CX Demo

Author: Franz Malten Buemann

  • How to Create an HTML Form That Sends You an Email

    Have you ever set up a form on your site, only to forget to check the entries that were submitted? Creating an HTML form that sends an email after submission is one of the simplest and most effective ways of resolving this issue.

    Here, we’re going to walk you through how to create a form that sends an email to you, as well as the customer, to ensure the form was received.

    Ideally, browsers would allow you to route form submissions directly to an email address. However, the reason they don’t is that emailing directly from an HTML web form would reveal the visitor’s email address, making the user vulnerable to malicious activities, such as phishing.
    Adding a mailto: address to the form can be a potential way to circumvent this challenge. This option activates the default mail client on the user’s computer, prompting them to send the form over email. The web browser sends a request to the email service provider, not to the specified address.
    There are a few problems with the mailto: option. For example, it isn’t 100% compatible with all browsers, it isn’t very user-friendly, and it’s impossible to control the formatting of the data when the form is sent by the browser.
    Beyond that, a warning message will pop up when the user goes to submit the form, letting them know that the information they’re about to send will not be encrypted for privacy.
    Below, we go over a few options for creating an HTML form that emails you when a new entry is submitted.
    The option you choose depends on how you work and what platform you’re using. This is to say that things are a little different if the plan is to use a mix of HTML and different scripts. Below, we go over the different options available.
    Method 1: Create an Email Send Form Using HTML (Not Recommended)
    Using just HTML? From starting fresh, here is a sample code for use:
    See the Pen How to Create an HTML Form That Sends You an Email by HubSpot (@hubspot) on CodePen.
    This code will create a form that asks for the contact’s name, message, and includes a submit button (not visible in CodePen). Note that this code is basic — it won’t look super snazzy. For a more beautiful one, you’ll have to add some more lines of code specific to your needs.
    While you can use just basic HTML, this isn’t the ideal option. This form doesn’t directly send to email addresses, but rather opens an email client or tool window to submit the form. This can spook the user out of submitting the form at all.
    So, what HTML code allows you to send form submissions directly to an email address?
    To make the form work with your email server and send it to a mailbox, PHP is the answer — let’s explore that option now.
    Method 2: Create an Email Send Form Using PHP (Advanced)
    To create a form subscribers can contact you with, the PHP script is going to be your best friend. I know, another acronym. This one stands for Hypertext Preprocessor, and this language collaborates with HTML to process the form.
    Before jumping into the process, let’s break down a few form basics.
    A webform has two sides: The front-end, seen in the browser by visitors, and a backend script running on the server.
    The visitor’s web browser uses HTML code to display the form. When the form is submitted, the browser sends the information to the backend using the link mentioned in the “action” attribute of the form tag, sending the form data to that URL.
    For example: <form action=https://yourwebsite.com/myform-processor.php>.
    The server then passes the data to the script specified in the action URL — myform-processor.php in this case. Using this data, the backend script can create a database of form submissions, direct the user to another page (e.g. payment), and send an email.
    There are other scripting languages you can use in the backend programming, like Ruby, Perl, or ASP for Windows. However, PHP is the most popular and is used by almost all web hosting service providers.
    If you’re creating a form from scratch, here are the steps you can take.
    Step 1: Use PHP to create a page.
    For this step, you’ll need to have access to your website’s cPanel on your hosting platform.
    When you’re creating a webpage, instead of using the “.html” extension, type “.php” instead. This is similar to what happens when you save an image as “jpg” versus “png”.
    By doing this, the server will know to host the PHP you write. Instead of saving the empty HTML page as such, save it as something like this: “subscriberform.php”. After your page is created and saved, you’ll then be able to create the form.
    Step 2: Make the form using code.
    In this step, you’ll write the code to create the form.
    If you’re not sure how to create forms in HTML, check out HTML Dog’s resource for a primer on the basics.
    The following code is what’s needed for a basic form:
    Because this is similar to the HTML-only write-up, these lines will also create a name for the form and an area for subscribers to type a custom message and send it to you.
    An important difference is the action=”subscriberform.php” part. This portion of code is what will make the page send the form when submitted. Recall that in the first example, that wasn’t an option.
    Step 3: Make the form send an email.
    After you create the form and add all the proper fixings depending on your design preferences, it’s time to create the email portion.
    For this, you’re going to scroll to the beginning of the page (the very beginning, even before defining the HTML Doctype). To enable sending data in the email, we have to add code that will process the data. Copy this code or create something similar:
    Everything inside the first and last lines will tell the webpage to make these functions perform as PHP. This code also checks to see if a subscriber uses the form. From there, it checks to see if the form was sent.
    Further breaking it down, “mail” sends the completed form as an email to “your@email.address,” and the subject line is what follows. In the next line, you can write a copy of the email message inside the quotes, to be sent from whichever email address you choose.
    Once the form is submitted, the page sends the data to itself. If the data has been successfully sent, the page sends it as an email. The browser then loads the page’s HTML — the form included.
    With that, you have the basic code you need to create the form.
    Note that this is just one way to do this — alternatively, you can also create a form using a builder, and then embed it onto your website.
    Method 3: Create an Email Send Form Using a Form Builder
    If you’re not using WordPress to build your website and are not coding-savvy, you may be at a loss as to how you can create a form, especially if your CMS doesn’t offer a drag-and-drop page editor.
    (Hot tip: A drag-and-drop editor can make it much easier and simpler to create an email-sending form. Try CMS Hub — it’s 100% free.)
    Each of the below tools allows you to build a form that sends an email without any coding needed from you. The best part is that you don’t need to change content management systems if you don’t want to. Instead, you can embed the form onto your website using each tool’s embed code.
    1. HubSpot: Best Email Form Builder Overall

