Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Steve Dotto here. Thanks for joining us today. Our topic du jour is forms. There are a wide
variety of different types of forms that we can use in the online world to gather information,
everything from order forms to opinion forms to registration forms. There are lots of different
ways that we want to use forms and as many different ways as there are and as many different
types of forms as there are, there are that many different ways for us to create and manage
forms. There’s a variety of different tools. So I’m going to take a look today at one
tool that I’ve been using for about three years.
It’s called EmailMeForm and it’s a small software as a service tool that’s online
that allows me to create a forms that are ideal for either embedding in websites or
for reaching out to people through email. But you don’t necessarily have to purchase
software in order to have the access to online forms gathering information. If you have a
Google account, with one of the real hidden kind of secret gems within Google with Google
Drive is this ability to create forms for free. Now it’s not quite as fancy a tool
as the commercial products that we’re going to look at a little bit later. It doesn’t
have quite as many bells and whistles but it does a great job of creating simple registration
forms. Actually, I’ve done a video on it which I will link to here. So if you’re
interested in kind of dipping your toe in the water, using and seeing what’s available
for free, Google Forms is a great place to start. But if you need a little bit more,
then you’re going to want to be taking a look at one of the other tools. There are
tools like SurveyGizmo and there’s this Wufoo which is probably the most popular of
the forms tools. It’s the one that I started with. It’s not the one that I actually ended
up purchasing myself and using. I chose a tool called EmailMeForm. Why did
I choose that over the others? It really came down to price. It was a little bit less expensive
for the same features. So I started with it three years ago and I’ve seen no reason
to switch. It does all of the things that I want to do and actually, I have a pretty
wide range of needs for using online forms. I have registration forms for different events
that I have, I have contest forms that I’ve both embedded in my website and I send out
in my newsletter, and EmailMeForm allows me to do all of my different forms and allows
me to distribute them in any way that I want and that is a key.
If you have a website, you then are going to look at a forms tool where you can embed
forms in your website but most people don’t have a website, or if they do have a website,
they are not the one managing it and they’re going to want to wait for the IT department
to embed a form in the site. Instead for a lot of us, it’s far more convenient to reach
out for email and email out our forms and have people fill out the forms based on an
email that they’ve received and EmailMeForm as you can imagine from the name, does a really
good job of enabling email forms that we can send out. Let’s dive into it and take a
quick look and show you what you pay for if you’re purchasing an email package.
Now this is my account in EmailMeForm and along the top are the basic navigation areas.
You can create forms from scratch but they also have a variety of templates that help
you create your forms. There’s a nice Whizzywig editor for managing your forms. So let’s
take you into the templates to begin with because that’s probably the place that most
of you would start if you ended up purchasing a service like this. You can see here that
they’ve got templates for agriculture associations all the way through to travel. There’s a
variety of different forms and just by poking around these a little bit, you can get a good
idea for what you can do with these forms. For example if we go in and take a look at
the restaurant form, there’s a little takeout order form that they have here. Now you can
use this as a template but the reason I wanted to show you this is look, they’ve got—I
guess this is for pizzas—if you want to order a ham pizza, if you can choose two they
do calculations. They have the ability to calculate, to do intelligent calculations
within the forms. And in fact, the EmailMeForm also has hooks so that you can tie it into
ecommerce systems such as Paypal or Stripe or some of the other systems. So you’ve
got a lot of upward functionality, not just gathering information but actually doing ecommerce
using these forms. That’s probably a little bit of the deep end of the pool for most of
us. Most of us kind of want to gather a registration form for people coming to a conference or
we want to sign people up for a mailing list or that sort of stuff. That’s where we want
to use the forms. So let’s take a look at some of the other
simple forms that they have as well. We go to the education forms here, we can see they’ve
got testing, the ability to do testing and create all of those sorts of measurements
where we ask people for a range so it works very for research, survey-type of stuff. Then
in the personal forms area, they’ve got little trivia quizzes that you could put and
these are great for building community and that sort of stuff. So you’ve got all of
these different types of forms available to you.
Let’s go back to the restaurant form and let’s show you how the editor looks because
let’s say that I want to use this form, I click on Customize Template and that takes
me into the editor where I can actually go in and modify all of the different features
or all of the different aspects and elements within the form. If we take a look in the
Add Field area, this really kind of gives us the best picture of what we can do with
the form. These are the basic types of data that we gather – numbers, names, paragraphs,
text. We can put in check boxes, etc. Under the Advanced area, we can do things like putting
in websites and phone numbers. Now this is to gather that information. This
isn’t putting it in our website. This is gathering information. So if here we wanted
to, for some reason, we wanted to add a website, allowing people to put in their website as
they putting in their order form for pizza—I don’t know why you would—but you just
drag and drop that and now see it’s dropped it in as website and it’s already preformatted
here for you. So you’ve got all of these different capabilities to be able to add different
data types. Down at the bottom, we have survey tools, things like putting in a star rating
system where you can add stars. If you put that in and click on it, you could actually
edit the options, saying number 1, 2, 3, 4. You can add more options. You can basically
customize it any way you want. This gives you, I think—I’m hard-pressed to come
up with a type of form that this software won’t support.
Now once you’ve built your form, that’s just the first step. Then you have to distribute
the form and start gathering information. Let me show you how that part works as well.
