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Forms

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What Forms Do#

Forms collect what you need from visitors and clients: contact and quote requests, job details with photos, sign-ups, feedback and payments. Every submission is kept with its form, and a form can add the person to your CRM, tag them, open a deal, email you and the person, and start workflows. You will find forms under Marketing → Forms. If the menu item is missing, an admin can switch the Forms module on under Settings → Modules.

The Forms page has two tabs: Forms, the list of your forms with their category, status, number of fields and submissions, and Submissions, everything your forms have received.

Creating a Form#

  1. Go to Marketing → Forms and click New form.
  2. On Start a new form, pick Blank form or a starting point: Contact form, Lead capture, Feedback + rating, Client onboarding, Event registration or Newsletter signup. Everything is editable afterwards.
  3. The builder opens with three panes: Add a field on the left, the form itself in the middle, and its settings tabs on the right. Click a field type to add it and drag fields to reorder them. Select a field to edit its Label, Description (help text), Placeholder, Required switch, options and validation on the Field tab, or to show it only when an earlier answer matches with Only show this field conditionally on the Logic tab.
  4. Click the form's name at the top to rename it. Changes save as you go: the bar shows Saving… and then Saved.
  5. Choose Who can open it at the top of the Form tab: Public (anyone with the link, and visitors to a website it is embedded on) or Members only (only people signed in to your organization). A new form is Public.
  6. Click Publish. The form opens for the people you chose, and the builder says who ("Anyone with the link can open it"). A draft accepts no submissions and nobody can open it; the builder says so ("Draft — not accepting submissions"), and Unpublish takes a form back to draft.

Preview opens the form as visitors see it, and Copy link copies its address: /form/s/<slug> once you give it a URL slug on the Form tab, otherwise /form/<form id>.

Field Types#

  • Basics: Text, Textarea, Email, Phone, Number, URL and Password
  • Choice: Select, Radio and Checkbox
  • Date & time: Date, Time, and Date & time
  • Advanced: File upload, Signature, Rating, NPS (0–10), Range, Currency, Payment, Color and Hidden

A Payment field takes a payment through your own payment processor when the form is sent; see Embedded Payments on Forms. Hidden fields are covered below.

The Settings Tabs#

  • Design: the layout preset (Card, Clean or Cover), primary and background colors, a background image, the logo (Use organization logo fills in yours), the font, an optional welcome screen, the "Powered by" footer and custom CSS. The design travels with the form wherever it is embedded.
  • Form: Who can open it (Public or Members only), name, description, category, the form's Workspace and its URL slug.
  • After submit: the success message, an optional redirect URL, and the emails the form sends.
  • CRM: contacts, tags, field mapping and deals.
  • Security: spam and abuse controls.
  • Multi-step: Split into multiple steps, then choose Show progress bar, Allow back navigation, Save progress locally (in the visitor's browser) and the Step validation: each step on Next, or only on the final submit. Assign a field to a step on its Logic tab.

Who Can Open a Form#

Each form is Public or Members only, chosen at the top of the Form tab under Who can open it. The choice is saved at once, and the top bar shows it next to the form's status.

  • Public: anyone with the link can open and send the form, including visitors to a website it is embedded on. A new form is Public.
  • Members only: only people signed in to your organization can open it, for example an internal check-in form. Anyone else, visitors to your website included, sees "Access denied" at its link, in its embed and in the floating button. A published Members only form says so at the top of the builder, with a Make it public button, and the Forms list marks it Members only.

Preview opens the form in your own browser, where you are signed in, so it opens either way. To see what a visitor sees, open its link in a private window.

An A/B variant opens for the same people as its original: change the original and its variants follow. The Speed to lead job form is sent as personal links, which open for the person they were sent to whatever is chosen. Answers posted through Your own HTML arrive either way.

Where a Form Lives: Workspaces#

Each form belongs to a workspace, chosen on the Form tab under Workspace. A new form starts in the workspace you are working in. New people from the form are added to that workspace, its workflows run for them, and the form is listed there. Choose None and new people go to your organization's main workspace, while the form is listed in every workspace.

An agency that builds a form for a client sets the form's workspace to that client's, so the client's leads land in the client's workspace and start the client's workflows. You can move a form only to a workspace you work in. An A/B variant always follows its original form's workspace. Leads that arrived before a form was moved stay where they landed.

Putting a Form on Your Website#

A form on a website must be published and Public. A Members only form shows your visitors "Access denied", and Embed & share says so, with a Make it public button. The website builder's Form block and its popup offer only published Public forms, and name the Members only ones they leave out.