    HubSpot includes a form builder in the free tier of all of its products. Because HubSpot already has your email, it will automatically send you a message when a new entry is submitted.
    HubSpot’s form builder is linked with other tools in the platform, including Marketing Hub and CMS Hub, and doesn’t require any previous technical knowledge. If you want to extend the form to include marketing capabilities, you can do so as well.
    For example, you can build custom forms that connect to your contacts list. You can also customize those forms and trigger automatic emails based on the completion of your forms. Note that the latter requires a premium upgrade.
    If you want to learn how to receive an email after a form submission, take a look at our Knowledge Base article.
    2. Forms.io: Best Quick Email Form Builder

    Forms.io allows you to quickly create a form in its drag-and-drop interface, then embed it on your site using HTML embed code. You’ll receive an alert or notification, and you can then manage responses in the tool’s backend. It’s free for 10 users, but if your company will need more seats, you can have access for $14.99/month.
    3. Jotform: Best Email for Builder for Multiple Forms

    If you expect that you’ll need more than one form, Jotform is a great choice. It gives you several options for embedding forms on your website: JavaScript, iFrame, or the entire source code of the form. You also have the option of creating a lightbox or popup form.
    Jotform is free with its branding. Pricing starts at $24/month.
    Check out more form builder tools here.
    Method 4: Create an Email Send Form Using a Plugin
    If you’re running a WordPress website, we have good news: You have a plethora of form builder plugins available to you, most of which come at the excellent cost of free. These tools will all send an email upon receiving a submission.
    1. HubSpot Form Plugin: Best for Lead Generation
    If you’re planning to use your form as a lead generation tool, then we highly recommend using the HubSpot form plugin. It links directly to your HubSpot account, allowing you to use it in conjunction with HubSpot CRM, Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, and more.
    2. WPForms: Best for Embedding Anywhere

    WPForms is a drag-and-drop form builder that allows you to configure it to email you upon receiving a submission. You can also embed the form anywhere on your site, including the sidebar and footer.
    3. ARForms

    ARForms allows you to receive email notifications based on conditions you’ve set, but you can also get email notifications for all submissions. You can also integrate it with other tools in your tech stack, including HubSpot, PayPal, and Google Sheets.
    The Perks of HTML Forms that Send Emails
    Whether you want to convert more visitors to leads, collect information for your sales team, or create more loyal brand advocates, forms are imperative to an inbound strategy. If you don’t have a form on your website, you could be missing out on more leads, higher conversions, and happier long-term customers.
    The problem is that it’s easy to forget checking the responses, and even easier to get submissions but have no searchable record of them. Forms that send an email back to you keeps information in your inbox for reference and ease.
    Editor’s note: This post was originally published in December 2019 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

