Before you publish your form, determine what you’d like to happen once the form is submitted. Form settings allow you to choose whether you’ll require a single or double opt-in, receive notifications when a form is filled out, set up conditional or advanced redirects, and more.

Check out this video to learn about form settings.

Table of contents

Accessing form settings
• Ontraport Pages
• Ontraforms
Opt-in settings
• Single opt-in
• Double opt-in required
• Configure double opt-in settings
• Double opt-in optional
• Conditional redirects
Manage form fills and always on rules
Hidden form fields
Notifications and routing
Advanced settings
• Don’t redirect visitor to thank you page until…

Accessing form settings

The form setting options are the same whether you’re using a form on an Ontraport Page or an Ontraform.

Forms on an Ontraport Page

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1. In the block where your form fields and Submit button are located, click the Submit button. The settings will appear in the left column. 
2. Click Form Settings at the bottom.

Ontraforms

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1. Locate the Smart Form or Order Form block in your Ontraport Form and click it to view the individual block elements and form settings. 
2. Click Form Settings.

Opt-in settings

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Opt-in settings dictate how new contacts are added to your account database and what page they’ll see after submitting their form responses. No matter which opt-in setting you choose, you have several link options to choose from.

You’ll also see the option to send contacts to the “default thank you page” which is an Ontraport branded page.

Single Opt-in

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The default setting for your forms is “single opt-in,” and it adds contacts to your database when they submit a form. This opt-in setting does not require contacts to confirm their email address; you can immediately send them messages.

Double Opt-in Required

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The double opt-in required option confirms that a person who signed up to receive your emails wants to receive them. A double opt-in email prompts the recipient to confirm their subscription by clicking on a link. Sending email to high-quality, engaged contacts improves your email deliverability; however, you will collect fewer contacts than using a single opt-in.

Your contacts’ bulk email status will be “unconfirmed” until they click the confirmation link in your double opt-in email. Once they confirm, their bulk email status will change to “double opt-in,” and you can send them messages.

If contacts are added to your automation while their address is still unconfirmed, we will not attempt to send messages to them.

To prevent your contacts from continuing through your automation without receiving your messages, add a goal under your trigger that moves your contacts when their bulk email status is updated to double opt-in.

Configure double opt-in settings

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Configure the following settings:

1. Confirmation Email: Use the dropdown menu to select the desired confirmation email.
2. On submit, send visitors to the following page: Select the confirmation page visitors will see once they fill out the form.
3. Send contacts who already opted in to a different page: This checkbox allows you to send contacts who have already double opted in to a different page than the contacts who still need to verify their address. 
4. Send contacts here: New contacts are directed to this page after clicking the link in the confirmation email or if the “Send contacts who are already opted in to a different page” checkbox is marked.

Double Opt-in Optional

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This combination setting allows you to add contacts to your database when they submit forms and sends a double opt-in email to confirm their address. 

This option does not protect your account from bad email addresses, but it allows you to capture more double opt-ins who are more valuable and engaged contacts. 

Contacts who do not click the double opt-in link can still be sent messages — their bulk email status remains single opt-in. But they still have the chance to verify their email, which changes their bulk email status to double opt-in. 

To set this up, select the “Double opt-in optional” setting and follow the setup instructions above.

Conditional redirects

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For all three opt-in settings, you can also check the “Conditional Redirect” box to create personalized experiences for your contacts based on their form field responses. 

1. For example, you can create rules based on your contacts’ country field. If they live in the UK, you can redirect them to a page describing data protection and privacy policies for the UK. 
2. Or you can redirect them to different product pages based on their responses to the form questions.

Just click Add to create redirect rules that correspond with each of your form responses. The rules for redirects run in order, so if your contacts fit the conditions for multiple rules, they will be redirected by the first rule that applies to them.

Check out this Ontraport University lesson on conditional redirects

Manage form fills and always on rules

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This section discusses a legacy feature set unavailable to new Ontraport accounts.

Legacy features are from older versions of the app, and we’ve replaced them with newer, more robust features, such as automations. 

These optional settings are not needed if you use automation. We strongly recommend you use automation maps to allow for more detailed reporting and speed up form processing. 

Manage Form Fills: You’ll see different options in your account depending on the features you’ve enabled:

• Automations: Add contacts to a specific automation map using the default trigger.
• Tags: If you’ve toggled on the “tags on form submissions” option in your account’s advanced settings, you can add tags to contacts when they submit your forms.
• Sequences: If you’ve toggled on “sequences” in your account’s legacy features settings, you can add contacts to sequences when they submit your forms.

Always-on Rules: If you’ve toggled on the “rules for form submissions” in your account’s legacy features settings, you can add rules that run when your form is submitted.

Rules: Successful Payment (Order Forms only): These rules will be run for the contact submitting the form if the payment gateway returns a successful transaction code.

