Learn how to use a form to collect an optin or run a survey with ActiveCampaign and you will be on your way to success in your business.

I’ve helped hundreds of users find the most effective forms to use in their business, and shown them how to get form entries into ActiveCampaign quickly and easily.

Read this blog for my most important tips, tricks and lightbulb moments on the best ways to use forms with ActiveCampaign.

Spoiler: it’s not always going to involve an ActiveCampaign form – other form services (third party forms) are sometimes the smart move here.

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Follow these steps to use forms with ActiveCampaign:

Watch Kay Peacey on choosing the right form to use with ActiveCampaign

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Read 10 creative ways to use forms with ActiveCampaign

Forms are used to collect information, and send it to ActiveCampaign.

There are so many use-cases for forms in every single business, and I bet there are some here you haven’t used or thought of before…

Ten creative and useful times to use a form with ActiveCampaign

1. Collect an optin with an ActiveCampaign form
   Newsletter, email list, lead magnet – all of these need an optin form to get the contact into your ActiveCampaign account – they’re usually simple forms that collect an email and first name
2. Use a form to collect enquiries with ActiveCampaign
   Enquiry forms usually involve a few more questions. Pro tip: make your enquiry form work harder by throwing in some qualifying questions, and don’t let them submit if they don’t qualify.
3. Create a quizzes, calculators or competition with a form
   All these are basically forms of one sort or another, with some fancy backend stuff to reward the user for giving us their data – see also spin-wheels, puzzles and assorted other fun-forms. 
4. Hand-raiser or expression of interest forms
   A hand-raiser asks them to submit if they’re interested – it’s a form that does what it says on the tin, and helps you target the right people with the right message. They’re quick, simple forms – like an optin in many ways.
5. Use ActiveCampaign forms to collect tech support tickets or pre-sale questions
   A powerful use for forms with ActiveCampaign is to have a form for support or sales questions on your site – this saves costs by using what you already have instead of buying additional help-desk software.

6. Re-subscribe, unsubscribe, email preferences, list selection
   These forms are built-in to ActiveCampaign and their role is to give contacts control over what emails they are sent. Many ActiveCampaign users don’t know where or how to customise these forms – we have tutorials in the ActiveCampaign Academy to make it easy as a one-time job.
7. Purchase and checkout forms that integrate with ActiveCampaign
   The information customers provide at checkout can be passed to ActiveCampaign too, using integration. Knowing the billing country, phone number and what they purchased is key contact information that’s useful to have in ActiveCampaign.
8. Use a form to gather testimonials into ActiveCampaign
   Don’t miss this easy win of using a form to make it easy for your audience to tell you how much they love you, and to store that testimonial copy in ActiveCampaign.
9. Create intake and exit survey forms with ActiveCampaign
   Ask your customers how it was for them using a simple automated form with ActiveCampaign. Result: Quality control and segmentation and audience connection.
10. Speed up internal business processes with ActiveCampaign forms
    Use a form that’s just for your team to fill out – then set off an ActiveCampaign process when the form is submitted – super-powerful for ensuring consistent actions in repeating scenarios, especially as your team grows and you get short on time.

How many of these brilliant times to use a form with ActiveCampaign are you using? 

To see an ActiveCampaign form created and used, step by step, so you can build alongside, join our free Accelerated ActiveCampaign training course – it’s a brilliant fast demo of using an ActiveCampaign form to collect and enquiry and follow up on it with an invite to schedule a call.

Get our FREE Accelerated ActiveCampaign training now

How to choose between ActiveCampaign forms and third-party form services

Did you know there are two ways to use forms with ActiveCampaign? And you’re going to need both, probably, for various times you want to use a form with ActiveCampaign.

1 – ActiveCampaign’s built-in forms

These are native forms created in ActiveCampaign.

Forms are built in ActiveCampaign itself, and ActiveCampaign is the only tech tool you need to create and use one.

2 – Third party forms that integrate with ActiveCampaign

These are forms created using another tool or platform – it might be free or paid-for.

Forms are built in the third party tech tool, and hooked up to send the entry data to ActiveCampaign using integration settings

You need to know the pros and cons of the different types of form you can use with ActiveCampaign, so you can make a smart choice, based on what needs to get done, and what the user experience needs to feel like.

Read the pros and cons of forms created with ActiveCampaign

Pros of ActiveCampaign native forms

• Forms are fast, simple and included with every ActiveCampaign account
• It’s easy to add Tags and List actions when a form is submitted
• Form submission shows in ActiveCampaign Contact activity, and triggers site tracking – boom!
• Gets a previously self-unsubscribed address back as an active contact

Cons of ActiveCampaign native forms

• Design features of ActiveCampaign’s own forms are pretty limited
• There are no options to use conditional fields, more than one page, or other advanced forms features

You can see an ActiveCampaign form in action, and looking lovely, running the sign-up for my free ActiveCampaign training, Accelerated ActiveCampaign, including a walkthrough of how to get an ActiveCampaign form to look pretty.