  • How to Improve Call Center Employee Retention

    It’s simple: If you can’t engage and retain employees, you’ll have trouble satisfying customers, too. Company culture consultant Stan Slap puts it this way: “If you can’t sell it inside, you can’t sell it outside.”
    Of course, call centers are notorious for high turnover rates. But if you’re a call center leader, it’s your job to combat that damaging trend. If you don’t, your customer service will suffer, and your call center operations will too. Don’t worry! There are plenty of ways to improve your turnover rates, including better agent training and recruitment practices. First, let’s understand why it matters.
    Why is Call Center Employee Retention Important?
    Poor agent retention has a domino effect that hurts your budget. Here’s how:
    Unproductive floor time
    New agents need about eight months on the job to reach regular performance and productivity levels. Imagine the benefits of having eight months of regular productivity if you just managed to hold onto that senior agent!
    Recruitment and hiring costs
    Setting aside time to sift through resumes, interview candidates, and negotiate packages—all this takes up valuable time from your managers. Recruitment might also pose advertising costs. All in all, you could be looking at spending anywhere from $5,000-$7,000 on each new hire.
    Overtime costs
    You might be short-staffed when you lose agents and have to pay other agents overtime. On top of that, your customer experience might suffer while new hires learn the specifics of their new role. They might add hiccups to the customer call or take longer to process a request. Average handle time and hold times increase, while eventually, customer satisfaction decreases.

    TIP:
    Assess your call center’s retention by calculating agent attrition rates.

    Common Causes of Low Call Center Retention
    Call center attrition is widespread, so there must be some common denominators. Here’s why you might be losing your agents:
    Stress and burnout
    High call volumes and angry customers can easily stress out your agents. These stressors might be the result of poor scheduling, inadequate training, or insufficient technology. Almost 74% of call center agents are at risk of burnout.
    Low compensation
    You’re not the only call center on the block—if your agents notice more attractive packages elsewhere, they won’t hesitate to leave. And who can blame them? The best way to show agents you care is to pay them fairly.
    Poor management
    Half of all employees quit because of their bosses, while two-thirds say their managers have insufficient experience.
    Rushed recruitment
    Imagine the time you can save by hiring the right call center agent. Often, candidates aren’t prepared for what call center jobs entail, and they leave within a few months.
    Sometimes, it feels like the call center industry works against you. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
    5 Tips to Improve Call Center Employee Retention
    An agent is more likely to leave if you don’t invest in an effective retention strategy. Are you ready to hire, train, and keep solid agents? Let’s see how we can improve call center employee retention.
    1.   Invest in training
    Today’s contact center agent wants to feel like a valued asset—and the best way to make that happen is with ongoing, quality training. Your agents will feel more confident and less likely to become another attrition stat. The good news is you have countless training resources at your disposal. Storytelling, tech, lunch-and-learn sessions, job shadowing, and incentives are all fantastic training methods.
    2.   Adopt a tech-forward mindset
    Your biggest competitors are leveraging technology to improve every aspect of the call center operation. Follow suit and pay for software that’ll improve employee productivity and agent experience. The result? You’ll satisfy customers more and enhance call center employee retention. Don’t take our word for it. Here’s what one of our clients had to say about Fonolo’s Voice Call-Backs.

    CUSTOMER FEEDBACK:
    “We saw a reduction in our abandon rate, an increase in member satisfaction, and an upsurge in agent morale.” – Mark Edelmen, VP of Digital Member Services, Stanford Federal Credit Union.

    3.   Improve the recruitment process
    One of the best ways to improve call center employee retention is to start from the beginning. Your recruitment process should entail detailed screening, the right interview questions, and even pre-hire training quizzes to assess fit. A strong recruitment process helps you find employees that’ll stay in the long term.  Look for soft skills in your candidate, too. Flexibility, communication, and assertiveness are harder to develop than technical skills.
    4.   Add more value to compensation packages
    A slightly higher-than-average salary will improve call center employee retention. If budget constraints make that difficult, consider adding more vacation days, personal days, fitness allocations, and other benefits to buff up your offers.
    5.   Invite feedback
    We all know how valuable customer feedback is—the same is true for employee feedback. Encourage employees to provide feedback on your management style, operation, and anything else. This is a great way to encourage open communication and catch issues before an agent leaves! Some places to gather feedback are:

    Anonymous suggestion boxes
    Performance meetings
    Training sessions
    Team meetings
    The post How to Improve Call Center Employee Retention first appeared on Fonolo.

  • Don’t blame the mouse

    If you leave your cheese out and the mouse eats it, the mouse is simply being a mouse.

    While it might be nice if the mouse didn’t wreck your dinner, that’s his job.