Open the form's ⋯ menu on the Forms list and choose Embed & share. Pick how the form should appear, then Copy the snippet and paste it into your website:

  • On the page: the form in a frame where you paste the code. Set its Width, Height, Corner radius and any Extra CSS; a preview shows the result.
  • Floating button: a button in a corner of every page that opens the form. Choose whether it Opens as An overlay on the page or A new window, the Corner, the Button text and the Button colour.
  • Your own HTML: keep the form you already have on your site. Point its action at the address shown, https://app.automatenexuscrm.com/functions/v1/form-template-submit/<slug or form id> (on an agency's own domain, that domain), and name each input as the table lists; name, email, phone and message are also understood as they stand. The answers get the same spam checks, notifications and contact matching as the form itself, and anything unrecognised is kept with the submission rather than dropped. Optionally fill in Send visitors to this page afterwards with a page on the same site; left empty, visitors see a thank-you page with your success message. File upload and Signature fields need the form's own controls and can't be collected this way.
  • React: a component for a React or Next.js site that frames the form.
  • Link: the form's direct address. Add a field's input name to the link to fill it in advance, for example ?email=….

On the Forms list, Copy URL copies the form's address and Copy embed code copies the On the page snippet with its standard size.

What an Embedded Form Passes On#

Every snippet passes the visit on to the form, so a lead is credited to the ad or campaign that brought it:

  • the ad click from the page's address (fbclid, gclid and the other ad networks' click IDs) and the ad's id;
  • the campaign tags, utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign and any other utm_*;
  • the page the form was sent from, and where the visitor came to that page from (the referrer).

These are recorded on the person's attribution touchpoint (see Multi-Touch Attribution Reporting), and when the Meta Conversions API is connected under Integrations → Automation, the ad click goes to Meta with the lead. On a Your own HTML form, the script under the form and the data-ax-visit attribute on the form tag add them as hidden inputs: keep both, or the answers still arrive without them. Forms placed on a site built with the CMS & Website Builder pass the visit on too.

A snippet copied before the visit was passed on still works, but without it: copy the snippet again from Embed & share to get it.

Hidden Fields#

A Hidden field never shows on the form; it records a value with the submission. It is filled from the form's address: add ?<field id>=value (the builder shows the exact parameter), or use the field's label written in lower case with underscores for spaces. Because embedded forms are handed the host page's click IDs and campaign tags, a hidden field labelled gclid, fbclid or utm_campaign is filled with the visitor's own value. Hidden fields are kept with the submission and are not mapped onto the contact.

Notifications and Emails#

Set up the emails on the After submit tab. They are sent from your own email, never the platform's: hosted email when your workspace has it, otherwise your connected Gmail or Outlook, an SMTP account in Mail settings, or your sending provider.

  • Email me on submission: emails the answers to the addresses in Recipients; left blank, the person who made the form gets it. Replying to it answers the person who filled in the form.
  • Send confirmation to submitter: emails the person a confirmation. Write the Confirmation subject and Confirmation message with {{first_name}}, {{name}} and {{form}}, and set Replies go to; left blank, the message thanks them for using the form and repeats your success message, and replies go to the mailbox it was sent from.

The ⋯ menu's Integrations sends submissions elsewhere: Webhooks posts each one to an address you add, API Keys creates keys for sending submissions in from your own code, and 3rd Party connects a Zapier Webhook URL (from a "Catch Hook" trigger) or a Slack Incoming Webhook URL.

Contacts, Tags and Deals#

On the CRM tab:

  • Sync to contacts (on by default) adds the person who sends the form to your CRM, or finds them by email in the form's workspace. For someone already in your CRM, a submission only fills in what their record is missing; it never replaces what your team knows.
  • Tags: everyone who sends the form gets these tags, whether they're new or already in your CRM. You can pick your workspace's tags and the organization-wide ones, or type a new name to create a tag. Tags are offered while Sync to contacts is on.
  • Field mapping: click Add mapping to send a field to a particular contact field, overriding the automatic matching by label.
  • Create a deal on submission: opens a deal on the person's account, at the Default stage (one of your pipeline's open stages) and Default value.
  • Follow-up automation: emails, texts, tasks and waits after a submission are built as a workflow with the Form Submitted trigger; Open Workflows takes you there. See Workflow Builder.

Where Submissions and Leads Land#

  • Forms → Submissions: every submission, searchable by name, email or form and filtered by form. Click one to read its answers; uploaded files open with View file.
  • People: a new person is added as a lead with the source Website form and the form's name, in the form's workspace. The submission appears on their timeline, and uploaded files go on their record.
  • New lead notification: a new lead notifies its owner, or your organization's owners and admins. Anyone can turn the New leads notifications off under Settings → Notifications.
  • Workflows: the submission starts the workspace's Form Submitted workflows, and a new lead, or someone still marked as a lead who sends it again, starts its New Lead workflows with the source Your own forms.
  • Deals: a deal on the person's account, when Create a deal on submission is on.

Spam Protection#

Every form has hidden honeypot protection. On the Security tab you can also set a Minimum fill time (seconds) (faster submissions are silently rejected as bots), a Rate limit (submissions / hour / IP), Blocked IPs, and Allowed domains to accept submissions only from your own sites.

Analytics and A/B Tests#

From a form's ⋯ menu, Analytics shows its views, starts, completions and conversion rate, submissions over time, field completion rates and devices, and AI insights suggests improvements. Create A/B variant makes a copy of the form to test against the original; set the share of visitors it gets in the % of traffic box on the variant's row, and compare the two in Analytics.

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