effective when they are personalized and timely.
For example, you can use automated emails to showcase products similar to what your customer has already bought. Or you can automatically send users an email as soon as you publish a new article on your website.
The free version easily connects with popular email marketing services such as Mailchimp, HubSpot, and others, making it easy to automate your email.
For this tutorial, we’ll use the free version of Mailchimp because it’s popular and they offer a free forever plan where you can send up to 10,000 emails per month to 2000 subscribers.
Upon activation, head over to the Automator » Add New page to create your first recipe. In this tutorial, we’ll send an automated email to subscribers whenever we publish a new post.
You’ll be asked to select which type of recipe you want to create. You should choose ‘Logged-in users’ and then click the ‘Confirm’ button.
Setting Up the Automation Trigger
Next, you need to choose whether the automation will be triggered by Uncanny Automator or WordPress.
Since you will be sending an automated email when a new WordPress post is published, you should click on the ‘WordPress’ option.
Now you can choose from a long list of available WordPress triggers.
You need to select the trigger labeled ‘A user publishes a type of post with a taxonomy term in a taxonomy.’
You can use the search feature to find this trigger more quickly.
If you like, you can get specific about the types of posts that will trigger the email. You can choose a post type and a specific category or tag from the drop-down menus.
For this tutorial, we’ll go with the default settings.
Make sure you click the ‘Save’ button when you have finished setting up the trigger.
Setting Up the Automation Trigger
Next comes the action part, where you choose what action will be triggered. To get started, simply click the ‘Add action’ button.
Now you will be shown a long list of integrations that are available for the action.
You should click the Mailchimp icon to connect it to your website.
This will bring up a popup where you need to follow the on-screen instructions to finish the connection by logging into your Mailchimp account or creating a new one. Once connected, you will be able to choose what action you want to perform on your Mailchimp account.
You should then choose the option ‘Create a send a campaign’.
Now you need to type a name for the campaign. You might like to use tokens so that the Mailchimp campaign name for each new post is different.
For example, you can click the ‘*’ button to the right of the field and select the ‘Post title’ token.
After that, you can use the drop-down menus to choose your audience and segment and fill in the subject and other details of your email.
You can compose your email in the ‘Email contents’ field. Make sure you use tokens so that the content is updated for each email campaign.
For instance, you can include tokens for the post title, post author display name, post excerpt, post URL, and featured image URL.
Once you are finished, you can switch the recipe from ‘Draft’ to ‘Live.’
From now on, when you publish a new article on your website, Mailchimp will automatically send an email to your subscribers.
You might also like to see our guide on how to automatically send a coupon to users who leave reviews in WooCommerce. It’s another good example of how you create automated emails using Uncanny Automator to build customer loyalty.
Bonus: Sending Automated Notification Emails
Now that you have set up automated emails for your users, you can do the same for yourself and your team.
For example, you can create automated email notifications to keep track of issues that require your immediate attention, such as when an author submits a post for you to review.
You can also stop the WordPress notifications you don’t need from filling up your inbox, such as comment notifications.
Collecting leads has never been as much fun! Thanks to our free 5-star plugin, Forminator, you can now create engaging quizzes and capture emails simultaneously.
Plus, you can easily manage your leads, integrate the emails with a 3rd party app (like Mailchimp, Aweber, etc.), automatically run submission reports, and more!
Quizzes are highly engaging, can offer personalized feedback, are interactive, and entertaining. Combine all of these elements with Forminator –the best form builder for WordPress– and you have a powerful and creative way to generate leads in just a few simple steps.
You’ll have your lead generating quiz up quickly and added to your WordPress site in no time.
So…
I think that’s the best answer, too.
1. Set Up a Quiz in Forminator to Gather Leads
It takes only a switch of a button to get the lead generator feature on your next quiz.
From the Forminator dashboard, simply click Create, name the quiz, and pick whether you want to create a knowledge or personality quiz. When you hit Continue, activate the option for collecting email leads in one-click.
One-click and your quiz is primed for collecting leads.
It’s that simple! There’s nothing more to get your lead generating quiz started.
From here, you’re ready to…
2. Customize the Default Lead Generation Form to Your Specifications
When it comes to adjusting your quiz, you’ll see all of the available options in the Edit section of the dashboard.
When you’re in this section, the Lead Generation Form area is where you can customize the default lead generation form. To edit, just click on the pencil in the container that shows the quiz’s name, and it will open up in a new tab.
This example is named ‘Test Quiz.’
