Good news! You can now add an email address to any existing or new form, so that whenever someone completes the form, you will receive the complete form data directly via email.
This feature is perfect for anyone using the forms feature to generate leads or receive inquiries that need timely responses.
Once setup, you will need to test this new feature. Email spam filters and corporate firewalls can be tricky and unfortunately these issues are outside of our control.
To test this feature, try completing a few forms yourself and then verify that the MoFuse emails are being received. If you don’t see the emails, check your spam or junk folders. You can also add MoFuse to your “safe senders” list, or take any other actions appropriate to the email server you’re using to receive these messages.
Finally, as a best practice and to make sure you’re not missing any data, we also recommend downloading the data from MoFuse to save as needed.
For our agencies or large businesses who may be receiving a high volume of completed forms or for whom email is not practical – please see this earlier post Forms API: Your Mobile Data Connection, for information on connecting with an API url.
Now MoFuse offers you a way to connect directly and instantly to data entered on any mobile form in realtime.
Available now, you can connect your “forms” API (using the URL of that API) to any mobile form you build and host with MoFuse. Whenever anyone enters data into your mobile form, that data will post immediately to the API (URL) you associate it with. This is the best way for you to ensure you are aware and responsive to any mobile form entries.
To use this feature with existing forms, click to “edit” the form. When creating a new form, you can enter the activate this feature during the forms creation process.
Leave us a message in our Help Center (click Support on the top toolbar) to let us know what you think, or if you have any questions.
When we converted to Forms 2.0 this weekend, we noticed a few best practices we thought worth sharing.
The best way to generate responses to your forms has to do with placement of the form. Sites that placed a link to their form and/or the actual form fields “above the fold” generated significantly higher response rates than those that required scrolling.
A recurring design issue we saw was that many mobile sites seemed to follow their website too closely, by including text on the forms page, above the actual data capture fields. Although this works fine on the website where you can view both text and data fields on the same screen (no scrolling) this doesn’t work well on the small screen where even just a few sentences requires visitors to scroll one or more times to get to the actual data capture fields.
If this sounds like your site, we recommend moving the sign-up right to the top of whatever page it appears, and placing descriptive copy below the data capture fields.
Another simple solution is to place just a link above the form fields (e.g. “Rules” or “Contest Details”) that sends users to a separate mobile page in case they do want to read more before entering information. (If you do this, don’t forget to link back to your form from this page!)
Our final recommendation is to nest the form under a Page Title element that makes it easy for visitors to jump directly to the form.
Wondering how other mobile sites are using Forms? Here are some of the different ways we saw forms being used across our network:
Case of the Day: Medical case studies, followed by a multiple choice question. Visitors can visit the mobile site the next day to read the answer to the medical case.
Sponsor surveys: sponsors pick 3-5 questions they want from the publisher’s mobile readers
We are extremely excited to let you know that we are about to launch Forms 2.0 – an all new version that works much like the easy layout of your mobile site. The new version will go live Saturday October 24, 2009 at 7pm EST.
Forms will be down on Saturday for about 1 hour (6pm – 7pm EST). After 7pm, our team will be rebuilding forms on a priority basis for those sites that are receiving live traffic. To minimize down-time for these sites, we are prioritizing the re-build for forms based on those we know are live and being actively promoted.
If you have a live campaign or event registration on your mobile site, please send an email to lmanfre@mofuse.com and we will make sure we handle this expeditiously for you. Likewise, if you prefer to rebuild your own form in version 2.0, please let us know and we’ll take you off our To-Do list.
We expect the re-builds to be completed by 7am, Sunday, October 25. As each form is rebuilt, it will begin collecting data immediately.
If you have not yet tried out our Form Builder but are thinking about it, we recommend waiting just a few more days. We know you’ll really like this new version!
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