Configure Contact Form Email Actions for Authors

Introduction

In this lesson, we are going to add custom email actions to our contact form. When the contact form is submitted it will trigger two email.

• An Admin notification Email. This email goes to the website admin with all the details of the form submission.
• The Thank You Email. This email goes to the website visitor who submitted the form confirming their message has been sent.

Breakdance Form Actions

Breakdance has over a dozen available actions for after a form submission. These include integrations with popular email marketing and communication platforms that we will look at in later lessons.

We are only going to use the email action for our contact form.

Configuring the email action

Back in the form builder I’m scrolling past the Form options we’ve already set up and going down to the ACTIONS tab. By default Breakdance has configured two actions.

• Store submission
• Email

If we look at the Breakdance menu item back on the WordPress admin dashboard you can see there’s an option to view all form submissions to the website. 

I don’t recommend storing form submissions on your website. It’s extra weight to the site, more admin and your email client with configured rules will do a better job of storing and processing all your messages anyway.

The Admin Email

• Click the x beside the Store Submission label to remove it as a configured option.
• Click on the edit icon beside the active email action
• We have one preconfigured email message.
• This is the email the website will send to Dirk with the contents of the message.
• Click on the email subject to edit the email
• Change the Subject to ‘New message from Dirk Volcano Website’
• I’ll set the To email to Dirk’s admin email 
• I’ll change the FROM EMAIL email to Dirk’s admin mail. This is the same one we set up with out SMTP connect way back in the first module. 
• For the FROM NAME we want to use the name of the person submitting the form. To do that we we click on the the PLUS icon beside the field where we will get the choice to pick from one of the available input fields on the form. We want the NAME field so I’ll click on that.
• I’ll do the same for the REPLY TO field but this time I’ll choose the EMAIL input from the form. It’s a small thing but when we get an email and are ready to answer we can just hit the reply button on our email client and not have to copy and paste the correspondents address.
• Next is the message. We have a couple of options here. The first is to stick with the default ALL FIELDS dynamic content that will put the senders name, email and message into the email to Dirk. This is absolutely fine but we can expand the text box and use the dynamic fields to create something a bit more human.

Hi Dirk, 

You got a message from {name} via the contact form on the Dirk Volcano website.

The message is as follows.

{message} 

Best Regards

Website Admin

• We don’t need to attach uploaded files as we haven’t used that as an input field.
• BCC is a good option to use if you have another team member or a VA look after messages from your website.

The Thank You email

That’s the admin email taken care of to make sure Dirk, or one of his team, get the message as quickly as possible. Now I want to add a thank you email to the visitor. This email will add another layer of confirmation to the visitor, on top of the thank you page, that their message has been received and when to expect a reply.

• Click on Add email
• Make the subject Thank you for contacting Dirk Volcano
• Add the dynamic email field in the ‘to email’ so this message goes to the person submitting the form.
• The from email is Dirk’s admin email
• FROM NAME is Dirk Volcano | Author
• REPLY TO email is Dirk’s admin email
• I’ll expand the message text box, delete the default ALL FIELDS dynamic data option and paste in the following.

Hi {name}, 

Thank you for contacting me. I or one of the team will be in touch before the end of the next working day. Thanks again for getting in touch. 

Best regards 

Dirk

• It’s short and vanilla but combined with the Contact Thank You page will help set expectations with the visitor.
• I’ll scroll back up
• Click on the email label
• Then click outside the box to close it.
• Both emails will be saved, although I wish the Breakdance team would add a save button inside the email setup section just to make me feel better and not have to go back in a couple of times to REALLY make sure it’s been saved.
• Save the global block
• Exit to wordpress

That’s all the form set up completed. We can’t test from inside the Global Block builder but we will test the form in the next lesson. For now I’ll click save on the Global Block and click X to exit to WordPress. 

Summary

In this lesson we added an action to our new global form to send TWO emails after submission. The first email is to the website’s owner, Dirk Volcano, to let him know a new message has been received, who it is from and what they have to say. We also configured that first email so Dirk only has to hit the reply button to get in touch with the sender.

We also added a second email. This one goes to the person submitting the form to acknowledge their message and to set expectations about what happens next.

Next Lesson

In the next lesson we will build our Contact page, add in our new global block with the form inside and test it to make sure it all works.