How to Set Up Form Confirmation Emails in WordPress (Gravity Forms)

Once you have built a form within Gravity Forms, we want to make sure our future website visitor receives an email confirmation that their entry has been submitted. You can easily set this up within WordPress.

Before We Start: Confirmations, Email Confirmations, and Email Notifications

• Confirmation means the visual response that a web visitor sees on their screen immediately after completing and submitting a form
• Email Confirmation means an email that is sent to the user immediately after completing/submitting a form
• Notification is the email that you receive when a customer completes the form on your website

Creating a confirmation that the user sees on their screen after filling out a form:

1. In WordPress Dashboard (you need to log in) along the left menu panel, click on Forms

2. Hover your mouse over the form you created, select Settings

3. Click Confirmations, and you’ll see the following:

4. Select Add New by clicking the button.

5. Select which confirmation type you want users to receive

• Text: Create a message that users will see
• Page: Redirects users to another WordPress page on your site
• Redirect: Redirects users to any public URL (typically, you won’t use this)

6. Save Confirmation when you are satisfied with your changes

7. Test the form as if you were a user to make sure you see the confirmation message on the screen.

Setting up email notifications Part 1: YOUR notification

Once you have built a form in Gravity Forms, you obviously want to receive the messages from the forms to your email inbox, we’ll call this an admin notification. Optionally, we can send the user a confirmation email, which we’ll do in the next step.

Let’s create our admin notification: 

1. In WordPress along the left menu panel, click on Forms

2. Hover your mouse over the form you created, select Settings

3. Click Notifications, and then select Add New. Now you’ll see the page below, and you’ll enter some settings here.

4. Enter a Name for your form, we recommend Admin Notification

5. Send To is important: here you want to to enter the email where you want to receive notifications when users fill out the form

6. Your form also needs “From” information, this part is easier than it looks:

• In the From Name, From Email, and Reply To fields, notice the little pull-down arrow to the right of the blank field. If you pull down that arrow, you’ll see an entry for each of the fields you made when you created your form. So, the Your Name field was one we created, and we can set that as the From Name in our notification. When in doubt, just set it up like we did.

7. Made sure you see {all_fields} in the Message box like in the screen shot. This means that all the form fields that the user fills out will get sent in the email to you.

That’s it, save your form and then test it by filling it out yourself to see if your form sends the email.

Setting up email confirmations Part 2: sending email to the user

This is optional, but a good practice: when a user fills out your website form, we can send them an email telling the user “we received your message and will reach out shortly”. We call this an email confirmation. We set this up in the same manner as the admin notification with one or two differences.

Let’s create our email notification: 

1. In WordPress along the left menu panel, click on Forms

2. Hover your mouse over the form you created, select Settings

3. Click Notifications, and then select Add New. Now you’ll see the page below, and you’ll enter some settings here

4. We need to set the Send To field. We simply click the Select a Field radio button and then set the Send to Field to the field name we made when we built our form for the user to enter their email

5. For the From fields, you can just enter your email. This will show you as the email sender when the email is sent to the user.

6. And, of course, fill out your Message, which becomes the body of the email notification.

7. Don’t forget to enter something like “customer notification” in the Name field

Save your notification, and as always with web forms, test your form after you create or make a change!