You may wonder what conditional logic is, and if that’s the case, this guide will definitely come in handy for increasing the quality of your forms.
Conditional logic, most commonly known as rules, is a feature that allows you to do a specific action based on certain behavior of the form visitor. What does that mean? Well, the most common scenario is to show or hide certain parts of the form when the user selects certain options. So, why is that important and how can rules be effectively used by your business? They have a series of applications that you should take advantage of in order to improve your visitors’ journey through your website.
Rules’ core benefit is that they allow you to tailor the behavior of your web form depending on the input provided by your visitors. Depending on your visitors’ answers, you can either show or hide form fields, send different confirmation messages after submission and even redirect them to specific web pages. In other words, rules make your form smart and more interactive. They give you the possibility of tailoring your users’ experience with your forms.
As you’ve probably already realized, there are three types of rules:
Field Rules → they selectively show or hide certain fields in real time, based on your respondents’ input.
Useful tip: use these rules to make your form shorter when some questions depend on the confirmation of previous ones. They will avoid showing irrelevant fields to your visitor, increasing your completion rate.
Autoresponder Rules → also known as Confirmation Rules, these rules apply after the form has been submitted, allowing you to trigger specific autoresponders to each form, or avoid sending autoresponders at all.
Useful tip: use these rules to send tailored messages via email to your visitors after they completed your form. It can be particularly useful when sending a summary of an online order.
Form Rules → after the form has been submitted, they redirect your visitors to a particular web page provided by you, when certain conditions are met.
Useful tip: you can use them to send users to a particular section of your website when they’ve shown particular interest in that with their answers, or to the specific URL that they should follow next in a multi-step process.
Let’s imagine a simple scenario, where you are the owner of a restaurant and you are taking online orders. In addition to pizza, you also offer pasta and salads. So let’s give your customers the possibility of choosing one of the above. Start by adding a standard multiple-choice field to your form, and add all the meal options to it:
Now, to provide specific options in each case, we will add 3 other multiple-choice fields (one for each of our categories) asking what pizza, pasta or salad would our visitor like.
We will set up a rule that will show these fields when their respective category is selected. So we go to our Settings tab, and from the Rules section we make the rule as follows:
As people usually prefer adding extra ingredients to their pizza, you can give them that option as well by adding a ‘Text Box’ field, and naming it “Extra Condiments”. After you added the field to your form and made sure it’s placed where you want it, go back to Rules, and set up a rule like this:
The reason we structured our rule with OR instead of AND, is because we want the Extra field to show up when any of the pizza types is selected. Using AND would imply showing the Extra field only when Margherita and Napolitana are both selected at the same time.
Voilà! Your form is ready to go, and it will only show your customers different pizza options when they specifically want to order pizzas!
You can apply this logic in many other ways and use rules to show your customers different colors of a selected item, further questions about a certain topic in a survey, and many other things to make the form more custom and interactive.
To use autoresponder rules you’ll first need to create your autoresponder.
For that purpose go to Settings → Notifications → Form User (Sender) tab. There you will be able to customize variables as the email subjectline and the sender’s email.
Click Customize → Create Autoresponder create and add content to your autoresponder. Save it, close the lightbox and click the green save button again.
Then you can click the blue Advanced Confirmation Rules link, or alternatively go back to Settings → Rules → Autoresponders Rules and select the autoresponder you’ve just built.
Useful Tip: in order to create custom autoresponders you’ll have to ask for an email address on your form, and make that field mandatory.
In this case, we’ve built an order summary, so that the person who completed the form can see a confirmation of the food they’ve just ordered.
That’s it! The next person who fills in your form will receive a tailored autoresponder! Make sure you test our Restaurant Order form to check how autoresponder rules work!
Following with our example, imagine you have a brand new vegetarian menu. Would there be any better potential client than people who like salads? Probably not. So you can create a Form Rule that redirects your visitors who order salads to your dedicated vegetarian menu. This way, you drive traffic to your new website and the perfect audience will get exposed to a custom offer after their submission. For their next order, they will have your vegetarian menu in consideration.
To create your Form Rules, just go to Settings → Rules → Form Rules, add the conditions and the specific URL you want to redirect your visitors to.
Useful Tip: keep in mind that using a redirection after submission will prevent your Thank You message (the message shown on-screen after submission) from showing up in that particular scenario. So you’ll have to decide what’s best for each case.
That’s it about rules, but having these 3 tips in mind will make your Field Rules journey much easier!
1. The same field cannot be shown/hidden by more than one rule (that is to say, appear after “THEN” in more than one rule). If that happens, then that field is shown only if the conditions of the last rule affecting it are met.
2. The field that comes after “show” is shown only if the condition in the rule is met, otherwise it will stay hidden automatically (without having to create another rule that tells the form when to hide it).
3. It is more recommended to set rules that tell the form when to show a field rather than when to hide a field (because it’s easier to set and it will not lead to conflicts about different rules affecting the same field – see number 1).
That’s it! In the end, using different kinds of rules will allow you to be more professional. It will provide personalized offers based on users’ interests, making a better user interaction between them and your form. As a side effect, you will also have clearer reports to take better decisions!
Was it helpful? What do you plan to use your rules for? Comment below!