Emails to Clients That Turned Into Blog Posts*
An Ongoing Series
Every so often, we respond to an email from one of our website clients that asks a great question or covers a common experience. We’re sharing them here on our site so you can benefit from a little Ogre Knowledge, too!
Have your own great question?
One of our highly-valued local website design and development clients, M., was experiencing a frustrating result with form notifications in her inbox: Gmail was grouping every notification from her website’s contact form into one big, unwieldy thread.
As the marketing manager of a busy renewable energy sector firm, M. received a lot of leads through the form. Organizing and searching for specific emails was taking more time than she had to spend.
M. reached out to us for advice, and we were able to come up with a quick solution, using the built-in functions of Gravity Forms, our preferred forms solution since 2016. Since she was particularly adept at managing the systems we set up on the custom WordPress website, we also provided tips on how she could refine the settings further to help her stay organized and efficient.
Good morning, M.,
Great question! You are totally on the right track: making the form notifications unique to each entry will keep them from being grouped in threads by your email client (looks like Gmail from your screenshots). Of course, you can turn off grouping emails for your whole inbox (conversation view, I think it’s called), but generally, I find grouping is a good thing — when it does what we want.
As it seems you already know, Gmail is keying in on the subject line of these emails to group them, so I added a few short codes to the Admin Notification for the Contact Form.
In the Subject Field of the Admin Notification settings, I used the “{…}” button (Insert Merge Tags) found just to the right of the field to change the following:
- Old subject line: New submission from {form_title}
- Since the form title doesn’t change from entry to entry, the subject text was always the same.
- New subject line: New submission from {Name (First):1.3} {Name (Last):1.6} via {form_title}
- This new subject line will include the sender’s name, and only emails from the same person will be grouped in your Gmail inbox.
If you need to split the emails from the same sender as well, you could add the date and time or another unique merge tag to the subject using the same method.
I hope that is all helpful!
*Edited for spelling and grammar, style and formatting, and to protect personal info; otherwise these are the bona fide truth.
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