When you open the new tab, you’ll find the default fields are already in place. These include:
HTML
Email Address
First Name
GDPR
These fields are an excellent start for creating a quiz with lead generation.
Add as many fields as you feel are necessary by clicking Insert Fields. Also, adjust the default ones by clicking on each area’s gear icon.
With Forminator’s drag-and-drop functionality, you can arrange the fields any way you want. Also, delete any fields with one-click.
When it comes to editing the rest of the form, you’ll notice that Email Notifications and Integrations are locked. That’s because these are shared settings between the quiz and form modules. They’re configured back in the quiz editor (which we’ll get to in a moment).
You can’t access Email Notifications or Integrations from here.
Everything else is accessible and editable.
In the Appearance section, you can pick the form container’s design style, change colors of separate areas, use custom fonts, create an optional border, adjust the spacing, and even add custom CSS.
Blue? Bold? Want a new font? You can do it all from here.
Choose what you want to happen after a form is successfully submitted in the Submission Behavior section.
In terms of validation, you decide if you want validation checks when the user submits the form using Ajax (which is recommended). The live method will inspect fields at the same time as the user fills them out.
Plus, you can enable inline validation with one-click.
Also, the Submission Indicator can be activated to show a loader on your form until it’s submitted.
Choose your validation method and whether you’d like a submission indicator to be displayed.
You can enable autofill, boost security by enabling Honeypot protection & enabling logged in submissions only, and set the life span of the form for submissions.
We’ll add some added protection to this quiz with Honeypot.
In the Settings area, it’s possible to disable the store submissions in your database.
Also, determine how long you want to retain the form’s submission form by the number of days, customize how you’d like to handle erasure requests, and, if your form contains files, decide if the file gets deleted with deleted submissions.
Customize exactly how long you want to retain your form’s submission and more.
The global privacy settings can also be accessed from here, where you can adjust however you’d like.
When clicking the global privacy settings, it opens up in a new tab, and you can adjust.
You’ll also notice that the status is Published. That’s because when created, it’s automatically connected to the quiz module.
The status tells you it’s published.
Since it’s published, all you need to do is save any changes by clicking on Update.
Clicking update will save all of your changes.
You can adjust the settings at any time if you ever need to make changes.
3. Adjust the Quiz Module Editor
Now that we have the default lead generation form set up, you can hop back over to the tab that has the quiz editor, and you’ll be able to adjust additional settings.
In the Leads section, you’ll notice that you now have Form Placement and Skip Form options.
You now have two more areas to adjust since editing the default lead generation form.
Form Placement is where you want to embed the lead generation form. You can choose between the beginning of the quiz or before showing the results.
If you want to give users the option to skip the form, you can enable the Skip Form feature.
Enter a customized message when you enable the Skip Form feature.
You can configure the Appearance and Behavior of the quiz, too. For help with this, please refer to our documentation on Appearance and Behavior.
4. Setting Up Email Notifications and Integrations
We can now get back into the Email Notifications and Integrations area since we set up the lead generation default. They were locked, but are now accessible. This is where we’ll set up email notifications every time a user opts into the quiz.
In the Email Notifications area, set up the Admin Notification and Participant’s Notification.
The admin’s email is also displayed here.
In terms of setting up, both of these fields function the same.
You can edit the message to the admin & participants that will go out after opting in, edit what emails the message goes out to, create advanced customizations with the email (e.g. CC & BCC), and add conditions.
Customize email notifications the way you want them.
Plus, in our new form data dropdown list, you can add quiz and form data in the body of your emails.
Add any specific piece of data in the emails that you’d like.
If you have any 3rd party apps integrated with Forminator, you can connect them in the Integrations area. Just click on the plus sign, and that particular app will walk you through on how to connect.
Easily sync your quiz up with MailChimp, Zapier, and more!
Once connected, you can start collecting the quiz’s data with any supported integrated app.
5. Implement Quizzes on Your WordPress Site
Once you have your quiz set up the way you’d like, hit Publish. Then, Forminator will give you a shortcode that you can use on any post, page, or acceptable widget.
Forminator hands over the shortcode as quick as that.
Simply copy and paste the code, and that’s it. Your quiz is now ready to collect leads!
6. Easily Viewing Submissions
Viewing and monitoring submissions is quick and easy. The Quizzes dashboard gives you an immediate glimpse of activity.
You can see when the last submission was made, the number of submissions in the last 30 days, and easily access the submissions for a specific quiz.
You can create a new quiz, view submissions, and edit quizzes in Forminator’s dashboard.
