Forms are how you collect information from new leads and customers. Someone fills out your form, clicks submit, and Ontraport saves what they entered to their contact record. In this lesson, you'll learn how forms work, the kinds you can build, how Ontraport handles people it already knows, and what the main form settings do.
A form is a set of fields plus a submit button. When you build one, you choose the kind of record it fills, like Contacts, and then pick your fields. Each answer is saved to the matching field: the first name goes into First Name, and the email into Email. A form can create a new record or update one that already exists.
After someone submits, you decide what happens next. You can send them to a thank-you page. You can start an automation with the Contact submits a form trigger, to send a welcome email or a text, or to assign a task to someone on your team. And you can have Ontraport email someone the moment the form is filled out. Forms also power your tracking. A form submission is logged on the contact's record and identifies them with a cookie, so the tracking script can show you who's visiting your site and where they came from.
You can embed a form right on a page, alongside your content. Or you can show it as a pop-up, called a lightbox. A click-to-pop lightbox opens when someone clicks a button or image. An automatic lightbox appears on its own, based on time on the page, how far they've scrolled, or exit intent, which means they're about to leave. Exit intent only works on desktop. Pop-ups are built with Ontraport Forms, also called Ontraforms. Forms can also be single-step, collecting everything at once, or multi-step, splitting a long form into smaller pieces. Put the email field on the first step, so you can follow up even with people who don't finish.
By default, a form uses the email address to work out who someone is. If the email matches an existing contact, Ontraport updates that contact's record with the new answers instead of creating a second one. But if they use a different email address, Ontraport treats them as a new person and creates a new record, which can leave you with duplicates. The Updating existing records with forms lesson shows you how to handle this.
Every form has settings that control what happens after submit. On an Ontraport Page, click the form's Submit button, then Form Settings at the bottom of the left column. In an Ontraform, click the Smart Form or Order Form block, then Form Settings. The settings are the same in both.
First, opt-in. Single opt-in is the default. People are added as soon as they submit, and you can message them right away. Double opt-in required sends a confirmation email, and contacts stay unconfirmed until they click the link. Until then, they won't get messages from your automations. Double opt-in optional also sends the confirmation, but people who don't confirm can still get your messages.
Next, choose where people go after they submit: Ontraport's default thank-you page, or a landing page of your own. Check Conditional Redirect to send people to different pages based on their answers, like sending people interested in one product to that product's page. Rules run in order, and the first one that matches wins.
Under Notifications and Routing, Send Notification emails an address you choose every time the form is filled out. Make Contact Owner assigns new contacts to someone on your team. If you leave it blank, the account administrator becomes the owner. It never changes the owner of contacts who already exist.
On older accounts, you may see Manage Form Fills, which adds contacts to automations from the form itself. That's a legacy feature that new accounts don't have. Use an automation with the Contact submits a form trigger instead. You get better reporting and faster form processing.
Forms on Ontraport Pages can also have hidden fields. They save information the visitor never sees or types, like a fixed value, or details from a dynamic page, such as the title of the blog post they signed up on. There's also an Advanced section, with options that are rarely needed and mostly for developers. Multi-step forms and the advanced settings each get their own lesson later in this section.
So: a form saves what people enter to their record, identifies them for tracking, and starts your follow-up, and its settings control opt-in, redirects and notifications. Next up: when to use each form builder.