How to Set Up WordPress Form Notifications

Not sure how to set up form notifications in WordPress? This easy guide shows you how to trigger email notifications on submitted forms.

Approximate read-time: 6 minutes

If you want to set up WordPress form notifications, it’s all about choosing the right form builder.

Today we are going to show you how easy it is to set up form notifications using Formidable Forms. Full disclosure - it’s our very own WordPress plugin! But we’ve worked really hard to create an online form solution that makes sending notifications easy.

Why use Formidable for WordPress form notifications?

So why choose Formidable? Here’s the first reason: it’s free! Sure - we have a bunch of advanced settings that can give your form notifications some real power. But that doesn’t mean you can’t benefit from our free features immediately.

Formidable Forms is the best WordPress Form Builder plugin. Get it for free!

In fact, in our email notification tutorial today, we will use Formidable’s free version. But before that, let’s take a quick look at some of the notification features of our premium plugin. When it comes to email autoresponders & notifications, there are a lot of possibilities!

Conditional logic & form action automation

Do you want to send different notifications based on different form submissions? Formidable can do that! Use conditional logic and form action automation to send notifications exactly the way you want.

Imagine you have a sales inquiry form where customers can contact different departments. When a user submits their inquiry, you can create different emails to send from different email addresses. This allows you to create one form, with several tailored notifications inside. No coding required!

SMTP integration

Experiencing SMTP errors? WordPress not sending emails from your site properly? An SMTP plugin like WP Mail SMTP can help a lot. And guess what? It plugs directly into Formidable Forms with almost no setup time required!

Learn more: How to Use the WP Mail SMTP Plugin in WordPress

More Integrations & add-ons

Are you using an email platform like GetResponse, ActiveCampaign, or MailChimp? Formidable Forms can connect to dozens of external apps directly. When a user submits a form, send the form data from your site to your platform of choice!

That means you can trigger emails from your site and your connected platforms however you want. If you want to take your automations even further, you can do so using our Zapier add-on.

Learn more: WordPress Forms for Zapier

SMS text message notifications

Formidable Forms can totally replace a WordPress SMS Plugin and send form notifications as text messages. All you need a Formidable premium plan and our Twilio add-on.

When a user submits a form, you can trigger an SMS text that gets sent directly to their phone!

Learn more: How to send SMS text messages from your WordPress forms

How to set up form notifications in WordPress

Let’s get into our step-by-step guide. Before we get started, create a form with an email address field at the very least. You can create any kind of form, like a contact form for example.

We need the email address field in case you want your notification to send to email addresses entered into your form. But you can also send email notifications to your colleagues or any email address you choose.

The following steps can be found in more detail in our knowledgebase article about email notifications.

Once in your form, click on Settings → Actions & Notifications. You’ll notice that an email notification is created by default. Click on it and we can begin editing your notification settings.

In Formidable premium, it’s possible to send an email based on the following triggers:

Entry is Created
Draft is Saved
Entry is Updated, Deleted, or Imported

If you are running the free version, these options will be hidden and the form action will be triggered when an entry is created.

Enter one or more email addresses in the To box. Depending on what kind of form you are using, who you send the email to will change. By default, it will be the admin email.

You may want to send an email to your internal team, or, you can send an email directly to the person who filled out the form. Or you could send multiple email notifications! You can CC & BCC people too.

You’ll also want to include the sender's name and email address in the From box. You can also automatically fill these boxes with data from form fields.

Next, we’ll add an email subject line in the Subject box.

Finally, write your email in the Message box.

For example, clicking on the 'First Name' field would insert the id of that field, [173], into the message content. The content in the 'Message' box could look something like this:

For more info on how to customize the email check out this article: Customize the email message.

After all that is done, go ahead and fill out your form to test if all the emails are properly sent. That’s it! You’ve configured your email notifications.

Wrapping up

That’s really all there is to it. Of course, there are plenty of other form building options out there. Many of them are also able to handle WordPress form notifications too. But we really believe our free form builder plugin is stronger than most!

Don’t believe us? We’ve compared ourselves to our top competitor in this Gravity Forms alternatives post. Take a look and see for yourself! Here’s a hint before you go: Gravity Forms doesn’t have a free plugin 🙂

We hope you’ve enjoyed today’s article. Please follow us on the Formidable blog for all things WordPress & more! Bye for now.