How To Set Up WordPress Form Notifications The Easy Way

Not sure how to set up form notifications in WordPress? This easy guide shows you how to trigger email notifications on submitted forms.

Approximate read time: 6 minutes

If you want to set up WordPress form notifications, it’s all about choosing the right form builder.

Today we're going to show you how easy it is to set up form notifications using Formidable Forms. Full disclosure — it’s our very own WordPress plugin! But we’ve worked really hard to create an online form solution that makes sending email notifications easy.

Why use Formidable for WordPress form notifications?

So why choose Formidable? Here’s the first reason: it’s free!

Sure, we have a bunch of premium features too that can give your form notifications a real boost. But that doesn’t mean you can’t benefit from our free features immediately.

Get Better Forms FREE!

In fact, in our email notification tutorial today, we'll use Formidable’s free plugin.

But before that, let’s take a quick look at some of the notification features of our premium plugin. When it comes to WordPress automatic emails, there are a lot of possibilities!

Conditional logic and form action automation

Do you want to send different notifications based on different form submissions? Formidable can do that! Use conditional logic and form action automation to send notifications exactly the way you want.

Imagine you have a sales inquiry form where customers can contact different departments. When a user submits their inquiry, you can create different emails to send from different email addresses. This allows you to create one form, with several tailored notifications inside. No coding required!

SMTP integration

Experiencing SMTP errors? WordPress not sending emails from your site properly? An SMTP plugin like WP Mail SMTP can help a lot. And guess what? It plugs directly into Formidable Forms with almost no setup time required!

Learn more: How to use the WP Mail SMTP in WordPress

More integrations and add-ons

Are you using an email platform like GetResponse, ActiveCampaign, or Mailchimp?

Formidable Forms can connect to dozens of external apps directly. When a user submits a form, have it automatically send the form data from your site to your platform of choice!

That means you can trigger emails from your site and your connected platforms however you want. If you want to take your automations even further, you can thanks to our Zapier add-on.

Learn more: WordPress Forms for Zapier

SMS text message notifications

Formidable Forms can totally replace a WordPress SMS Plugin and send form notifications as text messages. All you need is a Formidable premium plan and our Twilio add-on.

When a user submits a form, you can trigger an SMS text that gets sent directly to their phone!

Learn more: How to send SMS text messages from your WordPress forms

How to set up form notifications in WordPress

Let’s get into our step-by-step guide. Before we get started, create a form with an email address field at the very least. You can create any kind of form, like a contact form for example.

We need the email address field in case you want your notification to send to email addresses entered into your form. But you can also send email notifications to your colleagues or any email address you choose.

The following steps can be found in more detail in our Knowledge Base article about email notifications.

Once in your form, click on Settings → Actions & Notifications. You’ll notice that an email notification is created by default. Click on it and we can begin editing your notification settings.

WordPress send Email Notification Default

In Formidable Pro, it’s possible to send an email based on the following triggers:

Entry is Created
Draft is Saved
Entry is Updated, Deleted, or Imported

If you're running the free version, Formidable Lite, these options will be hidden and the form action will be triggered when an entry is created.

Enter one or more email addresses in the To box. Depending on what kind of form you are using, who you send the email to will change. By default, it will be the admin email.

You may want to send an email to your internal team, or, you can send an email directly to the person who filled out the form. Or you could send multiple email notifications! You can CC and BCC people too.

WordPress send Email Notification, CC BCC

You’ll also want to include the sender's name and email address in the From box. You can also automatically fill these boxes with data from form fields.

Next, we’ll add an email subject line in the Subject box.

WordPress send Email Notification, SUBJECT

Finally, write your email in the Message box.

For example, clicking on the 'First Name' field would insert the id of that field, [173], into the message content. The content in the 'Message' box could look something like this:

Customize you automated notification message

For more details, check out this article on how to customize email notification messages.

After all that's done, go ahead and fill out your form to test if all the emails are properly sent. That’s it! You’ve configured your email notifications.

Ready to set up form notifications in WordPress?

That’s really all there is to it. Of course, there are plenty of other form-building options out there. Many of them are also able to handle form notifications too. But we really believe our free WordPress form plugin is stronger than most!

Don’t believe us? See for yourself with this comparison of Formidable Forms vs. Gravity Forms. Here’s a hint before you go: Gravity Forms doesn’t have a free plugin.

We hope you’ve enjoyed today’s article. Please follow us on the Formidable blog for all things WordPress and more! Bye for now.