How to Send a Follow-Up and Pre-Fill Information

It’s a common occurrence to send follow-up emails after users submit forms on your site. For example, you might ask customers to sign up for a newsletter to receive more information on a product, or you want to send an email to every customer that has purchased tickets for an event. There’s multitudes of reasons to follow-up with customers on your site and an equal number of methods to send those emails.

Often the goal of these types of emails is to direct the user to another form. For example, you could send a follow-up survey to conference attendees. Using Easy Passthrough, the follow-up form’s fields can be pre-filled with attendee information, both saving time and ensuring accurate survey results. Let’s get started!

Getting Started

This article will use GF Email Users to send the follow-up emails and Easy Passthrough to pre-fill the form that is linked in the email. Make sure you have both Perks installed and activated, then follow the steps below to set everything up.

Steps

1. Create Conference Sign-Up Form
2. Set up Easy Passthrough
3. Send Follow-Up Email

Step 1 – Create Conference Sign-Up Form

In order to send follow-up emails to conference attendees, we need to make sure that there’s an Email field on the initial conference sign-up form. Outside of that, the form can contain any fields that you would like. My conference is free, so I’m only asking for a Name and Email.

Step 2- Create Survey Form

Some time after the conference concludes, we’ll send a survey request email to the attendees. They’ll be sent a link to a form with survey questions. In order to save time and improve form accuracy, we’re going to pre-fill some of the fields on the form. Start by adding those fields. In my example, these will be Name and Email. Then, add the Survey fields and insert your questions into those fields.

Step 3 – Set up Easy Passthrough

With the form completed, it’s time to set up Easy Passthrough. This will handle pre-filling out our fields. Create an Easy Passthrough feed and select the conference sign-up form as the source. Then, map the fields you want to pre-fill.

Step 4 – Send Follow-Up Email

Using GF Email Users

With everything set up, the next step is to send the follow-up emails. Technically, the next step is to let users sign up for your conference and then wait until after the conference has concluded, but assume that we’re already there.

The easiest way to send the follow-up emails is Email Users. It supports HTML, so we can add a link directly to the email that directs the user to the page where our form is located.

Easy Passthrough knows what values to pre-fill into a form based on one of two things: a session cookie or the ep_token URL parameter. Since the user will be directed to the page from a link in an email, we will use the ep_token method.

To do this, link to the page where the form is located and add the ep_token={Easy Passthrough Token} query parameter to your link. When the email is sent with Email Users, the merge tag will automatically fill with the correct EP Token for the entry.

Here’s what that email looks like in my inbox. You can see the EP Token has been added to the URL when I hover over the link.

After clicking the link, the survey form is pre-filled with my name and email.

Using a CRM or Email Marketing Platform

If you prefer to send your follow-up emails with a system outside of WordPress, you can do that too. You just need to pass the Easy Passthrough Token to the CRM from the initial sign-up form. This is done easily in the feed settings for passing the entries to your preferred email platform. Here’s an example where I’m passing the Easy Passthrough Token to a field in MailChimp called “EP Token”.

I can then use a merge tag in MailChimp to create a link to my survey. When I send my campaign, the EP Token parameters will be attached to the links.

That’s It

With a little setup, you can send follow-up emails to your customers that contain links to other forms and Easy Passthrough will automatically pre-fill fields in those forms.