Send follow-up messages to your respondents or yourself

You can keep the conversation going by sending your respondents follow-up email messages when they submit your form. You can also choose to send yourself or your team members a follow-up email when someone completes your form.

You can decide to only send ‌follow-ups when certain conditions are met, for example, when a respondent opts into your marketing campaign and can be considered a hot lead. You can also customize the text of the follow-ups you’ll be sending and lots more.

Read on to find out how or jump straight to the section that interests you the most:

- Set up conditions for follow-up messages

- Send follow-ups to your respondents (available on a Basic or above plan)

- Send follow-ups to yourself

- Deliver follow-ups with webhooks

- Send follow-ups to Slack (available on a Business or above plan) 

 

You can set conditional follow-up messages for the following triggers:

- Any response
- When someone lands on the selected ending(s)
- A response with conditions

In this example, we’ll be using a simple lead generation form to separate hot leads from cold leads. I’ll add a few questions asking for people’s contact details, like their name and email address, and a Yes/No question to segment leads. To cover multiple ways of creating follow-ups, I’ll also include two Endings, one for people who are interested in a live demo, and one for those who are not.

You’ll be able to set up conditional follow-ups based on multiple criteria. For example, you can send separate follow-up messages to different people who are experts on the specific products your respondents showed interest in. I’ll include a Multiple Choice question to cover this use case.

Next, I’ll add some Logic to the Yes/No question to segment my audience with Branching and calculations. Those who opt out of the live demo will be taken straight to an Ending screen thanking them for participating. These are my cold leads.

Those who choose to opt in will be taken to a Date question where they can indicate their preferred date for a live demo. They'll then see an Ending screen thanking them for scheduling a demo session with us. These are my hot leads.

Adding Logic to the form here is completely optional, and you’ll only need to set this up if you want to show people different Endings based on their responses. You’ll be able to add conditions to your follow-ups even without using logic, for example, by selecting different answer choices (Yes/No, Product A, B, C, or D) as your follow-up triggers.

Set up conditions for follow-up messages

Now it’s time to set up our conditional follow-ups.

1. Make sure to hit Publish on your form before you start creating follow-ups.

2. Go to form settings, and click Follow-ups.

You can also just click Get started in the follow-ups banner of the Logic Map.

3. Now you can click the + icon or the Create a follow-up button to start adding follow-ups.

4. You can click the three dots to rename or delete a follow-up.

5. After clicking rename, you can simply start typing to give your follow-up a name.

6. Now start adding triggers and actions to your follow-up. When a condition specified in a trigger is met, a follow-up message will be sent to the address(es) specified in the corresponding action.

7. First, click Add trigger to set up what'll trigger our conditional follow-ups.

8. If you select Any response, a follow-up will be sent every time someone submits your form, regardless of what their responses were. Click Save to set this up as a follow-up trigger.

9. If you select An ending(s), a follow-up will be sent when someone lands on the ending you assign to this trigger. In this example, a follow-up will be sent to hot leads who decided to schedule a demo with us (Ending A). Click Save to set this up as a follow-up trigger.

10. If you select A response with conditions, a follow-up will be sent when someone gives a specific answer to a specific question. In this example, a follow-up will only be sent when someone opts in to schedule a live demo with us (Yes answer to the Yes/No question). Click Save to set this up as a follow-up trigger.

You can also choose to set up triggers based on other answer options; for example, you can segment your audience based on the product(s) they showed interest in. As you can see, Typeform’s logic feature is built into conditional follow-ups, so you can use the + Add condition button to set up new logical rules, just like you would when adding logic to your form.

Send follow-ups to your respondents (available on a Basic or above plan)

If you're on a Basic or above Typeform plan, you can send follow-up emails to your respondents. After you’ve created your first follow-up trigger, you can create an action to send a follow-up to a respondent (as indicated by the Missing action warning message).

1. Click Add action to get started.

2. With actions, you can set up how to send emails to respondents or configure how to send an email to yourself or your team.

3. First, click Send an email to respondents. The follow-up messages will be sent to the email address your respondent has provided in your form. You can edit the Reply to field to select who will receive messages when your respondent decides to reply to your follow-up (by default, replies are sent to the email address associated with your Typeform account).

You can add multiple email addresses here, or you can choose to leave this field empty if you don’t want to receive replies to your follow-up. However, you can’t modify the From field, as our notification messages are sent from the notifications@typeform.com address by default. Click Continue when you’re ready.

