Earlier we created the contact form. Let’s spice it up a little bit — let’s create an automation for it!

Since we might want to get an email notification when someone sends us a message through the contact form, let’s do that. Let’s create an automation that sends an email to us.

We start by going into the contact form database and in the 3 dots menu you will see “Automations”.

And you will see an empty page of Automations. Let’s create one:

Next you will see a few things, which I will explain here:

  1. The Automation will be triggered by some event. At the moment, only Row inserted is supported.

  2. Triggering table. We need to specify, which table triggers the Automation.

  3. Bindings. When the row is inserted, it has some data, and the different fields are named by some human-readable name which tells what the data is about. Here are those names turned into lowercase character strings, wrapped in {{}}. You can use these bindings in the email that you send out. For example, the {{name}} means the name that the person gave and {{email}} is his/her email address.

  4. Publishing. When you are ready to take this Automation into use, set this to Public.

  5. Add action. Your automation needs actions — at least one. Add it here.

Actions

Your automation needs actions. Currently, two types of actions are supported:

  1. Sending an email

  2. Creating a task

And email needs a sender. And we can only use a sender that we have specified by ourselves. So, in case you haven’t set up Emails yet, now would be a good time to do that.

Here are the email accounts that I have set up, and I can choose from one of them:

Next we get to the main point — writing the email template that will be used for sending.

Here is the screen for writing email templates:

The Bindings are explained there again — how they work. You can use them in the body section of the email. And the actual bindings you saw in previous section.

The To field would be the email where you want the email to arrive at. The From field was set earlier.

You can write a template like this, for example:

Subject: Contact form submission
To: youraddress@gmail.com
Body:

Hi me!

Someone just filled our contact form with this information:

Name: {{name}}
Email: {{email}}
Message: {{message}}

Click Save template.

At this point just change the Publishing to Public. When you do that, you can test the Automation:

Then just start waiting for the emails to pour in!