Contacts & Smartforms

Create website visitors directly in your Pearl CRM

Smartforms can be used for simple tasks such as submitting a customer enquiry or requesting a callback, or slightly more involved processes like requesting a brochure and receiving it as an automated response. Smartforms also have the option to create new contacts enabling your contact forms to become powerful lead generation tools.

 

Setting up a smartform

Choose Contacts > Setup > Smartforms. Here you will see all smartforms stored on your Pearl account, including the default 'main contact' and 'registration'. Click on the 'Create new smartform' link at the top of the page to show the smartforms edit panel at the bottom of the page. 

Page Information tab

Page Name
The name used to identify the Smartform within admin

Page Title
This title will be shown on the website at the top of the form.

Page Action
Contact Page
Acts as a form emailer, with the option to add contacts to Pearl.
Registration Page
Allows website visitors to register for access to restricted areas of your website. Outputs a password field as well as your chosen fields.

Registered Only
Restricts a contact form to be used only by registered users of your website.

Create PDF
Save the results of the form to PDF and attach to the Pearl contact who submitted it.

Button Text
The text shown on the Submit button at the bottom of the form.

Use reCAPTCHA
Smartforms can optionally use reCAPTCHA to prevent spam. We recommend you turn this feature on at all times - it will require the user to type two words displayed to them in a random text to verify they are, in fact, human

Email file when submitted
Automatically send a response to the form sender. This can be useful to send a confirmation that the form has been received.

Send to email address
This is the email address that the completed form is emailed to

Send email to Tag
You can also send the completed form to a defined group of people, such as a support or sales team. Don't select a tag that contains clients, otherwise the form submission details will be sent to them all!

Send SMS to mobile
If you require an SMS notification when a form is completed, enter a mobile number here. You'll need to make sure that you have SMS credits.

Send SMS to Tag
You can additionally send an SMS to a group of people, useful for quick response from a support team.

Redirect to
The website address that a user will be directed to having successfully completed the form. Leaving this blank will display the "post submission text" in place of the form once it's been submitted.

Contact Settings Tab

Add new contacts to database?
Ticking this box will take the details from your completed SmartForms and create new contacts in Pearl for them. You also need to ensure that a Tag is selected.

Select Tag
Assign a new contact to a selected Tag.

Create contacts on status
Assign a new contact to a given status.

Create contacts in department
Assign a new contact to a given department. Don't select this unless you're actually using multiple departments.

Fields Tab

By default this tab will be blank. To build up your form use the "Add field:" section to choose the data type you want to capture and the label you want to associate with it. As you add fields they will be displayed in the Fields tab, allowing you access to the following:

Label text
The descriptive text placed next to the form element. 

Code
The Pearl reference for the form data. 

Required
If this is ticked, that data element must be completed by the end user. Use with caution.

Type
The type of data being collected

Display Order
You can edit the order the form elements are displayed by entering numeric values in this field. Form elements are shown in numeric order, lowest first. Tip: use numeric values in 10's so that if you need to move an element at a later date you can slot items between existing fields and you don't need to renumber the whole form.

Delete
Remove the selected element from the SmartForm

Pre-Submission Text Tab

Using the text editor on this tab you can edit the text displayed on screen before the SmartForm is submitted. 

Post-Submission Text Tab

Using the text editor on this tab you can edit the text displayed on screen after the SmartForm is submitted. Note: If you have set a redirect URL in the Page Information tab your users will not see the Post-Submission text. 

External Link Tab

Pearl SmartForms can be embedded in to nearly any external website simply by adding the code shown on this tab to the third party site. In order to protect your form from being copied to anyone's website we recommend that you add the domain names of allowed websites to the white list.

White List of Allowed Websites
Only websites that match the whitelist will be allowed to display your SmartForm. Note: If no sites are listed, then any website can use the embed code to display your SmartForm.

Tip
When adding domains to the whitelist it is good practice to use as much of the domain name as possible e.g. if your website is at http://www.yoursite.com/ then use "www.yoursite.com" in the whitelist. If however you also need http://secure.yoursite.com/ to show your forms, it is perfectly reasonable to either add "secure.yoursite.com" to the whitelist, or by using "yoursite.com" in the whitelist you will enable both http://www.yoursite.com/ and http://secure.yoursite.com/ to show the form.

Ideas for SmartForms

Using your SmartForm for Brochure Requests
By using a Pearl SmartForm it is easy to automatically send information to someone after they have sent you some details. For example if you want to send out a brochure once a user has provided their email address and contact details, a Pearl SmartForm can do this for you by following these simple steps.

  1. Setup an email template that will form the response to your contact form. If you are offering a brochure or download then provide a link to the file from within the email.
  2. Create a new SmartForm to gather the information you require.
  3. On the "Page Information" tab set the "Email file when submitted:" drop down to the email template you set in step 1.
    Alternatively you can set the "Redirect to:" option of the SmartForm to direct the user to a download page within you website.
  4. Link to your new SmartForm (Pearl hosted websites) or embed the SmartForm on to your own website.
  5. Sit back and relax, as Pearl SmartForms automatically deal with your website enquiries.

 

Sample CSS

You can embed the styles for the Smartform within your website stylesheet, or you can insert this code on the same page as the Smartform:

<style>

#contact-message {}
#contact-form {  width:100%; }
.contact-fieldset { 
   padding:4px; 
   margin:4px; 
   border-bottom: 1px dotted #eee; }
.contact-fieldtext { 
   float:left; 
   display:block; 
   width:180px; 
   margin:4px; 
   text-align:right; 
   font-weight:bold; }
.contact-field { 
   display:block; 
   margin-left:200px; 
   margin-right: 0px; 
   margin-top:4px; 
   display:block; 
   padding-left:10px; }
.contact-field .inputText { border:1px solid #333333; padding:4px; }
.contact-foot { 
   clear:both; 
   margin-top:12px; 
   padding-left:220px; 
   padding-top:10px;}
.contact-foot .button { font-size:18px }

</style>

 

A smartform in use on a Weebly website