Auto-response rules for webforms
Webforms are a powerful tool for generating leads, as they serve as a direct line of communication between businesses and their leads by helping record and track every inquiry submitted via a business's website in their CRM tool. Businesses can then follow up with prospects to provide additional information, address concerns, and ultimately close sales.
However, this follow-up process often involves manually sending routine emails to every lead, which can be quite taxing. Manual follow-ups may even result in important leads and business opportunities slipping through the cracks.
With the increasing reliance on webforms to capture potential leads, businesses must streamline their follow-up process to ensure they don't miss any opportunities. In this article, we'll explore the importance of automated follow-ups using auto-response rules.
What is an auto-response rule?
With this feature, you can automate a response to every lead when they submit a request through your webforms. You can create multiple auto-response rules for various webforms associated with a CRM module, as well as activate multiple auto-response rules simultaneously to send responses to your webforms. For example, if you have two webforms—one for event registration and another for signup for the Leads module—you can create and activate an auto-response rule for each webform in the same module. Not to be confused with autoresponders
While autoresponders are a feature in Zoho CRM and sound similar to auto-response rules, the two are very different:
Auto-response rules | Autoresponders |
A tool that enables you to send immediate automated responses to each prospect who's submitted an inquiry in Zoho CRM through your website. | Have no association whatsoever with webforms. Autoresponders help automate scheduled follow-ups with leads and contacts, regardless of whether they've been sourced from your website. These are handy when you're planning drip campaigns. |
Ideal for automating the receipt of acknowledgement of an inquiry. | Ideal for sending follow-ups based on a specific date and time or on a recurring pattern (daily, weekly, monthly, etc.). |
Scenario
Timothy, a sales manager, is conducting a webinar about new product features released in the last quarter. He aims to highlight the effectiveness of each feature by conducting a demo during his webinar. He creates and associates a Customer Registration Form to the Leads module. He also creates a Customer Feedback Form for all his webinar attendees, which he associates with the Leads module as well.
By creating multiple auto-response rules, Timothy can follow up with users submitting requests from different webforms with appropriate responses. To do so, he creates two auto-response rules:
- Customer registration: Activating the customer registration rule will automatically generate a welcome message that's sent to every user who registers for Timothy's webinar.
- Customer feedback: Activating the customer feedback rule will send an automatic thank-you message to every attendee who's submitted feedback.
By setting up multiple auto-response rules, Timothy's webinar attendees get a customized response for each form.
Availability
- Permission Required - Users with the permission to create webforms can access this feature.
- Number of auto-response rules that can be created depends on the subscribed CRM edition. Look at the table below
CRM Edition | Number of Auto-response rules |
Free | 1 |
Standard | 5 |
Professional | 10 |
Enterprise | 20 |
Ultimate | 25 |
Create auto-response rules
To create an auto-response rule for webforms
- Go to Setup > Channels > Webforms.
- Select the Auto-Response Rules tab.
- In the Auto-Response Rules page, Click Create Rule.
- Enter the Rule Name and select the module for which this rule must apply. Click Next.
- Define rules that determine which visitors will receive the automatic response via the Rule Entry page:
a. Specify the Rule Criteria.
b. Click Select Template to choose an email template or click on the + Create Template link to create a template.
c. Enter the appropriate email address in the From field. Click Add Reply to to add an email address that should receive replies.
d. Here, you can choose one of these options :
- Your account email address
- Your organization email address
- The email address of the record owner
- Another user's email address
Note : Please note that you need to specify and save the criteria to activate the rule. - Click Done.
- To add a new rule criterion, click Add Condition.
Note : You can add up to 25 conditions per rule and 25 rule criteria per condition. - Once you've created multiple conditions, you can reorder them by clicking the Reorder conditions link on the top-right.
- To reorder conditions, simply click and drag the conditions to their position as shown below and click Done.
- Click Save to activate the auto-response rule.
Manage Auto-response Rules
To edit auto-response rules :
- Go to Setup > Channels > Webforms.
- Select the Auto-response Rules tab to view the list of rules being created.
- Click the (...) more icon and click Edit to make changes to the auto-response rules.
- Click the edit icon as shown in the screenshot to make changes, and click Done.
To enable / disable auto-response rules :
- Go to Setup > Channels > Webforms.
- Select the Auto-response Rules tab to view the list of rules being created.
- Click the toggle button beside a rule to enable or disable a rule.
- Once an auto-response rule is disabled, it won't work for its associated webform until it is re-enabled.
To delete auto-response rules :
- Go to Setup > Channels > Webforms.
- Select the Auto-response Rules tab to view the list of rules being created.
- Click the (...) more icon and click Delete to make changes to the auto-response rules.
- While deleting, if a rule is associated to a webform, please note that the acknowledgement visitor option will be disabled, meaning the visitors to that webform will not receive an acknowledgement email.
Note :
Note: When the details gathered through a webform don't satisfy an auto-response rule's criteria, the email template (e.g., acknowledgement email) selected while creating the webform will be sent. See also: Setting up webforms - Specifying form details.
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