Are you interested in sending confirmation emails to users who submit forms on your website?
Confirmation emails are an excellent approach to inform users that you have received their message and will contact them shortly.
In this tutorial, we’ll demonstrate how to send confirmation emails to users following the submission of a WordPress form (step by step).
Why Would You Want to Create Automated Confirmation Emails in WordPress?
When a user fills out a contact form or any form on your WordPress site, confirmation emails are sent.
It’s a great gesture to send an automated confirmation email. Additionally, it notifies your users that you have received their information. This also enables your users to double-check their entries for errors.
There are numerous reasons why you should configure WordPress form confirmation emails:
l Permits you to communicate with your subscribers
l Can provide useful follow-up material, such as links and tutorials
l Allows you to verify that the email is genuine.
l Can confirm the subscription to an email newsletter and initiate an autoresponder cycle.
l If you’re selling something, this provides an opportunity to upsell or cross-sell.
l It’s excellent for email deliverability.
l The nice part is that configuring a WordPress form submission email is simple.
Configuring Confirmation Emails Following Submission of a WordPress Form
In this tutorial, we’ll demonstrate how to send a WordPress confirmation email using the WPForms plugin. It is the most popular contact form plugin for WordPress, with over 4 million installations.
If you’re on a budget, you can utilize the free version of WPForms Lite, which includes email confirmation functionality.
The Pro version, on the other hand, has extra capabilities such as conditional logic forms, more templates, order forms, and interaction with email marketing systems.
To begin, install and activate the WPForms plugin. For additional information on how to install a plugin, please check our step-by-step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.
Once the form builder plugin is installed and activated, a new WPForms tab will appear on the left-hand side of your WordPress dashboard
If your site does not currently have a form, you will need to build one. We have a comprehensive explanation on how to develop a contact form in WordPress that you can use as a starting point.
Following that, you’ll want to configure a WordPress confirmation email. This email will be sent automatically to inform your users that their form submission was received successfully
Navigate to WPForms » Settings » Notifications to accomplish this
You’ll notice that email notifications have been enabled by default.
If you do not wish to receive notifications, you may disable this option.
Keep the toggle for notifications enabled.
To send an automated confirmation email, you must leave this setting enabled.
Following that, we’ll customize the form fields to specify who we want to receive our emails from.
By default, the admin email Smart Tag admin email will be used. This is the email address that you used to create your WordPress site. This will automatically deliver all form submissions to your mailbox.
To ensure that form responses are also distributed to your users, you’ll need to update the email field with a new address. This is analogous to how blind carbon copy (BCC) is used in normal email.
Simply click on the ‘Show Smart Tags’ option directly to the right of the ‘Send to Email Address’ field to accomplish this.
Enter an email address in the field
From the drop-down option, select ‘Email’.
This identifies the email address that a user enters into a WordPress form. This email address will be used by the plugin to send the confirmation email.
Take note that a comma is required between the two Smart Tags.
Send to the user’s and administrator’s email addresses
Following that, it’s time to update your email’s subject line.
The default subject line for emails is “New Entry.” You’ll want to alter this to something more user-friendly.
Default subject line for emails
For instance, if you have a straightforward contact form, you might edit the subject line to “Thanks for Reaching Out!” Or, if the email is a confirmation of an order, “Thank You for Your Order!”
To modify it, erase the text that now appears in the box beneath ‘Email Subject’ and replace it with your new subject line.
Modify the subject line of an email
Now you’re ready to update the email address associated with the user name.
It makes sense to use the name of your business or website here.
Simply alter the wording in the ‘From Name’ field.
Change the email address associated with the name
Following that is the ‘From Email’ field.
You can leave this field blank, and the email address will remain the same as your admin email address.
Administrator through email
Following that, you’ll want to edit the ‘Reply-To’ field to enable users to respond to your automated email.
If this field is left blank, the email will be the same as the default administrator email.
Respond to an email
While changing it is not required, there are instances when you’ll want the Reply-To email to be different than your usual email address.
For instance, if you have a photography website and a form for new clients to seek a quote, you may like for these emails to be sent to a separate email address.
Customizing your email message is the final step.
You can provide a message in the ‘Message’ box that will be sent to everyone who submits the form. Additionally, you can alter the appearance of plain text emails by including HTML.
Personalized email message
Additionally, you can include all fields Smart Tag, which will append the user-submitted data to the email.
Personalize your email message by including all fields
Congratulations! You’ve installed and configured WPForms successfully added a form to your site, and configured an automated email confirmation message.
Troubleshooting the WordPress Email Not Sending Issue
One significant difficulty that many WordPress users have is the website’s inability to send WordPress emails. WordPress sends emails via PHP, which may be mistaken for spam. If this occurs with your emails, they will either never reach the inbox of your users or will end up in the spam bin.
This is why we strongly advise everyone to use SMTP for email sending in WordPress. An SMTP plugin provides an additional layer of security by sending emails over an official mail server.
We recommend that you use WP Mail’s SMTP. It integrates well with WPForms and is the best SMTP WordPress plugin available.
We hope this post demonstrated how to send confirmation emails following the submission of a WordPress form.
