I’m looking to replace a contact form on my website with a Mautic form.
Assuming when a lead first visits my site, all I will know is the IP address.
They fill out the contact form and it identifies the lead with name and email in Mautic. That’s easy.
The confusing part is the contact form message?
I can set the form to send me a predefined email using lead fields. I don’t really want to make the message a field on the lead. Mainly, because it would get overwritten with subsequent contact form submits.
Am I trying to make Mautic do too much? Should I be using the same form as the website currently uses and simply updating lead fields via some sort of API?
I’m looking to replace a contact form on my website with a Mautic form.
Assuming when a lead first visits my site, all I will know is the IP address.
They fill out the contact form and it identifies the lead with name and email in Mautic. That’s easy.
The confusing part is the contact form message?
I can set the form to send me a predefined email using lead fields. I don’t really want to make the message a field on the lead. Mainly, because it would get overwritten with subsequent contact form submits.
Am I trying to make Mautic do too much? Should I be using the same form as the website currently uses and simply updating lead fields via some sort of API?
It’s a good question. I’m thinking out loud here - what do you think about making a form field somehow a “note” field? I’m not sure exactly what the code would look like or more importantly the “UI flow” but in theory it sounds like it would be a good solution. You may want to keep those messages but I understand not on the lead profile directly. The notes section of a lead may be the perfect fit. Does this sound like a good solution?
Thanks for joining in the Mautic community! We are excited to have you here 
David
That’s kind of what I was thinking I would have to do. The thing is I have three forms that are basically the same form. Maybe I can create fields for last_contact, last_prayerrequest, last_story. Then at least it will be clear that only the last one is preserved on the lead.
Not an ideal solution but a workable solution.
I’m excited to be a part of the Mautic community. I went to Connections 2014 and everyone was talking about Marketing Automation. Everyone was talking about taking all the forms on a website and merging that information on one lead. I tried the Salesforce Marketing Cloud and it was terrible. I couldn’t figure out how to do the most basic thing like create a form for email address to sign up for newsletter. Mautic is leaps and bounds above that. Open source is awesome too because I feel like I can give back some. That also makes the price point perfect for my small non-profit.
I got the source code from github and put it on my server. I’m not sure if that is different than your beta download. Maybe that makes a difference.
Forgive me if I’m just being an idiot here but I’m having a hard time grasping the problem.
Maybe if you tell me what the ideal scenario would be, then we can try and figure out the best option and/or get it on our roadmap to optimize. Or if I’m just being an idiot and not understanding what is clearly stated, try rewording it for me
Thanks!
Alan
Re-describe problem:
It’s not really a problem so much as a use case. The goal is to have everything a user does tied to the Mautic lead. I think that’s the point of marketing automation software. One thing a user might do is fill out a contact form. My contact form is very basic: name, email, and message.
Currently the site is set up so that there is a special page in the WordPress theme that acts as the contact form. It validates the inputs, displays a confirmation message, and sends and email to the admin when form is submitted. I’d like to replace that contact form with a contact form in Mautic. The theory is, the more that flows through Mautic, the more I know about a lead.
To make the contact from do the same thing that it is currently and also flow through Mautic, I set up a form, email, and field for the message on the lead. (I’m under the impression that emails can only send fields from a lead. Let me know if this is not true.) I set up the form to have an two actions: first update the lead and second send email to admin with details of the form.
I should also say that I’m a developer and wanna be marketer. I probably use a lot of the wrong terminology. If you see that, set me straight so I’ll know better in the future.
New issues:
Incidentally, it seems to be sending an email to the lead and the admin. The email to the lead seems to be populating the lead fields in the email template. However, the email to the admin is only showing a raw template. Please see if you can reproduce this. I did check that the form only has action to send email to admin.
Email templates:
The email templating language doesn’t seem to be documented anywhere. I discovered that I can use lead fields as {leadfield=firstname}. I discovered this by adding one in the email builder. Are there other ways I can use this template? Can I add fields from the form more simply than using a lead field? Are there any other variables I can use?
I think I understand now. Hey, I’m in the same boat (being a developer and marketer wanna be).
Yes, you’re right that emails can only send lead fields. We do need to incorporate some way of including values from the form submission. I can think of two ways to do that.
- Build the form first, then build the email. In the email builder, there will be a new section where you can select a form which will populate the draggable form field tokens. After saving the form, come back and assign the email to the form submit action.
- I can add a generic “form field” token to the email builder. Drag the form field token, a modal opens where you enter the alias of the desired form field, and then the {formfield=alias} token is inserted. The benefit to this is that you don’t have to build the form first, just have to plan ahead on what the fields will be aliased. Also, you can use the same email across forms as long as they have fields with the same alias.
What are your thoughts on those options?
You’re right. Looks like the admin email doesn’t populate the details with the leads info. I’ll get that fixed.
One of my top priorities for next week is to work on documentation. But pretty much what you see in the builder is what you get as far as tokens.
Thanks!
Alan