In a recent blog post, Guy references a recent article he wrote for OPEN Forum, an American Express resource for “savvy business owners.” The article titled “The Art of Customer Surveys” is mostly a summary of  thoughts from Guy’s friend Dave Wanetick (managing director of IncreMental Advantage) about customer surveys.

Here is the post on the American Express website.  A very quick read where you’ll pick up some thoughts on gaining customer feedback through the use of surveys.

I was excited to see their “masterful” use of FormSpring. For starters, the form is implemented using FormSpring’s javascript embed option. This makes the form seamlessly fit into the existing web page and makes it unapparent (to even the trained eye) that the website is using a third party application (FormSpring) for their online forms. This is great to keep the branding of your site and forms consistent, and prevents confusion for your users.

Next, they are using promo codes to offer variable pricing to registrants. For example, last year’s attendees get a special price (we’ll call it the alumni discount) while other promotional channels offer different promo codes with a different price.  Great way to motivate return visits and immediate action.

Lastly, the payment integration was simple and easy to follow. My information was passed through to PayPal so that I didn’t need to re-enter my personal info.  Simply had to drop in my credit card info and submit.

I’ve been looking forward to the conference to hear what some of Indy’s most interesting technology entrepreneurs have to say about all things online. Now I’m even more anxious to give someone a big hug for making their online forms looks so beautiful!

You can learn more about the conference at the MBO Website.

One of the benefits of having a robust and thriving technology sector in Indianapolis is the draw that community has of other like-minded individuals for special events and conferences. ExactTarget is preparing for their annual user conference (called Connections ‘08) and FormSpring will be in attendance.

After all, an easy-to-use form builder like FormSpring and a world-class email infrastructure like ExactTarget go together like peanut butter and jelly. So next week we are off to learn more from one of the best in the business and to explore way marketers can make or surveys, registration forms, order forms, contact forms and other online forms can work better within the ExactTarget environment. And since FormSpring was built from the ground-up with a rich API, we think  the two should go well together.

Lastly, to any FormSpring customers planning to attend; let us know — we’d love to meet you face-to-face!

From their blog post:

The contact form is typically the gateway to allow people to submit their information to a company.  This is the gateway for the consumer to initiate a conversion with your company. You need to keep your contact form simple.

We couldn’t agree more. That is why you can create a simple form in seconds using our drag and drop form builder.  And while the form is the first step, one of the advantages of FormSpring is the ability to collect and quickly manage all that data you receive.

So, what are you waiting for? Check out our demo or create an account and see how you can start using contact forms as a lead generation source!

Our final Gas Card giveaway has wrapped up and we are proud to announce the winners! Tina Henderson guessed $3.63, which was the correct price of of gas on September 8th.

We also had a viral component which allowed entrants to forward a link to up to 10 friends to be entered into a second drawing for another $150 card. Angela Felts was the lucky winner of that drawing.

Thanks to everyone who entered. If you are interested in receiving emails regarding upcoming promotions and contests, contact us and we will add you to our mailing list, don’t worry, we never spam!

A contact form on your business website serves as many things. Yes it is to capture information and to handle problems, but many organizations use the “Contact Us” form as a way to filter requests and make sure that the proper person is handling that request. Using the Smart Routing for notification emails we can now make this process very simple.

To illustrate this point we create a simple contact form with a name, email and company/organization fields. We also add a Contact drop down field with three options; Sales, Support, and Marketing.

After we have our form set up you can go to the form settings, click on the Emails & Redirects tab, and select the Notification Emails. This is where you enter the email addresses of people you want to receive email notification once a form is submitted.

Before smart routing everyone on a multiple-department form received every submission. Now, by choosing “Use Smart Routing” at the bottom you can use conditional logic to choose who gets which submissions.

In this instance we set up an email for JohnQSales, when contact is Sales.

You will need to set up Smart Routing for each different email notification, so in this example we would have three seperate notification emails, going to three different individuals, all based on user submissions.

By using the smart routing feature with the notification emails you can quickly direct form submissions to the proper individuals ensuring that your customers recieve the attention they need and expect.

There is an online contest going around called the Hot Blogger Calendar and one of the FormSpring crew had the honor of being nominated.  Instead of just letting this slip by as the silliness that it is, we decided to try to do something good with it.  FormSpring is one of four companies that is sponsoring Chris’s drive to become a “hot blogger” and is donating Ten Cents for every vote to Jane Doe Inc, through the Social Media for Social Change initiative.

