Learn all the form settings and advanced features in Ontraport Forms, from opt-in settings to notifications and more.
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Feature updates: Since this video was produced, you can now insert rich text fields on your forms. This enhances your visitors’ experience by allowing them to format text in your forms with links, bolding, bullets, and more. You can also upload files and images on your forms.
Learn more about rich text fields here and about files and images on forms here.
Learn more about rich text fields here and about files and images on forms here.
Home > Ontraport for marketing > Forms > Form settings and advanced features
Form settings and advanced features
You'll learn:
- Where to find form settings
- Opt-in settings options
- How to send contacts somewhere else after they fill out your form
- How to set up notifications and routing
- Where and why to set up hidden fields
- Advanced features of form settings
Sam Flegal
Form settings and advanced features
Learn all the form settings and advanced features in Ontraport Forms, from opt-in settings to notifications and more.
- Where to find form settings
- Opt-in settings options
- How to send contacts somewhere else after they fill out your form
- How to set up notifications and routing
- Where and why to set up hidden fields
- Advanced features of form settings
Course Instructor
Sam Flegal
Related resources
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Transcript
If you watched our other videos about Ontraport Forms, you know your way around them pretty well.
In this video, we’re going deeper. I’ll show you all the form settings and advanced features in Ontraport Forms that can help make a seamless experience for your customers.
Let’s go!
First, Let’s look at Where to find Form Settings.
Depending on which form builder you’re using, you’ll find form settings in different places.
If you’re using forms on Ontraport Pages, click the “Submit” button on your form. You’ll see the form settings on the left-hand side, at the bottom of the element palette.
If you’re using Ontraport Forms, you’ll need to click on your Smart Form block, and you should see “Form Settings,” which will appear at the bottom of your pallet.
The form settings for Legacy Forms are in the top right of your screen. They’re between the “Design” tab and the “Publish” button.
Now let’s get into the nitty-gritty details of Form Settings.
“Opt-In Settings” can help you make sure a contact has given you a legit email address which keeps spammers from cluttering your list with nonsense. This is helpful because it prevents you from sending anything to those bad addresses, which would hurt your mailing reputation.
I’m going to jump around a bit while I show you the next few settings.
“Double Opt-in Required.” Your contacts will get a confirmation email from you. With this setting, they cannot receive marketing emails from you until they click the confirmation link in that email.
If you use this setting, interested leads won’t hear from you unless they confirm their opt-in by clicking that link.
So we suggest only using this setting if you’re in a high-risk industry or have experienced issues with spam submissions in the past.
For more information about high-risk industries and email delivery, take a look at the legal page.
With the “Single Opt-In” setting, your contact is opted in and can get marketing emails from your Ontraport account. No additional confirmation is required. This is the default option and for most accounts, this setting is just fine.
With the “Double Opt-in Optional” setting, your contacts will get a confirmation email asking them if they for sure want to hear from you. But they’ll still receive marketing emails from you in the meantime.
This one’s a good compromise between the more strict “Double Opt-in Required” setting and the looser “Single Opt-in” setting. If you’re worried about the quality of your list but don’t want to exclude potential leads, this is a good in-between choice. You know, like wearing socks with sandals because you can’t decide on open-toed or close-toed. No? Ok, moving on.
The “Send contacts here” setting controls where a contact goes after they click the “Submit” button on your form. The button submits the information to Ontraport and takes the contact to one of the following four locations:
There’s the “Use Default Thank You page.” This will send contacts to Ontraport’s default thank you page. This is a good solution for testing your form to make sure it’s working. But it isn’t necessarily useful for any customer-facing funnels. It’s an Ontraport-branded page and doesn’t reference your business at all.
The “Use this Landing Page” setting sends your contacts to a thank you page you’ve created.
The “Pop Ontraport Form lightbox” setting is a great option if you want to show a pop-up after someone fills out your form.
Lastly, we have the “Custom URL” setting. Use this whenever you want to send someone to a URL that isn’t an Ontraport-hosted page.
Note that if you’re using either of the double-opt in settings, there’s a “Send contacts who are already opted-in to a different page” setting.
This will send contacts who already confirmed their opt-in in the past to a different thank you page when they submit their form this time. Basically, you can skip sending people you already know to the opt-in confirmation page.
If you use either of the double opt-in settings, you’ll need to choose a confirmation email to send contacts. Select the email from the dropdown menu under the “Double Opt-In Optional” or “Double Opt-In Required” settings.
Moving on to Conditional redirects.
Conditional redirects let you send leads and customers to different landing pages and custom URLs.
These are different from the “Send contacts here” setting we talked about before. Conditional redirects are based on the information a person adds to your form. That means you send contacts to the pages that are most relevant to them. We have a whole separate video on how to use this feature to increase conversion rates.
Below this is “Manage Form Fills.” This section lets you add contacts to automations you’ve already created. Contacts who submit your form are added to the automation through the default trigger on your automation map.
This happens whenever contacts successfully submit your form. So it’s important to set up your automation and configure this trigger correctly if you’re going to use it.
Take a look at our video series on automations for more details about automation triggers.
