How to create a form

A form is a page you share with a link or a QR code, or embed on your website, where contacts sign up, subscribe or update their details. What they fill in is saved straight onto their contact.

Create a form

Go to CRM → Forms and click Add form.
Under What is this form for?, pick a purpose:
- Join your loyalty program: new contacts sign up and join your loyalty program. Public.
- Sign up form with wallet pass: new contacts confirm their email address, fill in their details and then add their loyalty pass to their phone's wallet. Private.
- Newsletter sign-up: contacts subscribe to your newsletter. Public.
- Update profile: contacts confirm their email address and complete or update their details. Private.
- Custom form: start from an empty form and build it your way. Public.
- Authenticated custom form: build your own form that contacts confirm their email address for first. Private.
Click Next step. On the Information step you see the Type and the Purpose you picked. Give the form a Name and click Create.

A Public form is available to everyone with the link. A Private form can only be opened through email verification: the contact enters their email address first and gets a personal link to the form. The purpose decides which one you get, so there's nothing to choose.

A new form is active straight away, so it accepts submissions as soon as you share it. It follows your brand kit, so it already has your theme, colors, corners and fonts.

What a purpose decides

You can't change a form's purpose after you've created it. Create a new form if you need a different one.

A Custom form and an Authenticated custom form are open: you can add and remove pages, and use any block. The other purposes come with a set structure, so the form keeps doing what it's made for:

You can't add or remove pages. You can still rename them.
The blocks the purpose needs, such as the email address and the submit button, can't be removed, hidden or made optional. When you select one, the editor says so. You can still change its text. The other blocks the form starts with, like the logo, the intro text, First name and Birth date, are yours to change or remove.
You can add text, images, spacing, dividers, contact attributes, a marketing opt-in, terms and conditions and a submit button. Contact types are also available on the sign-up and update forms, and Files on the update form. Custom fields and link buttons aren't available.
Some contact settings are set for you. See Settings below.

You still write the copy, add images, change the order of the optional fields and choose the look.

Build the form

Open the form and click Edit form to open the editor. It has three tabs: Content, Styling and Settings. Click Save changes to save what you've built.

Blocks

Select a page, then drag blocks from the Blocks panel onto it. On a content page you'll find:

Layout: text, images, buttons, dividers and spacing.
Custom: questions whose answers are kept on the submission only. Custom forms only.
Attributes: the contact's fields, such as their name, their birthdate or your own custom attributes.
Marketing: the marketing opt-in, or a checkbox per subscription type. See below.
Contact types, when your account has more than the default contact type, and Files, when your account has file types set up.
Tools: terms and conditions and the submit button.

A public form starts with a required email field on its content page. Keep it: contacts are matched on their email address. On a private form the email address is asked on the authentication page instead.

Click a block to change it. For an attribute you can set its Label, a Help text shown under the label, a Placeholder and a Default value, switch on Hidden, and switch on This field is required. Use the help text to explain a field or what contacts get for filling it in, like a birthday treat. A hidden field isn't shown, but its default value is still saved.

Marketing opt-in

There are two ways to let contacts subscribe on a form, and a form uses one of them, not both:

Marketing opt-in: one checkbox that covers the subscription types you choose. This is what new forms use.
Per subscription type: a separate checkbox for each subscription type. Forms made before the marketing opt-in existed often use this.

Once one kind is on the form, the other is greyed out until you remove it.

Click the marketing opt-in to set it up. Give it a Label, choose whether it starts Unchecked or Checked under Default value, and under Subscription types click Add a subscription type for each type the checkbox should subscribe contacts to. Until you add one, contacts don't see the checkbox. A subscription type can be in one opt-in only. Only a newsletter sign-up can have more than 1 marketing opt-in.

A contact who's created through a form with a marketing opt-in starts unsubscribed from the subscription types in it, until they tick the box. Subscription types that aren't in the opt-in keep their usual default. Contacts created any other way, such as through an import, aren't affected.

On a private form, the marketing opt-in and the terms and conditions sit on the authentication page, each behind a switch. Sign up form with wallet pass starts with both switched on, Update profile and Authenticated custom form with both switched off. On that page you can only add layout blocks around them.

Terms and conditions

The text of your terms comes from your settings, not from the form. Select the terms and click Go to settings to change it.

On a private form's authentication page you choose under Acceptance how contacts agree:

Contacts tick a box: contacts tick a checkbox to agree before they can continue.
Contacts agree by continuing: the terms are shown below the button, and continuing counts as agreeing.

Wallet pass blocks

On a private form, the confirmation page also offers Wallet Pass blocks: Buttons to add the pass to Apple Wallet or Google Wallet, and a QR-code. A public form doesn't offer them: it doesn't check that the visitor owns the email address they fill in, so anyone could get someone else's pass that way. To give contacts their pass after they sign up on a public form, add the wallet pass to an email instead, for example in an automation on the Form submission completed trigger.

