Form owners frequently ask for ways to automate custom charts and graphs for reports. Formsite provides several analytics charts and graphs for built-in reporting and analysis. These charts allow owners to see how individual questions perform, as well as:

• Percentage of each answer
• Subsets of answers using Results Filters
• Drop-off rate (where visitors abandon the form)
• Cross-tabulation (compare 2 different items)
• Inventory reports

For those not included in the built-in analytics pages, the best option to automate custom charts comes from Google Sheets. Using the integration to send new submissions to Google Sheets can also automatically update any charts.

The rise of email and instant messaging with mobile devices has increased the speed of communication in today’s culture. Today we’re able to use images, emojis, and other custom settings to communicate faster and more completely.

In the early days, limiting messages to text could potentially miscommunicate the sender’s intent ? because the context of messages are easy to mistake without the benefit of body language. This need opened the door to the creation of emoticons and emojis.

Today, emojis appear in many places where extra information is useful, like a conversation shorthand. Using them in places like online forms can help generate interest and enhance organization.

Online forms provide useful solutions to all kinds of tasks, like order forms, registration forms, surveys, and lots more. From a personal perspective, forms make it easy to collect information using online tools that anyone can access. Business owners often need more than basic convenience to establish value, though. Considering the productivity enhancements of online forms can help when evaluating the service.

Examples of business productivity tools include:

• HR forms, like employment records and benefits tracking
• Workflow forms, like approvals and multi-step processes
• Timesheets & scheduling forms
• Inventory tracking
• Form & result access, like online forms with Sub-users and Results Reports
• Analytics

Many Formsite customers use online forms to collect payments. Registration forms, order forms, etc. use forms to allow their customers to pay securely and accurately. To help with credit card security and to reduce identity theft, credit card companies came up with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS, or just PCI). PCI compliance is a quick way to show form customers that their data is safe.

Questions to consider:

• What are the PCI standards?
• How to make a PCI compliant order form?
• What payment options are PCI compliant?

Formsite reaches 21 years in business! Founded in 1998, Formsite began with the goal of providing an easy way for non-programmers to make forms. Setting up a hosting environment and a website was—and still is—an unreasonable obstacle for most people. Choosing Formsite for online forms and surveys means:

• No complicated hosting setup or contracts
• System updates performed by someone else
• Security is top-notch and automatic
• Support is a click away

Over the last 21 years, the internet grew to become the primary communication, entertainment, and shopping tool for most of us. Through these changes, sites and companies have come and gone as technology evolves.

Online forms and surveys collect data that many companies use to provide answers to business questions. This analysis often comes as charts and graphs, as our built-in Analytics show. Filtering data using Results Filters lets form owners pinpoint the conditions for more accurate analysis.

Creating filters allows for segmenting the results in either broad categories or specific groups. Examples of some popular filters include:

• Show only complete results (filter out incomplete ones)
• Date filters (before, after, or between dates)
• Results from specific domains (emails containing ‘edu’ or ‘gov’)
• Order volume (greater than 10 units)

Companies of all sizes use customer input to influence company decisions. Providers of products and services use feedback gained from customer surveys. These surveys may be informal questions asked via email or phone, or formatted in an online survey. The design of each survey question can influence the answers. Follow these tips to gather quality data and avoid skewing the results:

• Start with the answers
• Use the right items
• Don’t ask leading questions, avoid bias

A past article talks about personalizing emails and the more success it brings. Using the same concepts to personalize forms and surveys will also increase engagement. The more engaged form visitors are, the more likely they are to complete the form.

An obvious way to personalize the form is to use the person’s name and email address, and other ways for less-obvious personalization include:

• Screening questions
• Funneling previous answers
• Follow-up items
• Custom Success Pages & Notifications

Many forms and surveys rely on email to reach their audiences. Lead generation forms collect information from potential customers and typically an email follows. That email contains more links to order forms, follow-up information, or surveys. Form owners who rely on email views and clicks use these techniques to improve email response rates:

1. Focus the email topic
2. Maintain the email list
3. Be clear about privacy

Lead generation forms are a specific kind of form that puts potential customers in the sales funnel. Examples include contact forms, surveys, event sign-up forms, and contest forms. Many organizations rely on forms and surveys to attract customers and organize their information. Here are 4 essentials for making lead gen forms work as best as they can:

• Keep it short
• Be specific
• Allow opt-in and out
• Focus on privacy