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.
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