But most users prefer to keep their automations in the automation maps and add contacts with triggers rather than adding them here from forms. So, normally you’ll leave this setting blank.
Next is “Notification and Routing.”
When someone fills out your form, you might want to send a notification to a specific person, like a team member.
To send a quick email to someone with the info that a visitor asked for in your form, add a notification email address here.
Next, choose who the default owner of new contacts will be.
Assigning different contact owners means you can send automated emails that look like they’re from the contact owner. For example, this is useful if you want emails to look like they’re from a particular contact’s sales rep.
Or, maybe you want to use the owner field to limit which contacts each Ontraport account user can see. Then you’ll set up permissions that let users see only the contacts they actually own.
To spread out new leads among several contact owners, you can use a lead router, which we talk about in our Ontraport for Sales course.
Next up — our Advanced settings.
Each setting in the “Advanced” section addresses unique situations that can come up with forms. Most of the time you won’t need to worry about these, but let’s go through each of them anyway.
The “Override email address merge with cookie data” feature helps in certain situations to merge contact records when the same person fills out the form twice. We have a video on merging contacts that explains when this is useful, which, frankly, isn’t often. Leave it unchecked in most cases.
The “Pass CGI variables to Landing/Thank you page” setting puts form data into the URL of your thank you page.
Let's say your form collects someone’s email and first name and sends them to a page at “yoursite.com/thankyou.” If you check this box, it will send them to a link that looks like this.
Ontraport and other systems can use that information in the URL for various tricks, such as merging the information onto a page, like this.
Ok, moving on. If you check the box saying “Redirect after immediate campaign and sequence steps run,” your contacts will be taken to the thank you page AFTER any initial automation elements are done running. This will work for automations that are added up here in the form settings.
This is useful if your thank you page relies on updates to the contact record through automations.
Let's say you have conditional blocks on the thank you page that rely on an automation updating the contact record after they submit your form. You have to wait for those automations to run before landing them on the thank you page.
This will slow down your visitors’ browsing experience, so don’t turn it on unless you really need to.
If your form is an order form, you have some additional advanced options:
One is “Send Google Ecommerce Tracking Parameters to Landing/Thank you page.” If you’re using Google Ecommerce tracking, you must check this box every time. This will put the order information in the URL of the thank you page so Google can see it and track it for you.
Another is “If charge is successful, then use this card for all transactions in collections.” If you want your contacts to update their credit card information for outstanding transactions, check this box. It will update the card on file and charge all outstanding transactions to that card.
And we have “If charge is successful, also update all open orders with this card.” Let's say your contacts are on a subscription or payment plan. This setting ensures the credit card you just entered will also be used for those subscriptions in the future.
Finally, let’s go over “Hidden Fields.” These are pretty cool because they let you put fields on your form that people can’t see. People tend to use this feature for two main reasons:
One, to capture data from the URL that your contacts did not submit themselves. This captures marketing and other custom tracking information.
And two, to set up multi-step forms and merge data together without making contacts repeat themselves. We talk about this more in our “Multi-step forms” video.
That’s it for forms in Ontraport. Thanks for sticking with me!
If you’re ready to move on, next we’re going to talk about setting up pages in Ontraport. Check it out in our Pages video series.
In this video, we’re going deeper. I’ll show you all the form settings and advanced features in Ontraport Forms that can help make a seamless experience for your customers.
Let’s go!
First, Let’s look at Where to find Form Settings.
Depending on which form builder you’re using, you’ll find form settings in different places.
If you’re using forms on Ontraport Pages, click the “Submit” button on your form. You’ll see the form settings on the left-hand side, at the bottom of the element palette.
If you’re using Ontraport Forms, you’ll need to click on your Smart Form block, and you should see “Form Settings,” which will appear at the bottom of your pallet.
The form settings for Legacy Forms are in the top right of your screen. They’re between the “Design” tab and the “Publish” button.
Now let’s get into the nitty-gritty details of Form Settings.
“Opt-In Settings” can help you make sure a contact has given you a legit email address which keeps spammers from cluttering your list with nonsense. This is helpful because it prevents you from sending anything to those bad addresses, which would hurt your mailing reputation.
I’m going to jump around a bit while I show you the next few settings.
“Double Opt-in Required.” Your contacts will get a confirmation email from you. With this setting, they cannot receive marketing emails from you until they click the confirmation link in that email.
If you use this setting, interested leads won’t hear from you unless they confirm their opt-in by clicking that link.
So we suggest only using this setting if you’re in a high-risk industry or have experienced issues with spam submissions in the past.
For more information about high-risk industries and email delivery, take a look at the legal page.
With the “Single Opt-In” setting, your contact is opted in and can get marketing emails from your Ontraport account. No additional confirmation is required. This is the default option and for most accounts, this setting is just fine.
With the “Double Opt-in Optional” setting, your contacts will get a confirmation email asking them if they for sure want to hear from you. But they’ll still receive marketing emails from you in the meantime.
This one’s a good compromise between the more strict “Double Opt-in Required” setting and the looser “Single Opt-in” setting. If you’re worried about the quality of your list but don’t want to exclude potential leads, this is a good in-between choice. You know, like wearing socks with sandals because you can’t decide on open-toed or close-toed. No? Ok, moving on.
