Do you watch Little Big Shots? It’s the television show hosted by Steve Harvey and it features incredible kids from all over the world.
They always feature kids who can calculate big numbers inside their heads. It’s amazing, really, but I know they use magic number tricks.
Here’s one.
To square a number ending in 5, you just have to take the first digit and multiply it by the number that follows it and add 25 at the end. For example:
- 35 squared (35 x 35)
- Get the first digit, ‘3’ and multiply it by the number that follows it, ‘4’ (3 x 4 = 12)
- Get the answer and add 25 at the end (1225)
- Answer is 1225
No sweat.
Tricks give you treats, huh?
When you know these tricks, you appear to be this amazing kid who is perceived to take on the world someday.
Well, I think the same secret applies to us, the adults of our society.
We don’t have to be geniuses, we just need some tricks
and have the spunk to apply them.
And the treats will be flowing out to you like those colorful balls that are falling out when the bubblegum machine breaks.
You might even drown in them when you get so good at making your tricks.
So, when you’re using online forms for your business, make sure to apply some tricks too.
Automate your online sales. Embed videos or Google maps on your forms. To apply most of these tricks, though, you need to arm your form with powerful web form features:
- Form Logic
- Autoresponder
- Payment
- Web App Integrations
- Signature Field
- Save & Resume
- Data Export
- File Uploads
- Password Protect
Form Logic
Customize your form’s succeeding questions
depending on the user’s previous answers.
Form Logic makes your forms smarter.
It guides your forms to ask the right questions — or to totally end a survey if the user doesn’t qualify.
Take this example.
Would you waste your (biologically) male patient’s time by inserting this question into their Patient Intake Form?
I bet you’d rather not.
You can screen out this question by having a Sex Dropdown at the top. Make the pregnancy-related questions appear only if the user selected “Female” from the options.
It’s easy to set these rules. You don’t have to code.
There’s a Logic Setup Page where you can set field, page, form, and even payment rules through simple drop down selections.
You can skip a page, hide a question, send notifications to your email, or even redirect to websites. You can even end a survey even after 2 questions if the user is not the right fit.
Learn more about Form Logic.
Where to use form logic?
- Order and Payment Forms
- Disable payment to certain countries if you can’t ship a certain item over there.
- Wedding RSVPs and other event invites
- Customize the final message to say “We’re happy that you can join us!” or “Too bad you can’t come!” depending on the replies
- User research and marketing surveys
- Filter out respondents that don’t match your criteria early on the survey.
Autoresponder
Notify users of their successful form submissions via autoresponders.
Autoresponders are important. They bring peace of mind to your customers and clients.
You don’t want your customer service team to be constantly bombarded with, “Did my order push through?” They ought to spend time on more serious problems to solve.
Autoresponders are responsible for automatically sending emails to your form users as soon as they have finished filling up your form. A simple validation comes a long way.
Here’s a sample order completion form email.
The order confirmation email is to be received by the user moments after he or she submitted the order via your form.
This particular email does a couple of important things:
- Thanks the user for ordering.
- Confirms that the order has been received.
- Gives an estimate timeframe for the shipping.
- Recaps what the user has ordered.
- Shows the total amount of the order.
What you include in the email depends on the type of confirmation email that you want to send.
Setting one up in our form builder is easy.
You can customize the sender name, add images, and even use dynamic tokens to include the user’s input.
Learn more about Autoresponders.
Where to use autoresponders?
- Online store
- Include ordered items, shipping info, order number, total price, and more.
- Blog subscriptions and lead generation forms
- Thank them for signing up. If you promised a freebie, say an e-book, you can include the download link in the auto-reply mail.
Payments
Collect online payments from Paypal, Chargify, Stripe, and more
through your online forms.
Everybody favors fast and seamless transactions nowadays, creating a high demand for online payment transactions.
During the 3rd quarter of 2016, retail digital commerce on both desktop and mobile has reached $84.3 billion.
Imagine the number of people engaging in online transactions in just one day.
Get your share of the market. Activate online selling for your products or services and use online forms to collect payments.
If you’re selling cupcakes, for example, you can use an attractive order form like this one to drive sales.
Our payment forms support major payment systems including Paypal, Authorize.net, Stripe, and more.
Secure online payments on different channels — your website, blog, and even your social networks.
Learn more about payments.
Where to use payments?
- Your retail business
- Integrate payment collection into your order forms to make the transactions easier for your customers.
- Professional services
- If you’re into consulting, you can collect upfront fees through your appointment form.
- Renting business
- Have a guest house or car for rent? You can ask for initial booking fees right on your rental form.
