 Alright, I've been told it's 315 and this is a lightning talk, so let's get started right on time. My name is Sarah Dunn. I am the founder of ElevenWeb, which is a digital agency in Battle Creek, Michigan. And we make WordPress websites for clients. And when I heard that this WordCamp Grand Rapids was all about plugins and tools, my mind immediately went to Forms Plugins. Forms Plugins are a super basic type of plugin that almost every WordPress website uses. And so what I wanted to talk about today, and I developed with my co-worker, is a super short talk all about ways to take forms to the next level. So today we're going to talk about three ways to make your forms more awesome. We are going to go beyond the standard contact form. And if you're wondering at all what I'm talking about by a contact form, here is a super simple example of a form that just asks for a name, email, phone, and message. But did you know that forms can be used to do a lot more than that? So in the next 10 minutes, here are a few things we're going to talk about, showing only fields to your submitter if they actually need to fill them in, sending emails to different people automatically based on what the submitter enters, and adding a little sparkle and wow to your forms after the user presses submit. All right, the first thing we're going to talk about, have you ever gone to a website and seen a form that was so long you had no desire to fill it out? Something goes on and on and on. Well, at 11Web, we had this problem when a client asked us to create an employment form on their website. So they had this great paper application. They said, we really want people to be able to apply for this job online. Can you recreate this paper application into a web form? And we said, yeah, absolutely. So we took four pieces of paper and turned it into a web form that had tons of fields. And as soon as we saw what the user would see, we realized we had a problem. This form was way too long. And actually, a lot of the fields didn't even apply to everyone who would be filling it out. So we started to explore conditional logic. There's a little example for you. Let's talk about it. Conditional logic allows you to streamline your forms. And this is a feature that's available on a lot of different forms plugins. My examples today are from Gravity Forms, but other forms plugins will also offer these types of features. In conditional logic, we don't show them what they don't need. And that means we allow fields to appear based on answers to other questions. So for example, what is a little blurry on your screen asks the question, did you attend college? And only if the user clicks yes, does it ask them to list their college or university details. If the user didn't attend college, this field isn't useful and doesn't need to be shown. So one way to make your forms more awesome is to use conditional logic to clean them up, make them shorter, and make them a little bit more approachable to use. If you're a little curious about this, I want you to know at the very end of this presentation, I will be showing you where you can get slides as well as a full blog post with a little bit more in-depth how to's and what to do and how to actually create this using Gravity Forms or other plugins. Let's talk about a couple other uses for conditional logic. Say you want clarification on feedback. You ask someone a yes or no question if they were satisfied. If they said no, you might want to ask them why. So if they answer no, you can drop down an extra field asking for explanation. You might choose to ask someone for their credit card details only if they indicate that they want to pay by credit card. And you might ask for an address only if they indicate that they want a receipt. So this is really helping your user and making sure you're only showing them what they really need to see. All right, let's talk about way number two to make your web forms more awesome. And this is to send your emails to the right people automatically. So most companies, when they want people to inquire with them, they have one general email address. So imagine info at companyname.com. What's required when you have an email address like this is that someone on the other end of that inbox actually has to look through every single email and then route that email to the correct person who might actually be able to handle it. Instead of having that person in the middle, you can actually use your forms to send to the right person automatically using conditional routing. So we came up on this when a client of ours who's a concrete company has multiple departments. They sell a lot of different products and services. And we said to them, would you like it to be a little bit easier to get your email inquiries to the right person? So we developed a simple field on their contact form, which is shown here, that says reason for inquiry. And there are several things they can choose from. But imagine if they choose concrete, this form can send directly to Jim. And Jim is the head of the concrete division and he's able to get back to that person much faster than if there was someone in the middle who actually had to go through their inbox, read the email, say Jim is the person that needs to handle this and then forward it to him. So in this way of making your form more awesome, you are helping the email to get where it needs to go without needing an extra step in the middle. Personally, I think that's kind of awesome. This is a little example of how it's set up in the back end and this is clear in the blog post that I'll give you. But it basically says send to this person if the reason for inquiry field is general, or if it is aggregates or concrete, etc. So it's actually not too hard to set up once you understand which field this is based on and then can go through it and look at what you need to look at to send this through. A couple other examples of how you might use conditional routing of your form email notifications to send to someone more urgently. So if you wanted to, you could let someone indicate how urgent their request is. And if they indicate it's an emergency or highly urgent, you can send it to someone who is more likely to be in their inbox all the time and can handle that quickly. You can also send to the right salesperson based on a location dropdown. So say this is a sales inquiry and the submitter indicates they're in the state of Michigan. You can immediately send that email to Suzanne who is the sales director for the state of Michigan. So it's going to the right person instantly rather than having to be routed manually. All right, our third way to make your forms more awesome is to improve the experience after the form is sent. So I think we've all filled in a form and you put in your information and you press submit. And there's a default message that just says, thanks for contacting us. We'll get back to you soon, which is fine. You can have that. But if you really want to take your forms to the next level, what you can do instead of the default confirmation message is redirect that submitter to a custom thank you page. And on that page, you can put anything you want that could add value for that person that just submitted. Here's some examples. What you see as a screenshot on the left is for the Skull Island Resort. And one of their goals is to drive more people to their email list. So after someone inquires for pricing, they see this message that says, check your inbox for personalized pricing. Until then, if you're interested in learning more, check out our newsletter. And then they have an opt-in box there that someone can use to opt in for the newsletter. So you're capturing them and interacting with them more. Some other things you could include on a thank you page are a brief explanation of how you will follow up with the submitter. That's great for setting expectations so someone knows what happens next. That's going to leave them with a better impression of you and your website. You might give them instructions if you need them to do something next in the process of contacting you. So should they read something before an initial sales call, something like that, you can put that information on the thank you page. You can also list your social media accounts, so same verbiage. In the meantime, check us out on Facebook and Twitter, or maybe link to your most popular and most recent blog posts, because then the person gets to know you a little better. They then get a little bit more of that know, like, and trust before you even get back to them. So there's a ton of value to making your form more awesome by improving the experience after someone presses submit with a custom thank you page. That is it. Super brief talk today all about forms and ways to make them more awesome. And it's just a brief overview. So if you do want a little bit more help and a little bit more in-depth information, I have slides and the blog post linked at 11web.com slash WCGR18. Thanks a lot.