The “Send contacts here” setting controls where a contact goes after they click the “Submit” button on your form. The button submits the information to Ontraport and takes the contact to one of the following four locations:
There’s the “Use Default Thank You page.” This will send contacts to Ontraport’s default thank you page. This is a good solution for testing your form to make sure it’s working. But it isn’t necessarily useful for any customer-facing funnels. It’s an Ontraport-branded page and doesn’t reference your business at all.
The “Use this Landing Page” setting sends your contacts to a thank you page you’ve created.
The “Pop Ontraport Form lightbox” setting is a great option if you want to show a pop-up after someone fills out your form.
Lastly, we have the “Custom URL” setting. Use this whenever you want to send someone to a URL that isn’t an Ontraport-hosted page.
Note that if you’re using either of the double-opt in settings, there’s a “Send contacts who are already opted-in to a different page” setting.
This will send contacts who already confirmed their opt-in in the past to a different thank you page when they submit their form this time. Basically, you can skip sending people you already know to the opt-in confirmation page.
If you use either of the double opt-in settings, you’ll need to choose a confirmation email to send contacts. Select the email from the dropdown menu under the “Double Opt-In Optional” or “Double Opt-In Required” settings.
Moving on to Conditional redirects.
Conditional redirects let you send leads and customers to different landing pages and custom URLs.
These are different from the “Send contacts here” setting we talked about before. Conditional redirects are based on the information a person adds to your form. That means you send contacts to the pages that are most relevant to them. We have a whole separate video on how to use this feature to increase conversion rates.
Below this is “Manage Form Fills.” This section lets you add contacts to automations you’ve already created. Contacts who submit your form are added to the automation through the default trigger on your automation map.
This happens whenever contacts successfully submit your form. So it’s important to set up your automation and configure this trigger correctly if you’re going to use it.
Take a look at our video series on automations for more details about automation triggers.
But most users prefer to keep their automations in the automation maps and add contacts with triggers rather than adding them here from forms. So, normally you’ll leave this setting blank.
Next is “Notification and Routing.”
When someone fills out your form, you might want to send a notification to a specific person, like a team member.
To send a quick email to someone with the info that a visitor asked for in your form, add a notification email address here.
Next, choose who the default owner of new contacts will be.
Assigning different contact owners means you can send automated emails that look like they’re from the contact owner. For example, this is useful if you want emails to look like they’re from a particular contact’s sales rep.
Or, maybe you want to use the owner field to limit which contacts each Ontraport account user can see. Then you’ll set up permissions that let users see only the contacts they actually own.
To spread out new leads among several contact owners, you can use a lead router, which we talk about in our Ontraport for Sales course.
Next up — our Advanced settings.
Each setting in the “Advanced” section addresses unique situations that can come up with forms. Most of the time you won’t need to worry about these, but let’s go through each of them anyway.
The “Override email address merge with cookie data” feature helps in certain situations to merge contact records when the same person fills out the form twice. We have a video on merging contacts that explains when this is useful, which, frankly, isn’t often. Leave it unchecked in most cases.
The “Pass CGI variables to Landing/Thank you page” setting puts form data into the URL of your thank you page.
Let's say your form collects someone’s email and first name and sends them to a page at “yoursite.com/thankyou.” If you check this box, it will send them to a link that looks like this.
Ontraport and other systems can use that information in the URL for various tricks, such as merging the information onto a page, like this.
Ok, moving on. If you check the box saying “Redirect after immediate campaign and sequence steps run,” your contacts will be taken to the thank you page AFTER any initial automation elements are done running. This will work for automations that are added up here in the form settings.
This is useful if your thank you page relies on updates to the contact record through automations.
Let's say you have conditional blocks on the thank you page that rely on an automation updating the contact record after they submit your form. You have to wait for those automations to run before landing them on the thank you page.
This will slow down your visitors’ browsing experience, so don’t turn it on unless you really need to.
If your form is an order form, you have some additional advanced options:
One is “Send Google Ecommerce Tracking Parameters to Landing/Thank you page.” If you’re using Google Ecommerce tracking, you must check this box every time. This will put the order information in the URL of the thank you page so Google can see it and track it for you.
Another is “If charge is successful, then use this card for all transactions in collections.” If you want your contacts to update their credit card information for outstanding transactions, check this box. It will update the card on file and charge all outstanding transactions to that card.
And we have “If charge is successful, also update all open orders with this card.” Let's say your contacts are on a subscription or payment plan. This setting ensures the credit card you just entered will also be used for those subscriptions in the future.
Finally, let’s go over “Hidden Fields.” These are pretty cool because they let you put fields on your form that people can’t see. People tend to use this feature for two main reasons:
One, to capture data from the URL that your contacts did not submit themselves. This captures marketing and other custom tracking information.
And two, to set up multi-step forms and merge data together without making contacts repeat themselves. We talk about this more in our “Multi-step forms” video.
That’s it for forms in Ontraport. Thanks for sticking with me!
If you’re ready to move on, next we’re going to talk about setting up pages in Ontraport. Check it out in our Pages video series.
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