    Often, we show up with our cheese and then become indignant when the mouse does what mice do.

    “Oh, you’re a mouse.”

    That makes it a lot easier to navigate.

  • How Can Audience Engagement Improve Email Deliverability?

    Every successful business also has solid email deliverability. It’s not without effort. They most likely have a team of email marketers building strategies that ensure successful email campaigns without any throttling, bulking, bouncing, or spamming. Simply put, email deliverability is the ability to deliver emails to recipients’ primary inboxes. Sounds easy enough, but there are…
    The post How Can Audience Engagement Improve Email Deliverability? appeared first on Benchmark Email.

  • The Ultimate List of Marketing Automation Startups

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  • How We’ve Changed Our Engineering Mindset to Become Builders Again

    I’ve been working at Buffer since 2014, and even before I joined, I was always impressed by the Buffer team’s product and engineering culture: how quick they shipped improvements and how close everyone was to the users (not uncommon to see engineers responding to comments on Twitter!).I found that “can-do” attitude inspiring and contagious, and it’s amazing when things click that way. Of course, back when I joined, we were a team of 24 people; we all wore many hats and had no managers.As we grew, we started embracing the creation of team structures and processes to support us better and manage that growth. But of course, scaling collaboration while maintaining speed is an art in and of itself, and friction points started to appear: projects would run into bottlenecks more often, and teams would block each other. Since it would take longer to release features, we’d try to get them “right” by spending more time crafting the specifications of what we tried to build, but of course, the larger the projects, the longer it took to deliver them.We were stuck in a self-amplifying loop: if it took months to build something, it made it extremely difficult to fast-follow and iterate on it because we would also have other priorities to attend! This just kept reinforcing the need to do more and better and kept creating more pressure to “get it right.”Last year, we realized we wanted to change certain habits and dynamics at Buffer to return to those early days of shipping frequently: the more regularly we ship, the easier to manage those changes are (because they are smaller). It feels safer even if that thing we’re shipping fails – creating greater psychological safety for our team. It was clear: we wanted to become builders again and embrace our entrepreneurial spirit and culture of defaulting to action.The metrics that help us define builder modeHow will we know we’re in builder mode? That we are moving faster, shipping more often, and tightening our feedback loops with our customers? Some metrics are helpful to guide us in this journey: cycle time, pull request throughput, and defect rate. Here’s some context on what those metrics mean, and how we measure them:Cycle timeSince we want to decrease our time-to-market, we want to measure how fast and how often we deliver value to our users. Cycle time is, for us, the time between we start working on a feature or improvement (the first change we do in the codebase for that) to when a Pull Request with the changes is merged and released to production. Pull request throughputPull requests are the artifacts we generate as developers to begin the process of merging new code changes with the current code that’s running in production.We can think of each pull request as a unit of work that provides value (e.g. a new feature, a bug fix, or any other codebase improvement). That’s why a total count of pull requests merged (and deployed to production) can be a proxy for value delivered.Defect rateOf course, moving faster doesn’t improve anything if it means we’re shipping more defects and bugs to our customers!Defect rate acts as a control metric for us, where we measure how many of the code changes we perform are addressing bugs that were introduced in past changes.Dynamics we have implemented to drive this engineering mindset changeJust as habits are vital for shaping our identity as individuals, they are fundamental for evolving our mindset and culture as a company.Knowing what we wanted to achieve and how to measure it, we started thinking about new dynamics that, as we adopt them, help us build our identity as builders. Also, we kept our eyes open for existing habits that were getting in the way and preventing us from getting to this next level.Customer engineering daysA crucial component for any builder is to be in touch with their customers: interacting directly with our customers is key to gaining insights into the questions they ask, the needs they have, and the pain points that are feeling in our systems.With customer engineering days, we have each engineering team allocating one engineer each cycle pairing with an advocate for a day answering tickets in the inbox and fixing quick wins together. This is a great opportunity for engineers to ask our customer advocates questions about our customers, features, and products, and for advocates to share their experiences and provide some great customer insights!Removing blocking Pull Requests as much as possibleAs we embrace a culture of moving faster, one of the first things that caught my attention was the review process to integrate changes into production: some teams would have an enforced rule that required another developer to review their code before pushing a change live. Industry benchmarks and research have shown surprising results: approval processes for code changes are not correlated with software delivery performance.We want to remove gatekeeping for changes, promote ownership and empower people