4. Now you can edit the body of your email or use Recall information to make your message even more personal. This way you can call your respondents by their name or remind them of their chosen date for the demo session. Click Save when you’re ready.

If you want to send a follow-up to a respondent summarizing all of the questions and answers, you can do so by clicking the + button or typing the @ symbol in the Email content section. Then select the All answers option. 

Respondents will be sent an email with all their answers listed underneath each question. Here's how the email will look when the respondent receives it.

Send follow-ups to yourself

You can optionally set up actions to notify yourself or your team members when someone responds to your form.

1.  Click Add action to send follow-up messages to yourself or your team members.

2. Click Notify myself or team via email to do just that every time you receive a hot lead.

3. Enter the email addresses you want these follow-ups to be sent to and click Continue.

4. Now you can customize the message you’ll be sending to yourself or your team. You can use Recall information to view all responses, or you can also include a link to download your responses. Click Save when ready.

Your conditional follow-up is ready to go! You can rename it or delete it by clicking the three dots next to it. You can also click the trigger and select Edit trigger to modify it, or click an action and select Edit action or the trashcan icon to modify or remove an action. Note that you can’t delete a trigger that already has actions set up for it, as that would break the conditional follow-up itself.

Optionally, you can also set up a second follow-up to send to people who did not qualify as hot leads. For this use case, you can just skip sending follow-ups to your own or your team members email address.

Once you’ve collected responses, you can go to the Results panel to check them out.

If you’ve set up follow-ups to be sent to your email address, you can also check your email inbox for the messages you’ve received.

Deliver follow-ups with webhooks

By setting up webhooks for follow-ups, you can trigger your form’s response data to be sent to your own website URL whenever a specific event occurs. You can find out more about what webhooks are and how they work here.

1. Once you’ve set up a trigger, click Add action.

2. Select the Deliver a webhook option as the action to be triggered.

3. Now you can start setting up your webhook. Enter your website URL in the Endpoint field. This is where the follow-up will be sent when the conditions specified in your follow-up trigger are met.

4. Optionally, you can also enter your webhook secret to verify that requests are coming from Typeform and nobody else. You can find out more about webhook secrets here.

You can use the Show and Hide buttons to view the secret value you’ve entered.

5. Click the On or Off radio button to verify SSL certificates when delivering payloads. It is recommended to secure your webhooks this way, and you can find out more about how SSL verification works here.

6. When you’ve finished setting up your webhook, click Save.

7. Now you’ll see that delivering a webhook has been set up as an action in your follow-ups.

8. You can click the trashcan icon to delete a webhook, or the Edit action button to do just that.

To test your webhooks, you can create a test URL to collect test submissions on websites like https://requestbin.com. Your test deliveries will look similar to the screenshot below:

Send follow-ups to Slack (available on a Business or above plan)

If you're on a Business or above Typeform plan, and you have a Slack account set up, you can choose to send follow-up messages based on responses, endings, or conditions to different Slack channels.

1. Once you've set up a trigger, click Add action to get started with sending follow-ups to Slack channels. 

2. Select Slack as the action you'd like to trigger to send real-time notifications to channels or individuals in Slack.

3. Click Authenticate to give Typeform permission to connect to your Slack account.

You can use the dropdown list in the top right corner to choose the Slack workspace you want to send follow-ups to.

You can also click the arrows to read more about what Typeform will be able to view and do if you grant access.

4. Click Allow to grant Typeform permission to access the selected Slack workspace.

5. Select the individuals or Slack channels you want to send your follow-ups to from the dropdown list. Note that you can only send direct messages to users who have installed the Typeform app in their Slack workspace. 

Use the + button to add more channels; the x button next to a channel to delete it, or the Clear all button to remove all the channels you've selected.

If you want to send direct messages to individuals or private channels, you'll have to add the Typeform app to the channel settings first. You can do this by clicking the channel header, selecting the Integrations tab, then clicking Add an App.

6. Use the checkboxes to choose which questions and responses you want to send to the Slack channels you've selected.

You can use the checkbox next to Select all to select or deselect all of your questions.

7. Click Save when you're ready with selecting your channels and questions.

Once you hit save, you'll see a message from the Typeform app in the Slack channel(s) you've selected. 

Note that due to how Slack handles app permission rules, messages sent to personal channels will be sent to the Typeform app channel in Slack instead.

That’s all there is to it. Now it’s your turn to keep the conversation going between you and your respondents with conditional follow-ups.