So I’m going to go back into My Forms here. I’m going to leave this page. I’m not
going to save it and it’s already created it and saved the basic one here as my latest
form. But if you look here at the other forms, these are all of the forms that I have. I
have a total of 62 forms that I’ve done in the last about three years, I think, I’ve
been using it. You can see I’m doing about 20 forms a year for different types of projects
but here is one which I’ll use to kind of walk you through some of the things I did
because there’s no personal information in it. It was just a questionnaire after a
webinar that I delivered. If I want to see the results of all of the
people who have responded to this particular one, I just click on the data field. Here
I can see all of the different responses that people have done from that particular survey.
The next thing is I can export this and it exports it into a spreadsheet file so that
I can sort it and I can work on the data and work in a variety of different ways on the
data. Now I can choose how I want this reported to me as well. What I mean is I can just gather
all of the data here in the data field and then when I come in and visit my account,
I can look and see how many people have registered. Or if I go under Notifications, I can have
it let me note and send an email to any of my email addresses whenever there’s a response.
I could also ask it to set up an autoresponder, setting up a message that goes back to people
as soon as they have completed the form, thanking them for the form or following up with some
other area. Here beneath it, you can also start to integrate the forms with other autoresponder
packages like Aweber, for example. You can set it up for gathering and building your
mail list and you can also send the data directly to another application if you want as well.
So you’ve got some nice flexibility of how you respond when people enter data into the
form. One of the most important areas is the Code
area. If we click here on Code—let me go back to where is my form that I’m working
on, there we are Code—if I click on the Code button, this is where we create the embed
codes or the links that we send out in email. So we have the ability to be able to create
Javascript embeds or iframe embeds. So if you have a website, you can actually drop
the form right into your website. Let me show you how that looks. Let me just jump over.
This is my speaking page on my website. This is the Dottotech website which I hope you
visited. As you scroll down here to the very bottom of it, if people are interested in
having me speak to them at an event, I want to gather that information. So this is actually
an EmailMeForm that I’ve dropped in here a as an embed right within my website. Now
you have to be careful and make sure that you’re paying attention to how wide the
forms are and that sort of stuff versus how you pages are on your webpage when you create
the form because there can be some little issues here. But this is a great way of adding
some extra communication capability to your website through using the forms. It's super
easy to do, as you could see there. We just have to select the proper form here.
Now there are some other things that we can do with it as well. If we click on HTML Link,
this here will allow us to take this if we copy this—just let me go to a new tab here—and
this would be a link that you would embed in an email. This is what people would see
if they went to this link in the email. There’s the form that we just asked that we were just
looking at. So if you create an email, as opposed to have this embedded in my website
now—and this is actually hosted by the folks at EmailMeForm. As soon as they gather all
of the information here and as soon as the person submits it here by clicking on the
Submit button at the bottom, then a new record is created in my account in EmailMeForm and
we will see that data. It will have gathered that data. So it’s nice and flexible, both
using our website and using email for sending and receiving forms.
Some of the other things that I just wanted to quickly touch on before we go too far is
they also have Payment Options here. If we click here on Payment, it’s a premium. This
one cost you a little bit more. You have to buy the Pro or the Premium plan. I think it’s
about $20 a month in order to have the full merchant setup but here you could set up payment
options for being able to collect money if you have an order form or something like that
and it integrates with all of the standard payment systems including, I’m happy to
see Stripe, which is current favorite one. Also, you could also set up invoices coming
through and you could integrate it right with things like Freshbooks, some nice flexibility
there. And as if all of that weren’t enough, if
you’re a super advanced type of person, you can go in and can setup Logic. This is
so cool. When we click on Logic, what it does is it looks at the form that we’re working
on and allows you to set up rules based on that form. If I go into field rules, I create
a field rule, what it does is it looks at the different fields that I have and it says
that IF under the Name it contains something, THEN do something. So if you think about an
order form or if you think about a questionnaire, if people say they didn’t like the webinar
then show them these questions. If they say they liked the webinar then show them these
questions. So you don’t have to have all of the questions there but you can actually
branch people through depending on their responses using field rules, page rules and form rules
and even into payment rules. If they order something and they have purchased this then
you make sure that you also offer them to purchase this other thing if you’re going
to do a follow on sale or something like that. So the more that you use this software, the
more you kind of dive in under the hood, the more capabilities that you will discover.
As I say it, you can see it. It’s a nice rich application. How much do they cost? Let’s
just take a quick look here at how much it costs. For this one here, for EmailMeForm,
$9.95 a month is the basic but you can try it for free which will allow you to do a small
number of forms and to kind of test things out. The Pro version is $20 a month and you
can get about a 20% discount if you pay upfront for a full year. That is EmailMeForm.
Now Wufoo and some of the others, they’re really not all that different in pricing.
If we take a look at Wufoo, it’s a little bit more. I think their Basic is $14 a month,
yes, and then their higher end systems are $29 a month. It gets a little bit more expensive.
It might have a little bit prettier interface and all that sort of stuff but with these
tools, it’s more the use of them you figure out how they fit in your life by spending
time with them. So I say choose a good one, try the free trial for a little while. Once
you kind of have a handle on it, purchase the account and then just run with it and
don’t spend too much time worrying about what the other guys have because for the most
part, they all have the same basic features and it really comes down to your skills as
far as using them most effectively. I hope you found this video to be effective
and useful of your time. If you have, please give us a Like and don’t forget you should
subscribe to our channel. Every week, we’re going to release another good productivity
video just like this one which I hope you find incredibly valuable. I’m Steve Dotto.
Thanks for spending time with me today. [END OF VIDEO]