Get our FREE Accelerated ActiveCampaign training now

Read the pros and cons of using third-party forms with ActiveCampaign

Pros of other form services that integrate with ActiveCampaign

• Advanced forms features like conditional fields & redirects, optional questions, multi-page & progress bars are usually available in dedicated form services
• Field entry validation is a serious benefit of using a third party form with ActiveCampaign – it means the form will check the email address or phone number is valid – nice!
• Specialised form services that integrate with ActiveCampaign will usually offer more and better design options, with images, videos and engaging fun things

Cons of integrating third-party forms with ActiveCampaign:

• Extra cost – you’re likely to need to pay for the form service to get all the features and unlimited entries
• More work to get the data into ActiveCampaign – this is the integration bit. Once it’s done it’s done, but you may need time and support to get it set up – we can help you get that done fast and right first time in the ActiveCampaign Academy.
• There is always some risk of failure on the integration to ActiveCampaign, because more than one tool is involved

To choose which form to use with ActiveCampaign, know what’s important for you, and what’s important for the person filling out the form before you dive in.

We support our members inside the ActiveCampaign Academy to choose the best form option for their use case, and to set up and maintain integration so that it runs fast and smoothly.

Learn more about our ActiveCampaign Academy membership
Fast, effective training & support for ActiveCampaign users everywhere

Discover which form services integrate well with ActiveCampaign

You’re an ActiveCampaign user who wants a pretty form, with conditional questions, a fancy progress bar and (gasp) pages…

OK, but you’re going to need a third-party form provider that plays nicely with ActiveCampaign.

Here are my top three form services that integrate like a dream with ActiveCampaign, making it easy to pass the form entry data on autopilot to ActiveCampaign, with control over Lists, Tags and Custom Field mapping.

Use Gravity Forms integration with ActiveCampaign – for WordPress sites

Gravity Forms is a WordPress plugin the works beautifully with ActiveCampaign.

It has the best ActiveCampaign feed (the way it passes entries to ActiveCampaign) of any WordPress forms plugin I’ve worked with.

We use Gravity Forms as our main form service to use with ActiveCampaign on our WordPress sites.

Kay Peacey – Slick Business ActiveCampaign Academy

More details on how I use Gravity Forms with ActiveCampaign are in my Gravity Forms recommendation blog post.

Pros and cons of integrating Gravity Forms with ActiveCampaign

• conditional ActiveCampaign Tags, and Lists, and Field mapping
• Gravity Forms can add an ActiveCampaign contact note (killer feature – no one else has this!)
• easy to pre-fill for logged in users

But… you’re going to want some site level CSS to get the pretties, and you’ll want some add-ons to get the best out of it, and it’s not wildly intuitive to get the best out of the ActiveCampaign feeds – we do show-and-tell training and support for Gravity Forms feeds to ActiveCampaign in our ActiveCampaign Academy.

Integrate Response Suite survey forms with ActiveCampaign

Response Suite is a stand-alone hyper-flexible forms service with mighty powers for ActiveCampaign users.

We use Response Suite for super-powered, great-looking, highly visual forms for finding out more about our ActiveCampaign contacts and site visitors.

Kay Peacey – Slick Business ActiveCampaign Academy

Pros and cons of integrating Response Suite with ActiveCampaign

• you can do anything with involving forms this stand-alone platform
• conditional ActiveCampaign tags (add and remove), lists and fields mapping
• built-in integration with multiple other services and platforms

But… it’s a bigger learning curve, with a monthly subscription – well worth it if you’re building substantial multiple complex forms (and pssst – we have a member perk in the ActiveCampaign Academy on this one, and support our members to get the best out of the integration settings)

Integrate the Interact quiz-builder with ActiveCampaign

Interact is a standalone quiz-builder platform that does this one thing exceptionally well.  Yes – a quiz is just another sort of form you can use with ActiveCampaign!

Pros and cons of integrating Interact quizzes with ActiveCampaign

• Intuitive ActiveCampaign integration includes start automation – love this
• fast, easy visual builder for quiz-style option-selection forms
• social-sharing built in – brilliant for lead generation

But… it’s all about tick-boxes, not text entry, and is monthly subscription – would earn its keep for a lead gen quiz.

How to get the the best results when choosing forms to use with ActiveCampaign

Whatever you choose, Use free trial periods to make a test form and hook it up to ActiveCampaign to see how you get along.

And anytime you’re stuck, or want Kay’s personal specific advice and support with integrating a form, or deciding which to use in any scenario, join the ActiveCampaign Academy for immediate expert help to get you there fast, and right first time.