Rules: Failed Payment (Order Forms only): These rules will be run for the contact submitting if their payment fails.

Hidden form fields

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Forms created in Ontraport Pages can have hidden fields that allow you to prefill fields that aren’t visible to your contacts. 

When you prefill hidden form fields, you can:

• Add specific values, such as “Manager,” to the title field for a form explicitly made for managers.

• Add visiting contact merge fields. For example, add your visitor’s email address to a hidden field so they don’t need to enter their email address on your form.

• Add dynamic pages or block fields. For example, if you want to track which blog post a contact opted in from, you could use a hidden field to add your blog post’s title to the “Contact opted in from this post” field. This option is only available for forms on dynamic pages or blocks.

Note that the most reliable way to identify your contacts is on a membership site. If your form is not on a membership site, and they have cleared their cookies, Ontraport will not be able to identify your visitor.

Check out this Ontraport University lesson to learn more about privacy and data security.

The options to prefill hidden fields are slightly different than prefilling the visible fields on your forms. Check out this article to learn more about prefilling fields on forms.

Follow these steps to populate hidden form fields:

1. Click Form Settings and scroll down to the “Hidden Fields” section.
2. Click Add and select your field.
3. Add a value or click to add a merge field — for contact-specific information.
4. Click Save.

Notifications and routing

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These settings allow you to set up notifications to a user in your account after a form is filled out.

Send Notification: Enter an email address to be sent a notification that the form was filled out. This is a pre-formatted, standardized notification. 

Make Contact Owner: If the contact submitting the form is a new contact, use the dropdown to select one of the users on your account as the contact owner. If left blank, the administrator user will be the contact owner. This setting will not overwrite the contact owner for contacts who already exist in your account.

Advanced settings

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Advanced form settings are rarely used and are provided for developer use. The default setting for all of these options is unchecked, with the exception of “Conditions calculator for Ontraport Pages has run.” More information on that setting is below.

Override email address merge with cookie data: This forces the form to use the Ontraport cookie information rather than the email address entered on the form. This means the email entered, if new, will replace the contact record’s former email address and not create a new contact record. This is commonly used on opt-in forms to allow contacts to update their email address.

Pass CGI variables to Thank You page: Usually used in third party applications or by developers, this setting adds the values that the visitor submitted in their form to the URL of the thank you page in a format that can be read by programming languages or applications. This is most commonly used when there is some post-form processing they want to do with the information after the form is submitted.

Prevent tracking on form submissions: Use this option if you want to prevent tracking on your internal forms. Choosing not to track allows you and your team to submit info on behalf of your clients. This feature ensures your contacts’ record won’t show this form submission in their contact log. And it prevents your form from adding contact cookies to your browser.

Redirect after immediate automation and sequence steps run: This delays the thank you page from displaying until after running any immediate automation elements listed in the Manage Form Fills section. This option would be used only if those immediate elements are required for populating merge fields that are not present on the Ontraport Form itself (such as the result of a numeric field’s equation). 

Send Google Ecommerce Tracking Parameters to the Thank You page: This allows the Google ecommerce tracking pixel to gather order information.

If charge is successful, then use this card for all transactions in collections: Check this box if you are using an order form to update the credit card details for orders in collections. 

If charge is successful, also update all open orders with this card: This option will force an update of all open orders for subscriptions and payment plans to use the card entered instead of the card originally used for the order. This can be handy when customers need to change the credit card for all of their orders.

Don’t redirect visitor to thank you page until…

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Three of the four form setting options in this section are unchecked to maximize your form’s processing speed. “Conditions calculator for Ontraport pages has run” is checked by default to ensure your display conditions work as expected.

If you check any of these boxes, Ontraport will perform that action when a visitor submits the form. This will happen before redirecting your visitor to your thank you page. And this will also slow down your form’s processing speed, especially if you have a large account or a lot of automation running.

Limiting the number of actions in this section is a good idea. Slower forms result in visitors abandoning your pages or submitting the form twice.

We generally suggest keeping these boxes unchecked. However, there are some advanced use cases for selecting these form settings.

Automations added from this form have run: This will force any automations you add in the “Manage Form Fills” section to have all immediate steps run before redirecting the visitor to the thank you page. 

Rules on this form have run: This option will force any rules on the form to run before redirecting the visitor to the thank you page.

Conditions calculator for Ontraport Pages has run (checked by default): This setting ensures that any conditional blocks on the thank you page will reflect the data entered by the user in the form submission. We suggest keeping this checked unless you do not have any conditional blocks on your thank you page, which is a common setup.

All automation triggers account-wide have run: This will run all triggers in all your account’s automations to find any trigger updates from the form submission. If it finds any, the next steps of the automation will run before directing the visitor to your thank you page.