Sign up form with wallet pass ends on a confirmation page with the buttons and the QR code. The buttons have to stay on the page and stay visible. The QR code is optional: switch off Show QR code or delete it, since a phone can't scan its own screen. The page can have one set of buttons and one QR code.

Styling

The Styling tab opens the Theme panel. At the top you choose how the form looks:

Brand kit: the form follows your brand kit's theme, colors, corners and fonts. The name of the theme is shown under it. The form uses a copy of your brand kit, so changes you make to the brand kit later don't reach it until you update it. Edit brand kit takes you to your brand kit.
Custom: start from one of the themes and change its colors, fonts and corners for this form only. A custom form starts as a copy of your brand kit's look, so nothing changes when you switch. If you switch back to Brand kit and later to Custom again, your custom look is still there.

When your brand kit has changed since the form took its copy, a refresh button appears next to Brand kit. Hover over it to see Your brand kit has changed since this form took it. Click it to Update to brand kit, then click Save changes.

Forms you made before themes existed keep their own look and show as Custom.

On a Custom form you also get:

Base theme: Soft, Editorial, Bold, Minimal or Playful. The theme sets the design: type, shadows and borders. Your colors, fonts and corners stay as they are.
Colors: Background color, Card color and Button color. Your brand colors are offered as swatches.
Font: the Default font and the Heading font, chosen from the fonts in your brand kit. Without any fonts, you'll see a link to add one to your brand kit.
Corners: Square, Slightly rounded, Rounded, Very rounded or Pill.

These are available on every form:

Width: a number between 320 and 960.
Google sign-in button: only on a private form, and only when Google sign-in is switched on for your account. See Set up Google sign-in for the contacts portal and private forms.

To change the look of all your forms at once, change your brand kit and then update each form. See How to configure your brand kit.

Settings

The Settings tab has 4 pages in its menu: Form settings, reCAPTCHA, Social Media and Analytics. On each, change what you need and click Submit, which appears once you've changed something.

Form settings

Here you change the form's Name, and its Domain when your account uses your own domain for forms. Then:

Can create contact: whether a submission from an email address we don't know yet creates a new contact. It can't be used together with Requires approval.
Requires approval: submitted data is only processed after you approve it. Switching it off processes all submissions that are still pending.
Can overwrite contacts: public forms only. When it's on, every value the contact fills in replaces what's stored. When it's off, only empty values on the contact are filled in.
Is pre-filled: private forms only. The form opens with the contact's own data already filled in.
Link validity (days): private forms only. How long a personal link to the form keeps working after it's sent, between 1 and 365 days.

On a form with a purpose, some of these are set for you and show Set by the form's purpose under the switch. You can't change them:

Join your loyalty program and Newsletter sign-up: Can create contact is on.
Sign up form with wallet pass: Can create contact is on and Is pre-filled is off.
Update profile: Can create contact is off and Is pre-filled is on. Contacts can only update a contact that already exists, and what they fill in replaces what's stored.

reCAPTCHA: switch on Secure with reCAPTCHA to keep bots out.
Social Media: set how a shared link to the form looks on social media.
Analytics: add your Google Tag Manager container to the form. Switch on Enable Google Tag Manager and enter your Container ID, in the format GTM-XXXXXXX. Visitors of the hosted form are asked for cookie consent before Google Tag Manager loads. An embedded form sends its events to the Google Tag Manager that's already on your website.

Two pages in the form's sidebar put the form in front of contacts:

Share form: copy the form's URL, or click Download QR code to print it. Fill in a Source, for example store-utrecht, to get a separate link and QR code for a store, flyer or campaign. Every submission that comes in through it shows that source.
Embed form: put the form on your own website. It opens with Ways to use your form, which shows the form's own page and a tile for each way to use it, and an Ask Leat AI button for help with your platform. Embed on your website takes the height it needs, so visitors scroll your page as usual. Embed without a script and Advanced embedding are there for website builders that don't allow scripts and for styling the form with your own CSS. See How to embed a form on your website.

The Information page of a form shows its Status, Purpose, Type and UUID at the top. Below that, Details has its name, theme and when it was created and last updated, and Submissions has its responses and the last response. When Google Tag Manager is switched on, Analytics shows the container. Next to it is a live preview of the form. You can type in the preview, but it doesn't submit anything.

Submissions come in under Submissions in the same menu. On a private form, Authentication is where you choose the email that sends contacts their personal link.

To pause a form, open the actions menu next to Edit form and choose Deactivate. On an inactive form the same menu has Activate. It also has Duplicate and Delete.

The forms overview

CRM → Forms opens on Overview: your submissions, unique contacts, completed submissions and submissions awaiting approval over the last 30 days, a chart of submissions per day, and your top forms. All forms lists every form with its Type, Purpose, Theme, Responses and Status, and you can filter on each of them.

To get more contacts to your form, see How to market your program to get more sign-ups.