Included with every basic website management plan, Outward Image includes a licensed premium form software plug-in module. This versatile software allows us to offer many useful features in our basic plan, that can help make your website an integral part of your business. It plug-in is also dynamic, as improvements are made to the software in the future, these new features are automatically added to your site.
In this article, I will touch on a few of these features, and how they can be used to help enhance your business operations and/or improve client communications.
Quote Forms
WPForms is a great tool for creating quote forms, as you can literally create every type of form field you can think of, from drop-downs, check boxes, radio buttons, to file upload fields for pictures or documents. Conditional logic is available to control what fields are seen by the prospect as they progress through the form. Email notifications can also be conditioned based on individual entries, so each response can be personalized, to the person’s name and to their request.
Newsletter Integration
Custom forms can also be created that can be directly integrated into your email newsletter service provider, such as MailChimp or Constant Contact. As incentives are great for building mailing lists, rewards can be promised for sign-up, and sent through the email confirmation.
Agreement forms with signatures
With this premium form software, legal forms like leasing agreements can be filled out with signatures. These forms are stored electronically, but can be printed for physical verification. Even payments like security deposits can be included and paid through the form.
Payments/Subscriptions
Forms can be set up accept simple payments, and even subscriptions, especially if you use a good payment, like Stripe. Any type of simple order form can be created with any number of products or services to be selected. The payments can be one-time, or can be set up to establish monthly or yearly subscriptions that will automatically deduct payments from the payee’s credit card.
Though these functions are technically e-commerce, they lack certain functions that a full-blown e-commerce site would have, like a shopping cart, account pages, shipping functions, and stored payment methods. However, if you don’t need all that, but need a way to accept specific types of payments online, our standard form package may be all you need.
Surveys/Polls
Do you want to know how your customers feel about your products or services? Are you interested in knowing what their biggest concerns really are? With our form software, you can create any type of survey form you need, using a 1-10 rating, an Agree-Disagree Likert scale, a star rating to ask the opinions of your customers.
What’s even more impressive, is that the results can be reported out in visual formats like bar graphs, pie charts, and other visual devices that will help you understand the results better. Use properly, surveys and polls can be a useful marketing tool. Our form software package makes it that much easier to employ.
Data Reporting to Google Sheets
The most recent new feature added to our current form software is the ability to configure forms so that they report to Google Sheets, which if you are not familiar, is a spreadsheet creator very similar to Microsoft Excel. Each new entry to the form on the website creates a new record, or row of data on the spreadsheet. Conditional logic can also be employed that will send the data to different spreadsheets depending on the user entries. These forms and spreadsheets can be used to collect customer data, as well as set up reporting forms for employees. Collecting data in this way makes it much easier to manipulate and analyze the data you receive through your forms.
The Future
The form software we use is in constant development. So, just like the Google Sheet feature that was not even available until late 2022, other features are sure to be coming down the pike. And you can be sure I will do my best to keep you informed of the latest features.
