How to Advertise Your Form to a Mailing List
A number of users take advantage of our flexible web form platform to advertise a FormSmarts-hosted survey form or event registration form by email.
There are a few things to keep in mind if you wish to include a form URL in a newsletter or mailing campaign:- as specified in the terms of use, FormSmarts only allows advertising of a form URL by email for strict opt-in mailing lists
- you must be a verified form owner
- you may only reference the form by including its URL, and must not attempt to embed the form in an HTML email
If you intend to email more than 1,000 subscribers, ask for a permission beforehand. We may ask you to schedule your mailing at a specific time if the expected click-stream is high. When contacting FormSmarts, please indicate:
- the rough number of subscribers of your list
- whether this is a one off or recurring mailing
- the date/time of your mailing(s)
- whether advertising the form is the main purpose of the mail
- whether you offer any incentives for form submissions
Posted on Tuesday, 13 May, 2008 at 16:53 in html-form
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Tags: web-forms, howto
Building Successful Web Forms, Part 1
Web forms play a key role for visitor (and customer) interaction on many sites. However, many web designers don't realize that there may be huge differences in form abandonment ratio, depending on how well the form is designed. In this post and follow ups, we'll give you some tips to help you make your web forms an effective communication channel.
Always provide form filling instructions.
Don't assume that all of your visitors will understand how to submit a form without further explanation. Short and clear form filling instructions can reduce form abandonment, and increase the quality of the information collected.- include a call to action phrase like "Please fill out this form to contact XYZ"
- indicate the purpose of the form and the recipient of the information collected
- if applicable, confirm that you will reply, and give an indication of the time frame
Select the correct data type for each input field.
Because of necessary form validation, choosing and incorrect data type may prevent a form user from submitting valid information. When this happens, it is likely to lead to form abandonment.For example, if you specify that a form field can only contain a Number, it may not work for a phone number. 1233456789 will work, but not 123-345-6789. So use the Phone type instead. In many cases, the form builder will pre-select a type for you, but not always. Read more about selecting an input field data type in the form builder documentation.
Choose the most appropriate input field widget.
Don't restrict yourself to text boxes and drop-down lists. Take advantage of the full range of HTML form fields with radio buttons and checkboxes. Learn when to use each one.Using a drop-down list for a yes/no question will slow down the form user, and increase the chances (s)he gives up. Use radio buttons instead. Read tips about choosing the best input field widget in the form builder documentation.
Brand your forms for instant visual recognition.
Always brand your web forms with your own logo. This helps visitors recognize at first sight who they are about to send information to.Posted on Tuesday, 06 May, 2008 at 18:21 in html-form
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Tags: web-forms, form-builder, howto
Getting Help on FormSmarts
At FormSmarts, we are pleased to let you use our web form platform absolutely free. However, whenever we have to help you in person, we ask you to spend a few minutes publicizing FormSmarts, before we take some of our time to help you.
- post a video on YouTube showing how you use FormSmarts on your website, blog, MySpace, etc.
- post a video on YouTube about a specific FormSmarts feature
- write a review on HotScripts
- write a review on CGI Resource Index
- write a review on Scripts.com
- post a substantial comment about a FormSmarts demo video on YouTube
Posting a video gets you manual ownership verification and logo validation of all your websites. Please write at least two or three lines per review.
About Writing Reviews & Comments
We ask you to write reviews and comments that are useful to readers, not spam. If you're using FormSmarts, there must be reasons: talking about features you like about FormSmarts is probably a good start.Posted on Thursday, 17 April, 2008 at 03:15 in html-form
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Will FormSmarts Remain Free?
A few people asked if FormSmarts will remain free. Although we may some day offer FormSmarts as commercial service with SLA and additional features, the basic service will remain free.Note that we will need to charge a one-off fee for some services. For example, we will soon allow users to upload a custom website logo to appear on their web forms. Each image will require human validation, so we'll need to charge a small fee for this. We will however lift the fee for users who have referred friends/site visitors to FormSmarts, wrote reviews about us on relevant sites, posted a video about using FormSmarts on Youtube, etc.
Posted on Thursday, 24 January, 2008 at 16:23 in html-form
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Tags: web-forms
Show a Form Owner Name on Your Forms
Increase user confidence by letting us verify you own the websites you are using with FormSmarts. FormSmarts will then display a verified form owner name in the top-right corner of all your forms.To verify your sites, sign in to FormSmarts, and choose the Verified Websites option in the Settings tab. The form owner name can currently only be a verified web hostname. We will soon also support verified personal or company names. More details here.
Posted on Saturday, 12 January, 2008 at 06:35 in html-form
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Tags: upcoming, web-forms, privacy