To see submissions from a specific quiz, locate the name of the quiz, tap on the gear icon, and then View Submissions.
View submissions and much more from the gear icon.
Once you click View Submissions, Forminator brings up all the submissions to that particular quiz. It shows the submission date & time, email address, first name, and information from other fields you included.
The submissions are also numbered by the submission date.
By clicking on the dropdown on individual submissions, you can view detailed information, quiz results, and any details on 3rd party integrations.
All of the field information is displayed here and quiz results.
Want to download the data? That’s a click away.
Click on Export and you can download a CSV file. Plus, you can apply submission filters and schedule exports by specific times, making them automatically emailed directly to you.
Manually or schedule exporting the data.
Q: What’s the Best Lead Generating Quiz Maker Out There?
A: With a 5-star rating and many tens of thousands of active downloads, we have to side with our four-eyed friend as the best lead generating quiz maker because he makes it quick, easy, and free to do.
Plus, Forminator can create contact & registration forms, collect payments, make polls, perform calculations, and much more. He’s continuously updated, thanks to Forminator’s awesome team of developers and designers.
You lose 100% of the sales you don’t ask for, and the same holds true for having a clunky checkout experience. Order forms help you to collect order information and process payments efficiently, thereby increasing your conversion rates significantly.
Forminator makes it easier than ever to build an order form and accept payments on WordPress. Oh ya…and the best part is, it’s completely free! And that includes PayPal and Stripe payment gateways!
Whether you’re planning to sell merchandise, collect donations or get rooms booked, Forminator does them all without skipping a beat. His simple drag-and-drop interface means that you don’t need to know any coding whatsoever. It’s truly the one form maker plugin to rule them all!
**Long live Forminator!**
In this post, I’ll show you step-by-step how to use Forminator to build an order form from scratch and have set it up to collect payments effortlessly with Stripe and/or PayPal.
Introducing the Fantastic Forminator
Forminator is a powerhouse of a form plugin. He supports conditional logic, stores all the form entries in an easily accessible database, sends emails to both the user and the admin, and does it all without reloading the page.
He’s also GDPR compliant and works seamlessly with WordPress’ new Gutenberg block editor. If you can think of a form, Forminator can almost certainly get it done.
Let’s Build an Order Form
For this demo, we’ll build a simple order form, like the one below, to sell a custom notebook. We’ll make it so that the users can enter their personal information (such as name, address, email and phone number), and then at the very end, place an order by completing the payment.
Follow the steps below and/or enjoy the video we’ve put together to accompany this post:
Step 1: Install Forminator
To install Forminator, just go to your WordPress Dashboard, and under Plugins, choose Add New and search for Forminator. Click the Install Now button and Activate the plugin after installation.
If you’re a WPMU DEV Member, you can also install and activate Forminator Prodirectly from the WPMU DEV Dashboard. If you’re not a member yet, what are you waiting for? Try it free for 30 days!
Using the free WordPress.org version of Forminator is totally cool too. This tutorial works perfectly fine with either version.
Step 2: Access the Forminator Dashboard
Go to Forminator’s Dashboard. This will give you a quick overview of all your forms, quizzes, and polls.
You won’t see any data here now, but as you start creating forms and collecting user entries, the dashboard will start populating with views, submissions, conversion rates, and other interesting data.
Step 3: Let’s Create a Form
Go to Forminator > Forms and click either of the blue Create buttons to begin making your new form. You can also do the same directly from Forminator’s dashboard.
A popup will appear where you need to enter your new form’s name. Keep the form name unique and memorable so that you can recall it easily. Click the blue Create button after entering your form name.
By default, every form in Forminator comes with the following predefined fields: First Name, Email Address, Phone Number, and Message.
The default form fields can be edited or deleted, and with the option of adding many other fields, you have unlimited customization possibilities.
Note: The fields marked with a red asterisk (*) at the end are Required fields. The form won’t submit until the user fills them up.
Step 4: Adding the Order Form Fields
We’ll keep the First Name, Email Address and Phone Number fields, and delete the Message field which we don’t need for this form.
In the First Name field, click on the gear icon and select Duplicate. This is a faster way to insert multiple fields of the same type without accessing the Insert Fields menu repeatedly.
Rename the duplicated field as Last Name.
Drag the Last Name field to the same row as the First Name, to its right, so that they appear side by side in the form.
And just like that, you have a two-column row in your form.
All Forminator fields can be dragged and dropped into rows and columns, so you have maximum flexibility in designing your forms just the way you want them.
