In our opinion, Gravity Forms is the best form builder plugin for WordPress. It’s been around a long time, it’s flexible, highly customizable, and incredibly powerful.
At the heart of any web form is the need to communicate in some way with your users. Why else would you ask them to submit a form? More often than not, a form submission is the beginning of a conversation that moves to some other communication method, such as email.
There are many different ways you can respond to form submissions in Gravity Forms, with directly sending an email being the most common method. Responding to users over email isn’t the only way, though. In this post, we’ll look at some different ways to respond to submissions right inside Gravity Forms, without having to fire up your email client.
Replying with Entry Notes
Gravity Forms submissions are called “entries.” When you see the word “entry” used in Gravity Forms, it just means a particular instance of a form submission. If Jane Smith submits your contact form, that record is saved as an entry. Gravity Forms allows you to manage and view individual entries under the form’s entries section.
In each entry, there is a feature called “Notes.”
Notes are very handy, especially if you want to leave an internal note about an entry that’s intended your eyes only (you don’t want the submitter to see it). You do also have the ability to send that note to the user who submitted the form.
Canned Replies
Building on the concept of entry notes is Canned Replies. With Canned Replies for Gravity Forms, you can set up any number of canned responses, and quickly select which one to send to the submitter. Like notes, it also stores a record for each reply you send to the user. It even counts the number of times you’ve used a canned reply, so you can make decisions about which questions you’re being asked most frequently.
If you’re using an advanced integration with the Gravity Forms REST API, Canned Replies can also send out canned responses when an entry is updated via the API.
There you have it! Just a couple simple ways you can reply to form submission in Gravity Forms without having to directly send emails.