Send Emails natively from Webflow or use 3rd party service?

Hey Webflowers,

I understand how to send emails from a server but I’m a total noob when it comes to Mailchimp and Zapier. Which one is easier to use to let visitors send emails from my Webflow page?
Or an even more noob question: is that all necessary? I’m asking this because when it comes to adding hosting there’s a certain amount of form submissions one can send on a certain site plan. I also watched the Freelancer’s Journey and the instructor only set up reCAPTCHA which only serves to prevent spamming, but my question is if that was a working contact form at all or is Webflow actually able to handle simple form submissions natively?

I appreciate any help :slight_smile:

cheers

To my knowledge, Webflow does not natively handle form submissions other than the one email it sends to the owner of the website when someone fills in a form.

You can of course always pass a custom form action into the webflow form but will then need to write your own XMLHttpRequest to capture the form’s inputs, pass it to your php action script so that your server can finally send the email.

Hey Anthony,

Thanks for the reply. I’d like to host the site with webflow, so Php isn’t gonna work. Do you have any experience with zapier or mailchimp?
I’ve looked up some tutorials but both platforms have been updated since those we’re released.

Cheers

Hi Dan,

My experience with Zapier has been very successful and smooth — super easy to set up, really solid integration with the forms and data fields, and the formatting of the emails to send out. I have a client site (medical staffing firm) with 4 separate application forms, and I have individual response forms being sent to the applicants, and separate emails with the form’s collected data being sent to specific recruiting groups within the firm. I know that Webflow does send the notification of a form submission to whomever’s emails are listed in the settings, but (1) it has a limit of 5, and more importantly (2) you can’t have the notification only go to specific addresses per form. All 4 form notifications would go to the same addresses.

Zapier solved all of this within minutes and works beautifully — and I must say, their customer support and responsiveness has been great too. They complement Webflow very well.

It would be nice if the Webflow account would allow further options for the notifications (separate group addresses per form) and allow the auto reply email confirmations to the applicants… this would save a lot of time. But on the flip side of that, as in my case with this firm, having that in Webflow would mean I have to administer and set up the addresses to send to, or make text amends when the client needs it. By setting it up once for them in their Zapier account (and connecting it to my Webflow account to pull in the form data), they can administer everything from here on in however they wish, and I am hands-off.

I have worked with Mailchimp also on another project, and find their process and their interface clunky and not entirely user-friendly. For me, Zapier worked great.

Hope this helps :slight_smile:

Steve

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Zapier works well but you’ll need a separate form host if you’d like to get around the form submission limit. Zapier only connects forms, it does have the ability to send emails. So if someone submits a form, you can send an email to the address they used, for example. Mailchimp is very different, it’s used for sending email to people on a newsletter so the form is only for people signing up for the newsletter. What are you planning on using this for? The webflow limit is pretty high so if this is a contact form on a standard website, why not use the built-in option? I’d be able to give more specific suggestions if I knew what you’re planning :slight_smile:

hey Sarah,

you’re awesome, you actually almost answered my question. So does the built in Webflow form actually work without any 3rd party service? I only want a super basic form, 3 input fields: name, email and a textarea field.

The reason I’m so confused is because I mainly look at Webflow as a frontend tool and if I were to handcode an html form that would of course require a server so it can actually submit data.

@DanApro yes, the built-in form can do all that, yay! The need for something third-party depends on what you’ll want to do with the information people have submitted or are expecting to have more submissions than included in your plan.
The form sends the information to an email, you can specify that in your project settings. You’ll need an extra tool if you want to have the information sent to multiple email addresses or a different address per form or have the information sent to a different service, for example to a newsletter service. Let me know if you’ve got extra questions :slight_smile: .

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