Next, click on the purple Insert Fields button. It should open a popup with all the field options you can add to the form. There’s also another Insert Fields link at the bottom of the form.
Select the Address option from the popup window, and click the Insert Fields button.
Once inserted, click on the Address row to open its field settings. In the Labels tab, you can activate or deactivate the different address subfields (they’re all enabled by default).
Underneath the Settings tab, mark all the address subfields as required since they’re essential to ship the product.
Finally, click on the gear icon of Message field and hit Delete.
You can retain the Message field if you want to give users an option to add a comment or preference.
Step 5: Adding the Stripe Payment Button and Integration
Click on the purple Insert Fields button and select the Stripe option.
Stripe enables you to supercharge your online sales with its hassle-free and secure payment gateway.
Note: You need an activated Stripe account to configure the Stripe field. Otherwise, it won’t let you edit it. If you need help to set it up, use Forminator’s documentation as a cheatsheet.
You can configure Stripe by going to Settings > Payments > Stripe under Forminator.
Once Stripe is configured, under the Stripe field settings, we need to set the payment amount. Since this is a single product with an all-inclusive price and no variations, we’ll select the Fixed payment option.
When user inputs affect the price (ex. different sized t-shirts or customization options), or if there is a calculation such as tax or shipping that will be added to the original price, the Variable option should be used instead.
Select Fixed in the Stripe field settings and enter the amount.
Also, note the Test and Live mode options mentioned on the top here. We’ll be using the Test mode for now.
Don’t forget to set your brand logo, company name and product description under the Checkout tab. It’s great to have a self-branded payment gateway popup.
The below image shows how the self-branded popup will look like. Cool, isn’t it?
Next, change the Submit button label from Send Message to Order Now.
Preview the form and ensure it’s working as you intend. You can edit the default placeholders in the form if they’re not to your liking.
The order form is good to go!
Step 6: Let’s Jazz It Up
Forminator lets you make basic style changes to the form easily. The Appearance section helps you set your form’s Design Style, Colors, Fonts, Padding, Borders, Spacing, etc.
Click on the Appearance button to move on to its settings.
You can choose your preferred style here. I like the look of the Flat style more than the Default one, however this choice is up to you. It also offers you a way to add Custom CSS for your form.
As for the Colors and Fonts, I prefer the theme defaults and will leave them as is. Save your form draft after making your changes.
Step 7: Form Submitted. Next What?
Forminator is like a cool and casual professor. He’s fun and intelligent, but he also makes sure that the forms behave properly.
In the Behavior settings, you can define how the form will behave after the user successfully submits the form, or in this case, places an order.
By default, the form will show an inline message that will close automatically within 5 seconds. Change the message here to better reflect an order form.
You also have the option of redirecting the user to a new page or hiding the form altogether.
If you’re collecting payments, it’s highly recommended that you have the “Require SSL certificate to submit this form” option checked. It’ll enable your form to collect payments securely.
The rest of the Behavior settings can be left as is.
Step 8: Email Me Please, and to the User Too
After finishing up with setting the Behavior, move to the Email Notifications settings.
By default, every form will send you (the admin) an email with details of all the form fields entered.
You can change it and/or add multiple recipients too. You also have the option of adding Cc and Bcc fields to the email.
It’s good practice to send an automatic order confirmation email to the user. This option can be enabled in the Email Notifications settings.
Make sure that the recipient here is set to Email Address, which is the label for the email address entered by a user in the form. For example, if a user enters username@gmail.com as their email address in the form, the order confirmation email will be sent to that address automatically.
Forminator also lets you set Integrations with various third-party apps, and change the overall form settings. For this order form, we won’t be adding any Integrations, and will stick to the default settings.
Step 9: Hit the Publish Button
Preview the form one last time before pressing the Publish button.
Hey, give yourself a pat on the back. You just created your first order form!
After hitting the Publish button, a popup will present you with the form’s shortcode. Copy and place this shortcode anywhere in your site to display it to users.
You can also copy the shortcode later from Forminator’s Dashboard.
Step 10: Add the Order Form to Your Sales Page
Create a sales page if you don’t have one yet. It should contain all the important product details such as name, image, description, price, etc.
If you’re using the Classic Editor plugin, you can copy and paste the shortcode to add the form to your post/page. For sites that are using the default Block Editor, adding a form is much simpler.
To place the order form at the bottom of your sales page, in your WordPress post/page editor, click the Plus icon and add a Form block.
Next, select your order form from here to add it to the page.