to remain in a flow state, so teams have started shifting away from defaulting to open Pull Requests and wait for approval, and use a hybrid method named “Ship/Show/Ask”:Ship means just that! No need to ask for a review, just make the change and deploy it to production.Show is great for getting asynchronous feedback, or sharing some new patterns and learnings with the team, but not waiting to get the approval before shipping to production.Ask is the traditional approach in which you require a code review before merging and shipping to production.Being clear that there are alternatives and different approaches for different situations means that teams can figure out which balance to strike, and see if they’re in “ask mode” too much when they could nudge more towards “ship” or “show”.Working smallerOf course, if we were to just focus on the previous practices, it would feel like we’re just asking the teams to do more and faster work. These goals and practices are for us to challenge and improve how we work, and not how much we work!A key component to ensure that, and a major contributor to becoming a higher performing team, is working smaller: if we decompose our work into features that allow for rapid development instead of bigger, more complex projects that get released infrequently.For that, the engineering teams embrace the usage of feature flips (also named feature toggles) as a way to deploy new features that are still under development to production without negatively impacting the user experience. This gets rid of big releases that contain many changes, and instead, we can release new features to our users when we’ve already experienced them in production.Working in smaller batches generates greater psychological safety for our engineers, since the risk of deploying breaking changes that impact everyone is greatly reduced.Engineering managers’ role shift to become builders, tooWhile the role of the engineering manager on the different teams has been focused primarily on people management, engineer career growth, and coordinating ways of working, their key responsibility is to ensure that our teams deliver value by building our product and teams in a way that aligns with both our product and technical goals.So to truly lead with that builders’ mindset, our engineering managers need to become builders too! We’ve redefined the role of the engineering manager and we now aim for them to spend at least 25% of their time being hands-on in the team. That “hands-on” can take many shapes, such as:Diving into data analysis for a new feature launch.Working on non-critical tasks.QA’ing new features.Engaging with customers.This gives them an even better context and insights into the technical decisions and tradeoffs that their teams face and creates a shared sense of ownership across the team in that we all contribute in our own way to release more often.The results: Have we adopted the builder mindset?We started on this journey of mindset change 9 months ago and it’s been an incredible path of alignment between teams: the number of features and improvements we’ve shipped in the last few months is a reflection of all these changes. We keep asking ourselves “how can we ship the next thing sooner, and with greater quality?”. We feel there is a change in motivation and energy.Now, if we go back at the metrics I shared earlier in this post, we can see that:Cycle time has gone down dramatically: from 94.8 hours in average in 2021 to 55 hours in 2022 so far.PR throughput has increased: 4155 Pull Requests deployed in 2021 compared to 3687 deployed in 2022 so far (1816 more Pull Requests than H2 2021!).The defect rate has gone down: from 18% of the time working on fixing defects in 2021 to 16% in 2022 so far.This means that the engineering team is indeed releasing faster and more often and that quality is not at odds with delivery speed.There are some great technical projects underway that will speed the whole engineering team way more in the second half of the year, so we’re just getting started! Are there any habits your team has been doing that have helped them increase their shipping pace, and get closer to your customers? As we continue on this path to becoming builders, I’m excited to keep sharing our learnings and progress along the way.Feel free to reach out to me on Twitter at @msanromanv to share your experiences!

  • How to Start a Blog and Make Money in 2022

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  • Types of marketing research

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  • The advice gap

    Wisdom and good advice are everywhere, now more than ever.

    And yet, despite the abundance that’s available, people often make errors in job searches, product launches, or even planning a party.

    There might be three reasons:

    The advice might not be good, or it doesn’t appear to be valid. It’s hard to tell good advice from the not-so-good, so it may pay to simply ignore it.The advice might be good for “someone,” but it’s easy to imagine that it doesn’t apply to us. After all, the advice giver hardly knows us, we’re a special case and this is a special situation. Not to mention that good advice is often conservative and intended to maintain the status quo, which isn’t apparently helpful for someone who wants to make a ruckus.The person who needs advice might not actually want advice. They might simply want reassurance. Reassurance that their instincts are right, that they and they alone are the ones that can make a difference. Of course, reassurance is futile (because it needs constant replenishment) but that doesn’t keep this from being the biggest of the three categories.

    We don’t have an advice shortage. We have a gap in selection and application.

  • Klick-Tipp Partnerprogramm-Das Beste oder nichts!

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