How to Send Confirmation Emails with Gravity Forms

Let’s walk through the basics of how we can send a confirmation email, to the person who submitted the form (if you require they enter thei email address), to the site administrator, or any other email address.

Access the Gravity Forms Area of Your WordPress Admin

You’ll need to, of course, have Gravity Forms installed and a paid license. If you’re a client of mine, this is taken care of for you.

  1. Log into WordPress and look on the left side of the screen for the black and white menu of options.
  2. Go to Forms.

screenshot demonstrating how to find Gravity Forms in your WordPress admin.

You’ll see a list of all of the forms on your site. When you hover over one, you’ll see more options.

screenshot showing the additional options that appear when you hover over a form in Gravity Forms

Hover over Settings and choose Notifications.

screenshot showing the settings dropdown in Gravity Form's list of forms

Edit the Existing Admin Notification

All forms get a notification to the site’s admin (which is set in Settings > General > Administration Email Address) by default. You’ll see it in a list (and it may be the only item in the list) like so:

screenshot of the initial gravity form's admin notiffication

Click on its name, or the Edit link that appears when you hover over the name.

Let’s walk through all of the fields here.

Name. This is for your own administrative purposes only, and is what shows up in the list you clicked on to get here. It won’t be shown to people who submit your form.

Send To. Here we have three options:

  • Enter Email. You can enter any email you’d like, or a comma separated list of addresses if you want multiple recipients. For example, either:
    • john@example.com
    • john@example.com, jill@example.com, jack@example.com
  • Select a Field. If you have an email address field in your form, you can use this option to send this notification to whatever email address the form submitter entered. This is useful for when you want to send an email to the person who submitted the form, such as a receipt or a confirmation that you got their message.
  • Configure Routing. This more advanced method can be used to send different emails to different people, depending on what was entered in the form.
    screenshot of route configuration For example, you might have a form that has a list of options like:

    • Medical
    • Clerical
    • Administrative
  • And you may wish to send all Medical inquiries to doc@example.com, and any other emails to admin@example.com.
    • In the Send to field, type in doc@example.com.
    • if then from the dropdown choose the name of the field that has the three choices listed above.
    • You can then choose from is, is not, greater than, and a host of other options to set how to evaluate the next field…
    • Enter value, in our example, would be Medical

From Name. This will show as the name in the recipient’s inbox.

From Email. This will be the email address they see.

Note that your from email should come from the same domain as your website. So if you’re using myawesomewebsite.com then your email address should be something@myawesomewebsite.com. Otherwise, your email may not be delivered.

Reply To. If you enter an address here, then when the recipient hits Reply in their inbox, it will go here instead of to the From Email field above.

BCC. You can copy others on the email, without the recipient seeing their email address in the email itself.

Subject. You can type whatever you want in here, but you can also use this box to add content from the form itself.

insert merge tag icon

This will give you a list of fields that they may have submitted, so you can incorporate them into your content.

screenshot showing the described dropdown

So, you might have a subject like Hey Jane, we’ve received your payment of $200.

By typing in “Hey” then choosing “First Name” from the dropdown, then typing, “we’ve received your payment of “, then choosing “Form Total.” Your options will be different depending on the fields in your form.

Message is the body of the email, and you can use those merge tags above there as well. Or you can just type in {all_fields} to show a table of everything they submitted.

Auto-formatting. This will keep your email looking nice, but you can disable it and write HTML in the Text tab if you’d prefer.

Enable conditional logic. If you check this, you can do things like we discussed with email routing above. For example, only send a notification if a person made a payment through the form.

Add a New Notification

You can basically have as many notifications as you’d like. On the left side of the options described above, look for this and click Notifications.

navigation within gravity forms settings

Then look for the Add New button at the top right of your list of existing notifications.

Adding a new one uses the same fields as we discussed above. Enjoy!

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