Publish or Update your sales page after you’ve added the order form to it.
Visitors to your website can now use this form to place an order. It’s that simple!
Important Note: The Stripe field in your order form is still set to Test mode. This is to help you make test payments and make sure that everything is working fine. Before accepting actual orders, you need to change it from Test to Live.
Once an order has been placed, you’ll be notified of it via mail. Forminator also stores all the form submissions in a database so that it’s easier for you to sort through them later.
To view all of a form’s submissions, visit Forminator > Forms in your dashboard. Click on the gear icon and select View Submissions.
You can click on any individual submission row to get its complete details. You can also push the Export button to download all the submissions as a .csv file.
Reach > Engage > Convert
Running an online business comes with a lot of challenges. Anything that helps you engage with your potential customers and get paid easier is a welcome addition, and that’s exactly what Forminator does.
What we’ve built here is the simplest of order forms that you can make with Forminator. With its support for conditional logic, it can do much more! You can set taxes, shipping rates, product variations, and then have the form calculate the final order amount automatically.
The Google Forms Notification add-on sends you an email notification when a new form submission is received. You can set up one or more email notification per form and they can be sent to different recipients based on form answers.
How to Setup an Email Notification
To get started, open the Google Form, click the add-ons icon, it looks like a puzzle icon, choose Email Notifications for Forms and then click Create Email Notification.
Here specify the email address where you wish to receive the notification, you can also email multiple people, choose whether to wish to send a confirmation email to the form respondent and create the rule.
How to Edit a Google Form Notification
Now that your rule is created, assume you need to change or add one more email address to the list of recipients. For this, we’ll have to amend the existing notification. Here are the steps:
Go to your Google Form (edit screen), choose the add-ons icons, choose Email Notification for Forms and then click Manage Form Settings.
Please note that you’ll only see this option for Google Forms that have at least one notification rule associated with them.
Next, you’ll see a dropdown will all your form rule. Select the one you’d like to change and then click the Edit Rule button.
You can use the same screen make a duplicate rule or edit the date and time settings of the form.
The Reply-To email address is the address where the emails go when someone replies to your email notification generated by the Google Forms addon.
By default, the reply to address is set the email address of the form owner so all replies to form notifications emails are sent to them. You can, however, use any other email address in the reply to field.
How to Set Reply To Email in Google Forms
Go to the Google Forms, choose Add-ons and then Email Notifications. You can either create a new email notification rule or edit an existing notification.
In the notifications editor, type the email address in the reply to field where you would like the replies to go. You should include only a single email address and it must be a valid email.
Send Replies to Form Respondent
Change the reply to address to go to the form submitter’s email
It is also possible to have the form submitter’s email address in the reply to field. This is useful because you can respond to the form submitter by simply replying to the notification email without having to manually change the email in the To: box.
To edit the reply-to email address and set it to the respondent’s email address, edit the notification and put the {{Email Question}} in the reply to field. For instance, if your form question is “Your email”, you should put {{Your email}} in the reply-to field and.
The template variable in double curly braces will be replaced with the actual email address filled by the user when they were submitting the form. Please note that you can only have a single email address in the Reply-To field.
Google Forms support both the date and time fields. The time component and year component can be added/hidden inside the date field based on requirements.
The date and time fields in email notifications can be reformatted so that they are confirmed to your locale/region and are easy to understand. For instance, you could US users may prefer mm/dd/yyyy format while Europe (UK) users may prefer dd/mm/yyyy format.
Reformat Date & Time in Google Forms
To reformat date and times in Google Forms, go to the add-ons menu, choose Email Notifications for Google Forms > Manage Form Settings. Here choose “Edit Format” under “Reformat Date & Time” section.
You can now change the default timezone of your Google Form and also specify the exact date and time format that should be used for outputting date and time type questions in email notifications.
Google Forms use the Oracle date and time patters for formatting and parsing dates. Here are some sample formats and the corresponding outut.
Date Format
Sample Output
yyyy-MM-d hh:mm a
2016-11-28 06:30 PM
yyyy-MMM-d HH:mm:ss
2016-Nov-28 18:30:22
EEE, d MMM yyyy
Wed, 4 Jul 2016
yyyy/MM/dd HH:mm:ss
2016/11/29 12:08:56
“M” represents the month in year. If you say “MM”, it is interpreted as the month number while “MMM” will display the month’s short name. You can say “MMMM” to output the full name of the month.
Similarly, “E” is day name of the week while “a” is the AM / PM marker. You can check the date time formats documentation.