Check out Chris’s personal blog and vote for Hockeyskates (his twitter profile) and help raise money for a great cause!

That is why we are excited to announce our new Smart Routing technology. Smart Routing uses conditional logic to help you customize the way that you handle and process your forms, giving you even greater control once a user has submitted your form. Smart Routing works with Notification Emails, Confirmation Emails, URL Redirects, and PayPal processing. You can find Smart Routing settings in the “Email & Redirects” tab for each form.

Notification Emails

Setting up Smart Routing with your Notification emails you can quickly route forms to different people in your organization. Before this was available, if you had a contact form that had multiple departments within your organization (Sales, Marketing, Support, etc.) and you wanted people within those departments to receive the submissions there was no way for them to just get only the submissions that related to them.

Now using the Smart Routing you can direct submissions based on the user’s responses. i.e. if a user selects “Sales” on your contact form, only the email you set up to receive sales submissions will receive those queries.

Confirmation Emails

Smart Routing for Confirmation Emails is perfect for order forms, event registrations and other forms where you want to customize your message based on how the user responded. For instance if you wanted set up an order form for vacation packages and you had three different packages. In the confirmation email you can send different messages depending on what type of vacation package the user chooses.

Submit Actions

Smart Routing can be used in very powerful ways to redirect users after they have submitted their form. You can use Smart Routing to show different custom messages, similar to the Confirmation Emails, or you can use it to redirect to an external URL or to PayPal. Redirecting to an external URL or to PayPal is perfect if you have set up a form to process orders. You can now set up a field that has Payment Type and have multiple payment types (PayPal, Credit Card, Check) and redirect users accordingly.

Using Smart Routing will give you much more control on you manage your forms and how you interact with your customers, and website visitors.

Have interesting ways in which you are going to use this feature? Leave a comment or contact us to see how you can be part of our user profile series!

Form Deactivation Based on Date/Time:

One of the greatest advantages in running any time sensitive contest or promotion is the ability to control how long a form can be viewed. With our deactivation feature, you can now set a form to expire on a certain time and date. Before, the only way to do this was to manually deactivate the form within your form’s admin area. You can find the deactivation feature within your forms admin area in the “General Tab. At the bottom you will see a drop down menu “Disable this form” select “On Date” and you can fill out the date and time information.

Form Deactivation Based on Number of Submissions:

Just as you can now deactivate a form based on a time or date, you can also limit a form based on the number of submissions. This might be great for contests, promotions, events with limited seating, and so on.  Setting this feature up is similar to the deactivation based on date and time.  To do so, select the option “Disable this form after number of submissions”

CAPTCHA Support:

FormSpring forms have always had technology in place to help prevent spam to your forms. However, to give you some peace of mind we are now providing CAPTCHA support for all of our paid accounts. By enabling CAPTCHA you will be able to add another layer of protection to your forms and help thwart would-be spammers. You can enable CAPTCHA at the bottom of the form builder (1) when creating a form.

UI Changes

You will notice one big change in the form builder itself. The form building tools on the left hand side now scrolls (2). This is great for long forms. Before you would have to scroll up and down the page to add additional fields. This feature allows you to complete the form building process with greater ease.

Another subtle yet useful change is a new feature for multiple page forms. You can now add a progress bar for multiple pages (3). This is useful on longer forms to show your users where they are in the process of filling out the form.

You will also notice that we have moved the Rearrange and Layout controls to the bottom of the form builder (4). This cleans up the side bar and gives you all of your layout options and additional form tools (CAPTCHA and Progress Bar) in one area.

Have feedback on the new changes? Leave a comment below or discuss in our Forums!

We are proud to announce that the winner of the Gas Giveaway is…Paul Seitzinger. Paul accurately guessed the price of gas to be $3.78. We will be sending Paul a $150 Speedway gas card this week!

If you didn’t win don’t fret! Because of the overwhelming success of the first contest, and because we want to give someone else the chance to win free gas, we have created a second contest! That’s right, we are holding a second contest with another $150 Gas Card. The rules are the same. Go to www.FormSpring.com/freegas and guess what the price of gas will be on September 8th. The contest starts today, August 4th and guessing will close Midnight, September 1.

Also, Make sure to look for the ways to increase you chance of winning after you submit your entry!

Congratulations to Paul and best of luck to the rest!