Web App Integrations
For smooth and automated workflow, connect your forms with 50+ web apps
like Google Drive, Facebook, Active Campaign, and more.
It’s everybody’s goal to be less busy, but be more productive.
If you’re a busy business owner, you don’t want to be ridiculed by the repetitive tasks like copying and pasting form entries from an Excel file to your CRM tool.
Sure, you can hire a Virtual Assistant, but why let them do the manual work that can be automated? They can take care of something more complex like setting up your sales funnels.
Your online forms can be integrated with over 50 web applications — the very tools that you use everyday.
Learn more about web app integrations.
Where to use web app integrations?
- Subscription forms
- Forward your form submitters as subscribers to your email platform like ActiveCampaign and AWeber.
- Document storage
- If you’re accepting file uploads, say resumes, you can forward the files to DropBox or Google Drive for safe keeping
- Data compilation
- Easily transfer your form’s online submissions into PDF files through Webmerge for easier and faster documentation
Signature Field
Seal contracts by capturing the official signatures of your clients.
Don’t let distance hinder you from completing business transactions.
Attach a digital signature field to your forms and capture the signature of your clients. Make it official.
Your clients can manually enter their signatures using the mouse when they’re on desktop. If they’re on mobile, they can use their digital pen or even just their finger.
Yes, our digital signatures also work on mobile phones and tablets.
Learn more about digital signature fields.
Where to use form logic?
- Work contracts for remote workers
- Employment letters for internal processes
Save & Resume
Let users save their form progress so
they can get back to it later to finish everything.
Have you heard of the 20-Minute Fatigue?
A survey on surveys (ironic?) showed that once respondents have spent twenty minutes of their time answering the survey, they tend to drop out of the survey completely.
Worse, they’re going to randomly answer just to finish the survey, supplying you with untrue data that could wreck the results of your research. Tsk, you don’t want this to happen to you, do you?
Save yourself from this scenario by using the Save & Resume feature. If you have this feature turned on, users can save the entries on their form when they have to do some errands or if they’re beginning to get bored.
They can always get back to it later with renewed enthusiasm and finish the entire form.
Learn more about save & resume.
Where to use save & resume?
- Lengthy user research surveys
- Also activate the Multi-page feature so the respondents are updated of their form progress
- Tedious application forms
- Give them a couple of days to complete the form through the form settings. Default setting is 7 days.
Data Export
Export your form entries as .xls, .txt or .csv
for safekeeping or further data analysis.
Forms collect the data that you need, yes, but they aren’t the best tools to categorize or analyze your data.
Although we have the Advanced Reports Features which could interpret your form entries through graphs and tables, you’d probably still want a copy of your raw data either for storage, spreadsheet analysis or sharing with your team.
Learn more about data export.
Where to use data export?
- Your event invitation form
- Once you have gathered the participants, you can forward the spreadsheet to your event organizer for further work.
- School enrolment forms
- Save a copy of the printouts for record tracking or secure them in your university cloud.
- Your research surveys
- Analyze the results on spreadsheets.
File Uploads
Let your users upload the necessary documents through your online forms.
File sharing is a common requirement for us to collaborate nowadays.
We share files through emails, social media messaging, and popular software like Google Drive and Dropbox.
Your forms can be used for this purpose too. Along with their form entries, you can get the relevant files from your form fillers as well.
Easily get your hands on the document, music, picture or video that you need.
Learn more about file uploads.
Where to use file uploads?
- Job application forms
- Looking for your next employee? Require the applicants to submit their cover letter and resume in .pdf.
- Design or T Shirt printing business
- Capture your client’s dream design by letting them upload pictures of the designs that they like. Yes, they can upload multiple files.
- Loan application forms
- For online application forms, you can ask users to upload valid ID’s over online forms. We have a secure cloud storage that protects your safety.
Password Protect
Only show your forms (with sensitive data) to certain users.
Hesitant to use online forms because of privacy reasons?
Password protect can help ease your worries. If you have proprietary or private information that you only like to keep within a selected group of people, it’s best to put a fence on your form.
When your form is password protected, only users who have the password will be able to see it.
Learn more about password protect.
Where to use password protect?
- Your super secret organization application form
- Internal forms that you use in your company
- Your private Slack community invite
There you go, these are the powerful form features that will make your form perform much more. If you’re still not making use of them, it’s time to do so.
Make the most out of your forms. Start working less, but get the results that you want. wink emoji
Also leaving you this quote to inspire you to start automating your forms today.
I choose a lazy person to do a hard job.
Because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it.
- Bill Gates
Aiza Coronado
Aiza is a Content Developer and Marketer at EmailMeForm. She easily gets upset when random dogs don't bark back at her hello's.