Learn more about our ActiveCampaign Academy membership
Fast, effective training & support for ActiveCampaign users everywhere

Learn how to connect any third party form with ActiveCampaign

Don’t panic – but we’re about to go geek, and demystify how to hook up a form service to ActiveCampaign…

The key word here is integration – any non ActiveCampaign form service you choose will need to be introduced politely to ActiveCampaign so that it can send the entry data to be stored and used in ActiveCampaign. Integration is just a fancy word for setting the two bits of tech up with how to talk to one another.

In most cases, you only need to set up integration one time. In the ActiveCampaign Academy you’ll find full support, training, and troubleshooting for common form services, and live support for any form integration as required.

For now, let’s show you the main ways forms are connected with ActiveCampaign – from nought to ninja in terms of bravery-rating.

5 ways to integrate forms to send entry data to ActiveCampaign

🪄 Use an ActiveCampaign native form

Make life easy, and use an ActiveCampaign form embedded on a page.

There’s no integration needed, and our free Accelerated ActiveCampaign training will walk you through exactly how to get this done fast, and it’s super-easy once you’ve seen it.

🪄🪄  Connect a form service with an App integration with ActiveCampaign, like Typeform

App integrations are connected in the settings in your ActiveCampaign account Apps area  – you’ll need the Typeform login to use there. 

You can map fields, and entries are pulled in.

You even get an automation trigger for when a form is submitted – sweet!

🪄🪄🪄 Integrate a form service that maps fields, adds tags and more,  like Gravity Forms or Response Suite

For this type of integration, you add your ActiveCampaign account credentials in the other platform.

There are usually list, field and tag options.

Entries are pushed into ActiveCampaign.

🪄🪄🪄🪄Use a popup service that mimics the actions of an ActiveCampaign form, like Elementor or Bloom

For popups, most times you can choose the ActiveCampaign form you want to call up – usually you need the Form ID number from ActiveCampaign

🪄🪄🪄🪄🪄 Use Zapier for anything that can trigger a zap – super-powers!

When you learn to create or update a contact in ActiveCampaign from a zap trigger, and the world is at your feet.

We have a full training on using Zapier with ActiveCampaign in our ActiveCampaign Academy and it’s one of our most popular and wow-inducing courses – short, enlightening, delightfully easy when you know how, and opens up a world of get-things-done super-powers.

Learn more about our ActiveCampaign Academy membership
Fast, effective training & support for ActiveCampaign users everywhere

Read Kay Peacey’s Pro Tips for using forms with ActiveCampaign

Forms used with ActiveCampaign are a fabulous core feature of this email marketing automation platform

Make the most of forms with these ActiveCampaign tips, tricks and strategies from world-leading ActiveCampaign expert Kay Peacey.

10 expert tips for using forms with ActiveCampaign

1. Frictionless forms get completed and submitted more
   Only ask for what you need and keep it clutter-free and focussed. 
2. Strong micro-copy on forms leads to better quality data and happier customers
   Edit words, and the submit button, to suit your humanity and your brand, and to inform and reassure users.
3. Style your forms to match your branding
   Even an ActiveCampaign native form can look great embedded on a page – see our free Accelerated ActiveCampaign training for exact steps on this.
4. Remove the form service or ActiveCampaign branding if you can
   It’s a sneaky trick, but CSS can hide branding on embedded forms – naughty, but nice.
5. Redirect to a thank-you page instead of “thanks for submitting this form”
   An informal welcome video, what to expect in their inbox, and something fun to do while they wait gives human connection.

6. Send them an email to confirm the form submission
   Usually found in the form settings – or send one from ActiveCampaign. Inbox tumbleweed is not a good look when it comes to effective forms
7. Set up a notification to yourself
   Great for if you need to see and know when a form was submitted and what they said.
8. Pre-fill their email address
   This is the easiest trick in the world, and saves them typing in their email address or name with fat impatient fingers – we teach exactly how to do prefills magic in the ActiveCampaign Academy, and it’s a game-changer for effective forms.
9. Use short field names – not the full question label
   Use field names (admin labels) – they’re different to the questions the user sees. For example, the field name “email” might show the user this text “What’s your best work email address?” on the front end. 
10. Test your forms
    No exceptions, no excuses. We have training in the ActiveCampaign Academy on exactly how to test reliably and quickly to make sure everything is working. Because nothing is sadder or more annoying than a form that isn’t working and never was, but has been on your site for months…

Get more help and best practice for using forms with ActiveCampaign

In our ActiveCampaign Academy, we support members to find and set up the best form for any scenario they have, including integration, troubleshooting, and creating follow-up that’s fully automated.

When you want to lay out the form-filling red carpet for your leads, customers, and for you and your team, head to our ActiveCampaign Academy – I’ll be right there with you to personally help you make the smartest, fastest, easiest forms there are.

Learn more about our ActiveCampaign Academy membership
Fast, effective training & support for ActiveCampaign users everywhere