Automation Example: Create an Internal Notification 🎬

Details

If you'd like staff to receive an email or SMS message when a contact fills in a form, you can create an internal notification to do so. 

While we have a basic list notification setting that you can use, the below automation allows for more advanced filtering options - such as notifying different staff members based on data the contact has entered on the form.

Some examples for filtering could be:

• If the contact has requested information about Product A, then you can direct the notification to different staff than if the contact selected Product B.
• If the contact's email is of a certain domain type (eg. .gov.au, or .edu.au) you can notify different staff than if the email address contained .com.au.
• Notifying different sales reps based on the region or country entered on the form.

What This Example Will Cover

In this automation example, we'll be building a workflow that notifies staff depending on what 'Interests' our users select on our subscription form, which is shown below. Our example form has three fields on it - called First name ('first_name'), Email ('email') and Interests ('interests').

How-to Guide

Before you begin, you'll need to have your subscribe form (with the various form fields) created. You'll also need to have a separate list containing details for staff members that you wish to receive the various notifications.

1. Let's begin by building the notification email. Select Messages from the sidebar.
2. Click New Message.
3. Use the template browser to choose a template - or start from a blank email.
4. Create your email as desired. While editing the text content of your email, you'll need to include the fields from the form as wildcards within your email so that the recipient of your notification email can see what the user submitted through the form.
   In the example below, note the use of 'campaign_' at the start of the wildcards. This is required so that the system knows to display the information entered by the user who completed the form - not the information relating to the staff member receiving the notification. So if your form field for the email address is called 'email', you would enter the wildcard as: %%campaign_email%%. For more details, refer to the section "A Quick Note" in our Wildcards article. In the case of our example form, our email would look like this:
   
5. Click Save.
   You may wish to save it into an 'Automations' folder, so its purpose is obvious to other users of the platform.
6. Next up, we'll build the automation. Select Automation from the sidebar.
7. Select the Advanced Automation tab.
8. Click New Workflow.
9. Give the workflow a name and click Save.
10. Click New Step.
11. In the first section, set the action as A trigger against the following List and select the folder & list that contains the subscription form that you wish to have notifications sent for.
12. In the second section, set the trigger as Subscribe.
13. Under Filter your Contacts section, click Add/Edit.
14. In the popup window, select the fields and criteria you'd like to use for filtering. In our case, we're only going to have this automation step run if the user selected 'Muffins' or 'Cupcakes' as their interests on the form.
    
15. Click OK.
16. In the third section, select Notify these Contacts, with the Message and click Select Contacts. Choose your staff list and select the staff that you wish to notify. Click Update Send List.
17. Use the Folder and Message dropdowns to select the Internal Lead Notification email that you saved in step 5.
    
18. In the fourth section, configure the timing of your lead notification.
19. Click Save. Repeat steps 10 - 19 if you wish to create additional automation steps - such as notifying different staff based on other form values submitted by the user.
20. Click Save on the automation setup screen.
21. Finally, click … next to the automation and choose Activate. Your automation is now ready and will run each time the form is completed and data meets your selected criteria.

Once you have completed the setup process, you can test the automation by filling in the form to make sure you receive the relevant emails.

Power Session Video

Check out our video recording below, from a Vision6 Power Session on this topic. The topic of this article is one of the examples presented in this video.